July 18, 2024
CONTACT: Glenn T. Eskew, GSU WHI, [email protected]
Anne H. Farrisee, GSU WHI, [email protected]
LOCALLY: Cainan Townsend, Moton Museum, [email protected]
Cameron Patterson, Moton Museum, [email protected]
ROBERT RUSSA MOTON HIGH SCHOOL AMONG A DOZEN CIVIL RIGHTS SITES NOMINATED FOR WORLD HERITAGE
A dozen iconic sites of the U. S. Civil Rights Movement have been authorized by the federal government to be nominated for possible inscription on the World Heritage List including the Robert Russa Moton High School and Museum. U.S. Department of the Interior Assistant Secretary Shannon Estenoz of Fish and Wildlife and Parks who oversees the nation’s participation in the global program announced the decision.
“We’re thrilled by the nomination,” said Cainan Townsend, executive director of the Robert Russa Moton Museum. “For years international visitors have stopped by to tour our historic site so gaining the World Heritage designation would increase our international visibility and help spread our story around the globe. We are grateful to so many local, regional, and statewide partners who have helped to support this effort. World Heritage designation is the highest form of historic designation a site can receive internationally.”
These locations of events from the 1950s and 1960s where protest marches, mass demonstrations, and violent suppression of nonviolent activists occurred are being considered as expressing Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) for all humanity, the hallmark of World Heritage.
“Three historic Black churches in Alabama are on the U.S. Tentative List for World Heritage already awaiting this formal nomination,” according to Dr. Glenn T. Eskew, the director of the Georgia State University World Heritage Initiative tasked with preparing the potential U.S. Civil Rights Movement Sites Serial Nomination for World Heritage. Eskew explained that “joining them will be additional sites that collectively express the African-American agency that used nonviolent protest to end the racial segregation of legal white supremacy, thereby gaining freedom and equality for all people.
Three of the proposed sites concern the U. S. Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark ruling on school desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education. At Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, Black students walked out over their inferior school building and filed a lawsuit that joined one filed by Black families including the Browns attending Monroe Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas, demanded equal access to the “whites-only” schools. At Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, the federal government intervened to escort nine Black students to class and enforce the Brown decision as the law of the land.
The significant role of the African American church in the movement is well represented in the nomination. Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church is identified with the Montgomery Bus Boycott where the federal courts applied the Brown decision to public transportation; and both Bethel Baptist and Sixteenth Street Baptist Churches reflect the struggle for equal access in public accommodations in Birmingham; so too Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, reveals the new Black theology that underpinned the nonviolent strategy of the civil rights struggle led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Yet much of the dynamic drive of the movement came from Black youth conducting such nonviolent demonstrations as the sit-ins at the F. W. Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, that launched the student protests across the South in 1960; and the 1961 Freedom Ride that upon reaching the Anniston, Alabama, Greyhound Bus Terminal met white resistance but continued on. Also proposed are sites identified with sit-ins and freedom rides such as the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Jackson, Mississippi, where a white supremacist murdered the civil rights activist in 1963.
Places of mass gatherings in protest against white supremacy such as the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall where the March on Washington occurred in 1963 and the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where the state brutally beat nonviolent voting rights advocates in 1965 are nominated; as is the balcony of the Lorraine Motel where in 1968 an assassin shot King as he stood there on the eve of a planned nonviolent protest march in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Both the Lorraine Motel and the Greensboro Woolworth still require final federal approval before officially joining the serial nomination.
Gaining World Heritage designation would recognize Farmville’s Moton High School as important globally as the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids of Egypt!
“Our work towards this moment has been a long journey, but we have been strengthened by the belief that the Robert Russa Moton Museum is a site of importance to our community, the Commonwealth, the Nation, and the World.” said Cameron Patterson, Senior Partner for Strategic Initiatives for the Moton Museum. “We have long believed that Moton is a site of cultural and historical significance. We are grateful that the Department of Interior agrees and is willing to advance this nomination. It is also significant that we join this effort as a joint serial nomination with other sites of importance to the Civil Rights Movement.”
Seen as the most successful international treaty ever created, the World Heritage Convention—signed in 1973 first by the United States and now ratified by 195 countries—has in its fifty-year history identified 1,199 places around the globe of such natural and cultural importance that their loss would diminish all of humanity. Overseen by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), inscription on the World Heritage List is the highest honor humanity bestows upon a heritage or natural site.
Savvy tourists often visit World Heritage destinations when traveling abroad as the program is seen as the Gold Standard for international travel. It is a highly sought-after designation that is extremely hard to achieve but can pay off dividends with tourism dollars.
An involved nomination process overseen by UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre in Paris sets a high bar using Ten World Heritage Criteria to determine eligibility. Extensive juried evaluation by international experts determines if a site expresses OUV, authenticity, integrity, and will be properly managed and protected.
These experts come from three Advisory Bodies which have a select membership: he International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) which evaluates natural sites, and in assessing cultural sites the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM).
To date 168 countries have at least one site on the World Heritage List while both Italy with 59 and China with 57 have the most. Cultural sites predominate with 933 of the 1,199 inscribed properties.
While the U.S. has only 25 sites on the World Heritage List, they are split evenly with 12 cultural such as the Spanish Missions in San Antonio, Texas, and 12 natural such as Yosemite National Park in California and one a mixture of both, Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in Hawaii. Last year the World Heritage Committee inscribed the 2,000-year-old Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks in Ohio while in 2019 it inscribed eight buildings as components of the Frank Lloyd Wright Serial Nomination.
Yet the World Heritage program remains little known in the United States. That could change with this Serial Nomination.
For several years now, civil rights sites have been leading tourist attractions. Other formerly segregated states have followed Alabama’s lead by developing their own civil rights trails and opening venues at heritage sites that recount the struggle for racial equality. In 2017, state tourism directors under the consortium Travel South USA organized the U. S. Civil Rights Trail (USCRT) which launched on the King National Holiday in 2018 and today features 130 places across 15 states identified with the civil rights movement. Travel South views the components of the proposed World Heritage Serial Nomination as the holy sites of tourist-driven civil rights pilgrimages.
Since being placed on the USCRT, the Moton Museum has experienced an uptick in visitation and expects even more people will want to tour with inscription on the World Heritage List.
“As a site of historical consciousness, Moton enables visitors to experience the power of place and to make connections between past and present-day human rights issues. We teach each day that the Moton Museum is a story of young people who used the tools of a constitutional democracy to create positive change for all Americans. Inscription on the World Heritage list will help us share this inspirational story with a global audience,” said Dr. Larissa Smith, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs and University Liaison to the Moton Museum