Civil Rights

San Jose, CA

A single stark date—February 19, 1942—marks this Nikkei (Japanese American) lantern in San Jose's historic Japantown. On that day President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal and incarceration of some 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, into remote wartime camps. The lantern stands as a quiet 'Day of Remembrance' for a community torn from its homes and businesses.

Yeadon, PA · est. 2021

In 1959, after three Black families were turned away from a local swim club in the Philadelphia suburb of Yeadon, they refused to accept exclusion and pooled community resources to buy land and build their own. The result, the Nile Swim Club, became the first private swim club in the nation owned and operated by African Americans. In an era when public and private pools were flashpoints of segregation, the Nile offered families a place to swim, gather, and build community on their own terms.

Tryon, NC

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon in 1933, the woman the world came to know as Nina Simone was a classically trained pianist who fused gospel, jazz, blues, and classical traditions into a sound unlike anyone else's. As her fame grew through the mid-twentieth century, she poured that artistry into the civil rights struggle, becoming one of its most fearless musical voices. This bronze monument, sculpted by Zenos Frudakis and cast at Laran Bronze Studios in 2010, stands in the small Blue Ridge foothills town where her story began, its inscription carrying her own conviction that an artist has a duty to reflect the times.

Aliquippa, PA · est. 2000

In the depths of the Great Depression, the mill town of Aliquippa was company-dominated turf where Jones & Laughlin Steel fired workers for organizing. Their case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and on April 12, 1937 the justices upheld the new National Labor Relations Act, ordering the men rehired. The ruling scattered decades of doubt about whether Congress could protect the right to unionize.

Hempstead vicinity, TX

Norris Wright Cuney was born into slavery on a Texas plantation in 1846, sent north to school as a boy, and returned after the Civil War to build a wharf-contracting business in Galveston. He organized Black longshoremen into a labor association and rose to lead the Republican Party in Texas, serving as a city alderman, school board member, and U.S. Customs collector. When the party stripped his delegation of its seat in 1896, it silenced Black political power in the state for more than half a century.

Galveston, TX

Born into slavery in 1846 on his white father's Waller County plantation, Norris Wright Cuney was educated in Pennsylvania and worked Mississippi River steamboats before settling in Galveston after the Civil War. He rose to become one of Texas's most powerful Black political leaders — the state's Republican chairman, a national convention delegate, Galveston's first Black alderman, and, under President Benjamin Harrison, Collector of Customs. A Galveston park was dedicated to his memory in 1937.

Dallas, TX

North Dallas High School opened in 1922 on the city's northern edge — on land that had hosted the first Texas State Fair — as the school board scrambled to keep pace with a booming population. Designed by nationally known school architect William B. Ittner, it quickly built traditions, a fierce athletic reputation, and a devoted alumni association; a 1930 football game there drew a record 45,000 fans. Over the following decades desegregation and waves of immigration transformed its student body, and the school earned recognition as the first officially designated international school in the state and nation.

Skagit County, WA

This memorial honors the 1,487 patients of Northern State Hospital buried in its grounds between 1913 and 1972. The hospital was a large state psychiatric institution in Washington's Skagit Valley, part of an era when such places were self-contained communities with their own farms and cemeteries. Many who died there were interred with only numbered markers, and this memorial was raised to restore their names and dignity.

Canaan, NH

In the years before the Civil War, the small town of Canaan, New Hampshire, briefly hosted one of the boldest educational experiments in the country. Chartered in 1834 and opened in 1835, Noyes Academy welcomed Black and white students together at a time when higher learning was almost universally closed to African Americans. The experiment was short-lived: within months, a mob of enraged neighbors hitched teams of oxen to the schoolhouse and hauled the building off its foundation, dragging it away to shut the academy down. Some of the young Black scholars who had traveled from across the Northeast to study there went on to become leading voices in the abolition movement.

Cameron, TX

Education for Cameron's African American children began in church instruction at the "Little Rocky" Church in the Marlow community until Oscar John Thomas arrived in 1923 as principal and teacher. Under his leadership the district drew on the Julius Rosenwald Fund to build a new school in 1925, later renamed in his honor. The building became Cameron Junior High during integration, regained the O.J. Thomas name by petition in 1974, and after closing was sold in 1998 to an alumni group for use as a community center.

Orlando, FL · est. 2019

On Election Day 1920, Black residents of Ocoee who owned land and businesses sought to vote and were turned away; after Mose Norman persisted, white mobs unleashed days of terror. They surrounded and burned July Perry's home, and the next morning a lynch mob took the wounded Perry from the Orange County Jail and hanged him within sight of Judge Cheney's home. Mobs burned some two dozen Black homes, two churches, and a lodge, and within a year Ocoee's entire Black community was driven out.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Octavius V. Catto was a rising leader of Black Philadelphia in the Civil War and Reconstruction years—an early graduate of the Institute for Colored Youth who became an educator, a military officer, and a tireless organizer for equal rights. On election day in 1871, as he urged Black citizens to exercise their newly won right to vote, he was assassinated by rioters. His death was mourned across the city as the loss of a brilliant champion of equality.

Missouri City, TX

Builder J. T. Dyer raised this Victorian house of heart pine and cypress, fastened with square nails, in Richmond, Texas, around 1890. His work was interrupted when his crew deserted him amid the violence of the Jaybird-Woodpecker feud, a bitter and bloody struggle over political power in Fort Bend County. The house survived the turmoil and was moved to its present site in Missouri City in 1963.

San Jose, CA

This statue on the San José State campus honors alumni Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics bowed their heads and raised black-gloved fists during the national anthem after winning medals in the 200 meters. Their silent salute, protesting racial injustice, became one of the most iconic images of the civil rights era — and cost them dearly in the backlash that followed. The sculpture places their courage permanently at the school that shaped them.

Nash County, NC

In 1946 Black "leaf house" workers who graded and processed tobacco in eastern North Carolina organized to demand better pay and conditions, casting the region's first pro-union vote at a factory just west of here. The drive was part of Operation Dixie, the postwar labor campaign to unionize the South. Historians see these worker mobilizations as an early seedbed for the civil rights movement that followed.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1990

In 1964, in the unlikely setting of an abandoned Philadelphia jailhouse, Rev. Leon H. Sullivan opened the first Opportunities Industrialization Center to train Black workers for skilled jobs that discrimination had long kept beyond their reach. Born of the same organizing energy as Sullivan's earlier 'selective patronage' boycotts, O.I.C. paired vocational instruction with dignity and self-reliance, and the model spread from this city to hundreds of centers across the nation and eventually overseas.

Palacios, TX

Founded in the 1920s, the Palacios Colored School was this Gulf Coast town's first school for African American children. Built anew in 1939 from an earlier two-room structure, its cross-gabled frame building with banks of tall windows served a student body that doubled to 81 pupils in the early 1940s. When Palacios schools finally integrated in 1963 the campus closed, ending some four decades as the heart of Black education in the community.

East Lackawannock Township, PA · est. 2019

In November 1854, sixty-three African Americans freed from a Virginia plantation arrived in Mercer County to build a new life. Manumitted by Dr. Charles Everett, they settled an agricultural community on land he provided, where abolitionists had already raised houses to receive them. Many of these newly free men and women went on to labor toward purchasing freedom for others. Archaeology has since recovered the traces of their determined, self-made community.

Beaumont, TX

Pandit Mehar "P.M." Chand emigrated from Punjab to the United States in 1913 and by the early 1920s was running a grocery on Beaumont's Crockett Street. His pursuit of citizenship collided with the era's rising nativism: days after he filed his 1923 naturalization petition, the Supreme Court's ruling in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind held that Indians were not "white" and thus ineligible, and his application was rejected. Facing deportation and a conviction he insisted was unjust, Chand won a 1937 pardon from President Roosevelt after his neighbors rallied to his defense, and finally became a citizen in 1949 under the Luce-Celler Act.

Atlanta, GA

In the summer of 1996, Atlanta hosted the tenth Paralympic Games on the heels of its Centennial Olympics, welcoming 3,310 athletes from 104 nations who together set 268 world records. It was among the largest Paralympic competitions the world had yet seen and helped cement Atlanta's place on the international sporting stage. This monument preserves that legacy in the city where those records fell.

West Nottingham Township, PA · est. 2011

In 1851, emboldened by the harsh new Fugitive Slave Law, Maryland slave catchers seized Rachel and Elizabeth Parker — two free Black women — from the Nottingham area. When Rachel's employer, Joseph Miller, tried to win her back in Baltimore, he was murdered. The outrage drove Pennsylvania officials to fight for the sisters in a Maryland court, which finally secured their freedom in 1853.

Austin, TX

As Austin's Tejano population grew in the early 1900s, segregation pushed the community into East Austin, and leaders petitioned the city for a place to gather and celebrate. In 1931 the city bought this land for a park, naming it for Gen. Ignacio Zaragoza, the Goliad-born hero of the Cinco de Mayo battle at Puebla. The park quickly became a cultural anchor, hosting Fiestas Patrias, conjunto music, and celebrated Sunday baseball games that drew crowds from across the region.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

Paul Robeson was a rare figure of towering talent — a football star at Rutgers, a Columbia-trained lawyer, and then a world-renowned concert singer and actor celebrated for his interpretations of African American spirituals. His outspoken activism on race and labor drew fierce backlash during the Cold War, and his career and travel were curtailed for years. He spent his final years in quiet retirement at this Philadelphia home.

Durham, NC

Pauli Murray grew up in Durham, in a childhood home a quarter mile south of here, and went on to break barrier after barrier. A lawyer, activist, poet, and writer of the memoir Proud Shoes (1956), Murray helped shape the legal arguments behind the civil rights and women's movements, and in later life became the first African American woman ordained an Episcopal priest. Few Americans left a mark across so many fields.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2022

Pauline Hanauer Rosenberg lived here in Pittsburgh during the Progressive Era, when a generation of reform-minded women organized to soften the hard edges of an industrializing America. A founder and second president of the National Council of Jewish Women, she championed the causes of women, children, immigrants, and the poor. Under her leadership the Council's aid workers met new arrivals at the docks and stations, raising alarm about—and working to prevent—the trafficking of vulnerable immigrant women.

Hillsboro, TX

In 1885 Hillsboro issued a bond to build a school for African American children in the Black neighborhood known as Freetown, naming it for George Peabody, whose fund famously aided Southern education after the Civil War. A brick building replaced the original frame structure in 1919, and the school moved to this site in 1950. Its last class graduated in 1966 as full integration approached; though the building burned in 2005, Peabody School remains a point of community pride.

East Vincent Township, PA · est. 2010

For nearly eighty years, more than 10,500 Pennsylvanians with developmental disabilities lived at Pennhurst, a state institution that became notorious for the inhumane conditions endured by its residents. Public outrage and two decades of landmark litigation—including three arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court—ultimately forced its closure in 1987. The fight helped establish the principle that people with disabilities belong in their communities, not warehoused behind institutional walls.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

In 1775, as revolutionary fervor stirred Philadelphia, reformers founded an organization to defend free Black people who were being unlawfully seized and sold into bondage. Reorganized in 1787 as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, it broadened its mission to press for education, employment, and opportunity for Black Americans. It became one of the earliest and most influential antislavery bodies in the young nation, counting figures like Benjamin Franklin among its supporters.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Built in 1838 by the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, Pennsylvania Hall was meant to be a grand meeting place where abolitionists could gather freely in a city long divided over slavery. Just three days after its opening, an anti-Black mob set the building ablaze and burned it to the ground while authorities stood by. The attack laid bare the fierce hostility abolitionists faced even in the North.

Galveston, TX

Peter Leroy Colombo was born in Galveston in 1905 and, at age seven, lost his hearing, speech, and the use of his legs to meningitis. Swimming in the Gulf surf helped him walk again, and after training at the Texas School for the Deaf he returned home to become one of the island's most celebrated lifeguards. Over a roughly 50-year career he officially saved more than 900 people—regardless of race, in an era of strict segregation—set long-distance swimming records, and pioneered surfing on Galveston's beaches. When he died in 1974, the Texas Legislature paused for a moment of silence.

Town of Lansing, NY

Born free in New Jersey in 1789, Peter Wheeler was kidnapped as a boy and sold into slavery, ending up in the small Finger Lakes hamlet of Ludlowville in 1801. New York was then in the slow process of abolishing slavery, and a network of sympathetic neighbors—including abolitionists Thomas and Henry Ludlow, for whom the village was named—helped him flee bondage in 1806. Wheeler's story is one of countless individual struggles for freedom that played out across the early-republic North even as the institution of slavery lingered.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

In 1833, Quaker reformer Lucretia Mott helped organize this society of some sixty women dedicated to ending slavery, headquartered on this spot. Barred from full participation in male-led abolition groups, these women built their own influential organization, raising funds and rallying support for emancipation. After the Civil War, they turned their energies to aiding the newly freed, extending their reform work into a new era.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2021

Founded on this site in 1976, the Philadelphia Gay News grew into one of the nation's most respected LGBTQ+ newspapers during a pivotal era for the community. When the HIV/AIDS epidemic devastated gay Americans in the 1980s, the paper delivered urgent, groundbreaking coverage that mainstream outlets often ignored. Over the decades it became a driving force in the fight for LGBTQ+ visibility, rights, and marriage equality.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Christopher Perry launched the Philadelphia Tribune in 1884 as a single hand-printed page devoted to improving daily life for Black Americans. From that modest start it grew into an enduring institution and the oldest continuously published Black newspaper in the nation. For generations it chronicled the triumphs, struggles, and demands of Black Philadelphia when few other outlets would.

Dallas, TX

Bought by the City of Dallas around 1912 as a neighborhood green, this park grew into the heart of "Little Mexico," the city's Mexican-American community, by the 1920s. Renamed in 1927 for park board member Edgar L. Pike, it became a gathering ground for Mexican-American servicemen during World War II and remains the stage for Cinco de Mayo and Diez y Seis de Septiembre celebrations. Its bilingual marker reflects generations of cultural, recreational, and political life.

Houston, TX

Founded in 1904 in Houston's Freedmen's Town, Pilgrim Congregational was the city's first African American Congregational church, begun in the Rev. G.B.M. Turner's home. Its members left a lasting civic mark—helping establish the Colored Carnegie Library in 1909 and the local NAACP chapter in 1918—and city schools were later named for early leaders including educator E.O. Smith. Renamed after a 1957 denominational merger, the congregation moved to Blodgett Street in 1974 and still honors its ties to the 1839 Amistad captives and their Congregationalist defenders.

Pleasanton, TX

Pleasanton had educated its African American children at the Abraham Lincoln School since 1913, and by the mid-1950s Black and white students were already practicing and playing sports together. When the Lincoln School proved inadequate and Texas's House Bill 65 required a community petition and vote before integration, Pleasanton's residents supplied both, approving the measure 343 to 88 on October 26, 1957. Days later nine Black students entered the new high school before assembled press, welcomed by their classmates in a transition that recorded no violence.

Houston, TX

After World War II, restrictive covenants and quiet discrimination shut African American families—including returning veterans—out of much of Houston's housing. In response, Jewish developers Melvin Silverman and Bernard Paul partnered with Black realtor Judson Robinson, Sr. to build Pleasantville, a master-planned community of some 1,500 homes where owners could customize their houses. First occupied in 1949–1950, it grew its own businesses, schools, library, and churches, and produced leaders like Judson W. Robinson, Jr., Houston's first Black city councilmember elected after Reconstruction.

Marfa vicinity, TX

Porvenir was a small farming and ranching community on the Rio Grande in remote Presidio County, caught in the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution's border violence. In the pre-dawn hours of January 28, 1918, Texas Rangers, U.S. cavalry soldiers, and local ranchers separated fifteen men and boys from their families and shot them dead. The outcry led Governor Hobby to disband the Ranger company, and State Representative J.T. Canales's charges sparked a 1919 legislative investigation that forced a reorganization of the Texas Rangers; the survivors abandoned Porvenir entirely.

Prairie View, TX

Authorized by the Texas legislature in 1876 as the "Agricultural and Mechanical College for Colored Youth," this land-grant school opened in 1878 on a 1,434-acre former slave plantation, making it Texas's second state college. After an early closure it reorganized as a normal institute to train Black teachers, then grew steadily into a full college by the 1930s. Integrated in the 1960s, it took its present name, Prairie View A&M University, in 1973.

Galveston, TX

After the Civil War, efforts to open tax-supported schools in Galveston were stalled by yellow fever and empty coffers until 1881, when the board finally built a system that included classes for Black children. From rented rooms grew Central High School, which in 1893 gained a purpose-built campus designed by noted architect Nicholas Clayton and became a source of deep community pride. It served generations until integration phased it out in 1968, and the site was reborn as a cultural center in 1976.

Garland, TX

Public schooling in Garland grew from the rural Duck Creek School into a tuition-charging subscription academy, then in 1901 into a tax-supported independent school district that opened with 130 students. Football arrived in 1906 and the first PTA in 1922, the same year the district opened the segregated Carver School for African-American children, whose high schoolers had to travel to Dallas. Integration began in 1964 and was complete by 1970, by which time the district had swelled to more than sixty campuses and roughly 51,000 students.

Mesquite, TX

Public schooling in Mesquite began with a community school in 1885 and took formal shape when the new Mesquite Independent School District opened its first building here in 1902 with 200 students. A high school followed in 1923 and won accreditation the next year, and in the late 1930s a new high school opened alongside the George W. Carver School for the area's African American students. The district integrated in 1964 and, by 1997, enrolled some 30,000 students.

Chesterhill, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, the Quaker community that settled around Chesterfield—now Chesterhill—turned its faith into action. Guided by their belief in the equal worth of every soul, Friends like Elias Bundy sheltered freedom seekers who had escaped slavery, feeding and hiding them as they moved north along a secret route through Morgan County toward Canada. They did this in open defiance of the federal fugitive slave laws, which made helping the escaped a crime. The Monthly Meeting formally organized here in 1839, anchoring a settlement whose conscience outweighed its fear of the law.

Denton, TX

In the 1880s, Quakertown grew into a thriving African American neighborhood in the heart of Denton, prospering as a self-supporting community of churches, businesses, lodges, and homes near the city square. Its very success and its nearness to the growing College of Industrial Arts made it a target: in 1921, white voters approved a bond to buy the land and convert it into a park, displacing more than 60 families with little say in the matter. By 1923 Quakertown had been erased, its residents scattered to Solomon Hill in southeast Denton or out of the city entirely.

Freeport, TX

When the Brazosport district consolidated its African American schools in 1947, children from Freeport, Clute, Jones Creek, and Evergreen came together at Velasco — with an army barrack hauled in for extra room. Named for Dr. Raphael O'Hara Lanier, a university president and U.S. Minister to Liberia, the school grew into a full campus with band, sports, and a veterans' training program, and its Wildcats claimed a state football title in 1960. It closed in 1965 when the district integrated.

Galveston, TX

Born in London and trained as a rabbi, Henry Cohen came to Galveston in 1888 and led congregation B'nai Israel for 64 years until his death. President Woodrow Wilson called him the "First Citizen of Texas," and his reach matched the title: he headed relief after the 1900 storm, helped settle shiploads of immigrants across the country, pressed for humane treatment of prisoners, and championed social justice across every race and creed. His humanitarian work made him nationally renowned.

Corpus Christi, TX

A trained pianist ordained in 1932, Rabbi Sidney A. Wolf came to Corpus Christi's Temple Beth El for a three-month trial that became a forty-year career. In the Jim Crow years he championed integration and interfaith worship—regularly inviting African American pastors and choirs to his pulpit and trading Thanksgiving sermons with an Episcopal rector—and in 1945 he helped found the Corpus Christi Symphony Orchestra.

Park County, CO

In the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, as the federal government forced tens of thousands of Japanese Americans into internment camps, Colorado Governor Ralph L. Carr (1939–1943) publicly welcomed them and defended their constitutional rights as citizens—a stance widely believed to have cost him his political career. This highway carries his name in honor of that moral courage.

Boston, MA

Arnold 'Red' Auerbach was the architect of the Boston Celtics dynasty, the cigar-chomping coach and executive who guided the team to a run of NBA championships in the 1950s and '60s that has never been matched. A statue near Quincy Market honors him, and this inscription carries his famous creed that the Celtics were 'not a basketball team' but 'a way of life.' Beyond the wins, Auerbach reshaped professional sports — he was the first to draft a Black player, field an all-Black starting five, and hire a Black head coach.

Galveston, TX

Methodist trustees bought this Galveston lot in 1848 as a worship site for enslaved Black people, who met outdoors until a building rose in 1863. At the Civil War's end in 1865, ownership passed to the newly freed congregation, who organized the first African Methodist Episcopal church in Texas—later named for its first pastor, the Rev. Houston Reedy. The congregation rebuilt after fire, storm, and the catastrophic 1900 hurricane.

Edinburg, TX

Founded in 1928, Restlawn is believed to be the only cemetery in Hidalgo County set aside for African American burials, established for a growing Black community of workers and entrepreneurs who had previously been allowed graves only in private ranch cemeteries. County sheriff A.Y. Baker designated a half-acre in a corner of Hillcrest Cemetery for a segregated "Black Cemetery," renamed Restlawn in 1993. Among those buried here is World War II veteran Jacob White, namesake of a local American Legion post.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2017

Known as the "Lion of Zion," the Rev. Dr. Leon Howard Sullivan pastored Philadelphia's Zion Baptist Church for 37 years and turned his pulpit into an engine for economic justice. His Selective Patronage Movement — boycotting companies that refused to hire Black workers — opened thousands of jobs nationwide, and his gospel of self-help built lasting institutions to train minority workers. Decades later, his Global Sullivan Principles pressed corporations toward human rights and helped isolate apartheid South Africa, earning him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 1995

From his pulpit at Holy Savior Parish, which he founded in 1895, Rev. John J. Curran earned the name the Labor Priest for standing with the coal miners of Pennsylvania's hard-coal country. He played a key role in resolving the great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, a bitter standoff that drew in President Theodore Roosevelt, who counted Curran a friend and visited Wilkes-Barre often. His work placed the church squarely in the era's fierce struggles between labor and capital.

Marlin, TX

Born into slavery in Arkansas in 1845 and brought to Falls County as a boy, Nelson Taylor Denson was taken into the Confederate Army by his enslaver during the Civil War before returning to Marlin as a freedman. Educated and inspired by Sam Houston's example, he founded Marlin Missionary Baptist Church in 1868—the county's earliest Black congregation—and established Black schools that opened formal education to the area's freed people. In 1882 he became the county's first elected Black official.

Louisville, KY

Born in Virginia in 1865, William H. Sheppard trained at Hampton and Stillman before being sent to the Belgian Congo as a Presbyterian missionary in 1890. His explorations won him a fellowship in London's Royal Geographic Society, and he became an early and courageous voice denouncing the brutal cruelties of Belgian colonial rule. Returning home, he served as a beloved pastor in Louisville's Smoketown community until his death in 1927.

Edinburg, TX

Kentucky native Richard A. Marsh came to the Rio Grande Valley in 1880 to teach the children at Fort Ringgold, and was troubled by the poor schooling available to children of Mexican descent. He spent the rest of his life improving the region's public education, first as a traveling teacher for ranch schools and then, from 1902 to 1914, as Hidalgo County Superintendent of Schools.

Meadville, PA

Born into slavery in Maryland in 1801, Richard Henderson escaped as a boy and made his way to Meadville around 1824, where he built a life as a barber. From his home on Arch Street he became a fixture of the Underground Railroad, and by tradition the house sheltered some 500 freedom-seekers before the Civil War. In the decades before emancipation, small northern towns like Meadville formed vital links in the secret network carrying people north toward freedom.

Rosslyn Farms, PA · est. 2023

Born and raised in Rosslyn Farms, Dick Thornburgh rose to lead Pennsylvania as its 41st governor and later the nation's Department of Justice as U.S. Attorney General. Just months into his governorship, he steered the state's emergency response to the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the most serious in U.S. commercial history. As Attorney General he pressed prosecutions of white-collar crime and drug trafficking, and he championed the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

Quakertown, PA · est. 2019

In the decades before the Civil War, eastern Pennsylvania's Quaker communities formed a dense network of shelter for people escaping slavery. Richard Moore, a Quakertown businessman and man of conscience, turned his own home into a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom seekers moving north through Bucks County. Among those he aided was William Parker, a central figure in the 1851 Christiana Resistance in which a Maryland slaveholder was killed. Over roughly thirty years Moore helped hundreds continue on toward liberty.