The National Parks- America's Best Idea

I hope anybody reading this blog has been watching all of or part of Ken Burn's latest masterpiece ,"The National Parks-America's Best Idea." With one episode to go,It has been a great series, with a few flaws. For as majestic as the pictures of Yosemite and the Grand Canyon have been, we have seen little if any of the Parks dedicated to preserving and explain our History,both the good and the bad. So the week of the series, I visited 2 National Parks, I have written twice about Tall Grass and in the middle of the week, I went to a National Historic Site,run by the Park Service that pass by sometimes twice a day on my way to work. This is probably the shortest distance I will travel in this blog, turning right on Adams , a few miles and a left on 17th street to the corner of 17th and Monroe. Maybe 5 minutes depending on how I hit the lights and traffic.

We find ourselves at a red bricked school house that opened with much fanfare in 2004.The old Monroe school, now the Brown v. Board of Education site. In the early 1950's the NAACP made headway in opening up the argument over Separate but equal facilities, this included bathrooms,restaurants,movie theatres and in some National Parks,camping area. In Topeka this meant 4 schools were opened for Blacks.Students had to walk miles out of their to attend schools,even when one was blocks away.

Brown is an accident of the alphabet,2o courts were bundled together for the Supreme Court to hear the case , the official title of the Case is "Oliver Brown,et. al v. ....." so Topeka gets the fame in the history books over people in South Carolina,Virginia and two other states. That being said the story of Oliver Brown is an amazing story,he attended school board meetings attempting to change the law, the school would hear none of it, even changing meeting time so he couldn't attend due to work.

The school contains two galleries ,a short film and a room to record your impressions. The galleries talk about the case, Jim Crow laws and the firestorm that proceeded the decision. For the most part I see school buses when I drive by, it does not contain the transcendent feelings you get at the Grand Canyon or Tall Grass.Yet it tells an important story.

Post script. Opps bad me, I left this as a draft. Ken Burns did briefly out that other National Parks,Mounments,Historic sites do exist,but he spent little time discussing it. That being said I watched most of the series.And it was fantastic, and caused me to do a little planning. We'll see if it comes off. Kansas has 5 spots under protection of the National Park service. Many more exist within a few hours drive, doable in day trips.