Tim Wise: 2008 Oliver L. Brown Distinguished Visiting Scholar for Diversity Issues
September 10, 2008
Noon
Free, reservations recommended

Tim Wise, renowned author and lecturer, is said to be one of the most brilliant, articulate and courageous voices in the nation on the topic of race relations and white privilege. His writings are a must read for those in the field of sociology, education, political science and everyone wanting to understand issues of race in America.

Wise will address the public at a brown bag lunch at noon at brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site. To RSVP by September 8, call the brown Foundation at (785) 235-3939 or email by clicking here. Limited space so please respond early.

Blacks and the United States Constitution
September 1 to September 30, 2008
9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Free

The pivotal role of race in American Constitutional history is surveyed in Blacks and the United States Constitution, an exhibition on display at Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site. The exhibition is touring nationally under the auspices of the Schomburg Center Traveling Exhibition Program.

Highlights of the exhibition include proceedings of nineteenth-century black conventions; David Walker's fiery "Appeal" using natural rights philosophy to justify slave violence in pursuit of freedom, Secretary of State William H. Seward's signed certificate attesting to the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the U.S. Supreme Court's formal judgement in the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case.

From Micheaux to Morrison: Literary Adaptations to Film
October 1 to October 31, 2008
9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Free

This traveling exhibit from Separate Cinema's vintage movie posters archive, traces the changing images of African Americans in feature films. At the beginning of the 20th century, African American representations in film consisted largely of stereotypes that distorted the African American experience. The early African American independent filmmakers particularly Oscar Micheaux struggled to counter demeaning portrayals with more realistic images of African Americans in film.

Over the course of a century some of the most representative films were derived from literature by authors like Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison, to name a few. The whole American culture is much richer for the efforts of filmmakers and writers from Micheaux to Morrison.

Annual Film Series
October 14 and October 25, 2008
7:00 PM
Free, reservations recommended

Please join us for our annual film series in October. On October 14, the featured film is the newest documentary, Viva la Causa! by the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance project, followed on October 25 with Kevin Wilmott's Bunker Hill.

Viva la Causa!
The film is about one of the seminal events in the march for human rights - the grape strike and boycott led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. It highlights the parallels between the farm workers and civil rights movement.

Bunker Hill
The movie is the story of former Wall Street executive Peter Salem (portrayed by James McDaniel of NYPD Blue fame) who heads for the small town of Bunker Hill, Kansas, where his ex-wife (actress Laura Kirk) and their children have started a new life alongside a powerful local leader, Jim McLain (actor Kevin Greer). Soon after Salem arrives, all power is lost--no electricity, cars and computers stop functioning...leaving all to wonder if this is the rapture? a terrorist attack? or aliens?

To RSVP for Viva la Causa! by October 10, or Bunker Hill by October 22, call the Brown Foundation at (785) 235-3939 or send an email by clicking here.

A Choice of Weapons
November 1-30, 2008
9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Free

To fight discrimination and social injustice, Gordon Parks chose the camera as his weapon. The exhibit of photos taken by the late Gordon Parks are on loan from the Gordon Parks Cultural Center in his boyhood home of Ft. Scott, Kansas. Gordon Parks became a photographer, filmmaker, writer and composer who used his largely self-taught talents to chronicle the African American experience and to tell his own personal history. He developed a large following as a photographer for Life magazine for more than twenty years. By the time he was 50, he ranked among the most influential image-makers of the post-war years.

This exhibition includes fifteen original works from his photographic collection archived at the Gordon parks Cultural Center in Ft. Scott.

Black Seminoles: Living History in the Classroom
November
Classroom presentation
Free

November is Native American Heritage month. During the month, Lewis Johnson of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, will provide presentations in several classrooms in Topeka Public Schools.

Mr. Johnson is curator of the Seminole National Museum in Wewoka, Oklahoma. In his presentations for schools, he shares the history and culture of the Seminole Nation including the Black Seminoles and the Seminole Nation's epic experience of the "Trail of Tears." Black Seminoles are disenchants of free Africans and those who escaped slavery making their way from coastal South Carolina and Georgia into the Florida wilderness. They joined the Native Americans inhabiting Florida; together the two groups formed the Seminole tribe, a multi-ethnic, mixed alliance.

For more information on this free classroom presentation, call the Brown Foundation at (785) 235-3939 or send an email by clicking here.

Oh, Freedom Over Me
December 15, 2008 to January 30, 2009
9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Free

Inspired by the work of the Security Administration photographers during the Depression, Matt Herron organized a team of eight photographers, called the Southern Documentary Project, in the summer of 1964 to record the rapid social change taking place in Mississippi and other parts of the South. As civil rights organizations brought in college students from outside the region to work alongside local residents in voter registration and education in Mississippi, Matt Herron, Danny Lyon, George Ballis, Dave Prince and others documented what came to be called Freedom Summer and the movement that surrounded it. Photographer Dorothea Lange served as informal advisor to the project.

A selection of these photographic images serve as the core of this engaging exhibit, which originally opened in 2004 to mark the fortieth anniversary of Freedom Summer and celebrating American voting rights and responsibilities.

Quilting African American Women's History: Our Challenges, Creativity, and Champions
February 16 to March 30, 2009
9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Free

Quilting African American Women's History: Our Challenges, Creativity and Champions will introduce visitors to a collection of powerful artworks that illuminate and interpret the rich history of African American women from the beginning of this country's history through the present. While African American women have always had a past, its meanings and witnesses have been contested since the first reported arrival of three African women in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 and remain controversial scholarly subjects to this day.

This exhibit was organized by the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center of the Ohio Historical Society and curated by internationally renowned artist, historian and curator Carolyn Mazloomi, Ph. D.

Half of the quilts will be on display at Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site daily from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. In partnership with Washburn University, the other half of the quilts will be on display at the Mulvane Art Museum, 17th and Jewell Streets on Washburn University's campus. Museum hours are Tuesday, 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM; Wednesday thru Friday, 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM; and Saturday thru Sunday, 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM.

For more information, call the Brown Foundation at (785) 235-3939 or send an email by clicking here; or contact the Mulvane Art Museum at (785) 670-1124.

To Kill a Mockingbird: The Big Read 2009
February 18, 2009
2:30 PM
Free, reservations recommended

The Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library will include the Brown Foundation and Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site among its community partners for The Big Read 2009. The book selection will be To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Reading the book and special events will take place in February. The program taking place at Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site on February 18 will feature Dr. Carmalletta Williams from the Kansas Humanities Council Speakers Bureau. She will speak on the topic "Freedom Doesn't Mean Welcome," which addresses the early African American experience in Kansas.

To RSVP by February 16, call the Brown Foundation at (785) 235-3939 or send an email by clicking here. 

Saturday Night at "The Down Beat"
March 28, 2009
7:00 PM
Free, reservations recommended

March is National Women's History Month. Renowned musician Kelly Hunt takes us on a musical journey through the history of women of song who have left an impression our hearts, our minds and our social conscience. She has roots in rhythm and blues and she performs in the tradition of Kansas City blues and jazz. Her performances remind us of the long-standing ethnic traditions of using music to talk about social ills, as a shield against oppression and to convey that a day of freedom was coming.

To RSVP by March 26, call the Brown Foundation at (785) 235-3939 or send an email by clicking here.

To Enjoy and Defend Our American Citizenship: Fighting for Civil Rights in the Shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act
April 3 to April 30, 2008
9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Free

This important exhibit acknowledges the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that had a dramatic effect on immigrant populations for decades afterwards. On May 6, 1882, the United States Congress passed the nation's first immigration legislation, a law to prevent people of Chinese descent from entering the country. The law would tear apart families and cut the nation's Chinese American population in half while removing their right to become U.S. citizens.

Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site 5th Anniversary
May 17, 2009

Five years ago on May 17, 2004 the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site first opened its doors to the public as part of a coast-to-coast commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the United States Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Since its grand opening tens of thousands have visited including people from over twenty countries around the globe.

This program is yet to be determined.

Desegregation and Civil Rights Political Cartoons by Herb Block
June 1 to June 30, 2009
9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Free

It is said that Herb Block is a thoughtful journalist and gifted cartoonist who through his political cartoons has been thinking about "the other guy" throughout his career. For more than seventy years, cartoon after cartoon, day after day, he has chronicled the best America has to offer and the worst, from the depths of the Great Depression into a new millennium. No editorial cartoonist in American history has made a more lasting impression on the nation than Herb Block.

This exhibition celebrates the gift of the Herb Block Foundation and features a selection of original cartoons spanning the artist's remarkable career. He published his first political cartoon for a major U.S. daily newspaper shortly before the stock market crash in 1929, and drew his last in August 2001. The exhibit will feature editorial cartoons from Herb Block's series of desegregation and civil rights cartoons.