Black History

In October 1965, nearly 800 young people attempted to march from their churches in Natchez to protest segregation, discrimination and mistreatment by white leaders and elements of the Ku Klux Klan. As they exited the churches, local authorities forced the would-be marchers onto buses and charged them with "parading without a permit," a local ordinance later ruled unconstitutional. For approximately 150 of these young men and women, this was only the beginning. They were taken to the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, where prison authorities subjected them to days of abuse, humiliation and punishment under horrific conditions. Most were African Americans in their teens and early twenties. Authors G. Mark LaFrancis, Robert Morgan and Darrell White reveal the injustice of this overlooked dramatic episode in civil rights history.

Phantom Ranch is nestled in the Grand Canyon basin on the Colorado River--a location hardly visible from the rim and only accessible after a journey through scores of geologic layers. The only way there is by river rafting, hiking, or mule, and with each foot of the journey, the traveler descends 30,000 years in geologic time. While at Phantom Ranch, the view looking above is of 1.7 billion years of geology, all swirling together in an alphabet of colors. Grand Canyon's Phantom Ranch is the story of the rustic buildings designed by architect Mary Jane Colter in 1921, of the park's first peoples, river rafters, the early trail and bridge builders, and dramatic flash floods. When travelers leave Phantom Ranch, they are never the same. For some of them, departing is as if they have just said good-bye to an old friend.

Tuskegee, Alabama, is associated with Tuskegee University, the Tuskegee Airmen, Booker T. Washington, and George Washington Carver. Named after the Taskigi, it is the site of the first law school in Alabama and had local schools long before there was a public school system. Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers (now Tuskegee University) was pivotal to the city being a beacon of African American achievement for a century. The birthplace of civil rights icon Rosa Parks, radio host Tom Joyner, and singer Lionel Richie, it is where Olympic star Alice Coachman was dubbed the "Tuskegee Flash" and where important court cases guaranteeing voting rights and equal education were fought. The city was also the site of the infamous medical experiment that threatened to stain the school's triumphant legacy.