Obama names five new national monuments, including Southern civil rights sites
Source: The Washington Post
By Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis January 12 at 6:00 PM
President Obama declared five new national monuments Thursday ranging from a Birmingham, Ala. church bombed by segregationists to the coniferous forests of Oregon. He has now used his executive authority more than any other president in history to protect iconic historic, cultural and ecological sites across the country.
The three new monuments in the South, all of which enjoy bipartisan support, exemplify Obama’s push to expand America’s shared national identity through the narrative it tells with its public lands. Two of the sites, in Birmingham and Anniston, Ala., respectively, witnessed acts of violence perpetrated against African American children and an interracial group of civil rights activists. The third, in Beaufort, S.C., commemorates the period between the Civil War and the push for segregation in the 1890s when freed slaves worked to establish schools and communities of their own.
In a statement, Obama noted that that monuments “preserve critical chapters of our country’s history” and reflect his lonstanding effort to “ensure that our national parks, monuments and public lands are fully reflective of our nation’s diverse history and culture.”
The president also enlarged once more the California Coastal National Monument, which was established by President Bill Clinton and expanded by Obama in 2014, and the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, another Clinton monument, by roughly 42,000 acres in Oregon and another 5,000 in California. Many environmentalists and scientists had argued the two protected areas needed a wider buffer to guard against the future impacts of climate change.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/obama-names-five-new-national-monuments-including-southern-civil-rights-sites/2017/01/12/7f5ce78c-d907-11e6-9a36-1d296534b31e_story.html?utm_term=.8d8aab9b97a8&wpisrc=al_alert-politics
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