National Parks Honor African-American History (NAPSA)—February is National African-American History Month, an excellent time to celebrate America’s rich cultural diversity by visiting the many national parks that celebrate the role of African Americansin U.S. history. These sites are found all over the nation. For example, the Underground Railroad Networkto Freedom, still in development, includes scores of sites used during the era of slavery to help enslaved people escape oppression. Sites range from the Boston African American National Historic Site, which includes 15 pre-Civil War African-American historical structures, to sites in Ohio and across the south to Texas. Check the destination finder, Get Outdoors, on www.eparks.org, the Website of the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), for locations. African-American parks commemorate historical events that shaped America. The Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail in Alabama remindspeople of the struggle in the 1960s to ensure that all people enjoyed an equal right to vote. Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka, Kansas; Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site in Arkansas; and the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site in Alabama commemorate the struggle for equality in education endured by African Americans into the twentieth century. Individual African Americans are celebrated at sites such as the Virginia birthplace of Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute; the Richmond, Virginia, house of Maggie L. Walker, the African American who was one of the first women to found and head a bank; and the Atlanta, Georgia, house in which civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was born andraised. Commemorating African Ameri- Photo courtesy of Terry Adams, NPS Cedar Hill, former home of civil rights champion Fredrick Douglass, is now a national park site in Washington, D.C. A new study of CedarHill can be found at www.eparks.org. cans in national parks is particularly appropriate because African Americans played a critical role in the birth of the National Park System. The Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th and 10th U.S. Cavalry (Colored) served asthefirst “park rangers” in places such as Yosemite before there was a Park Service, and Captain Charles Young, an African American, was appointed acting superintendent of Sequoia and General Grant (now Kings Canyon) National Park in May 1903. Although the National Park System protects the heritage of African Americans andother ethnic groups, recent surveys show that people of color remain largely absent from the national parks as visitors, subjects of interpretation, and contractors. The National Park Service itself has yet to diversify its ranks in a manner representative of the nation’s changing population. This failing is reason for concern because, as a federal agency, the Park Service is tasked with maintaining U.S. natural and cultural resources for all Americans. By 2050, nearly half the U.S. population will be composed of people of color. If the Park Service continues its current trend, the agency risks becoming irrelevant to a large and increasing segment of the U.S. population that in time will assume a large portion of the responsibility for the protection of our natural and cultural resources. For information on cultural diversity in the nation’s parks, go to www.eparks.org. There you can learn about NPCA’s cultural diversity program and find a new assessment of conditions at the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, the great civil rights leader’s former home.
