By Jarvis Holiday, Levine Museum

In celebration of its 20th anniversary, Levine Museum of the New South is bringing back COURAGE: The Carolina Story That Changed America. Supported by the Bank of America Charitable Foundation and the John S. & James L. Knight Foundation, the exhibit tells the story behind the Supreme Court’s landmark school desegregation decision Brown v. Board of Education. COURAGE opens Martin Luther King weekend with two free days of community activities. As part of the exhibit, the Museum is featuring “COURAGE: Where Do We Need It Now? A Conversation with Juan Williams, Janet Murguía, John Payton, and William Winter.” The January 20th panel discussion will focus on the impact of the Brown decision, as well as race relations and the challenges facing public education today.

Panelists include Williams, bestselling author of Eyes on The Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 and Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary and a FOX News commentator; Murguía, president and CEO of National Council of La Raza, the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S.; Payton, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a nonprofit organization that seeks structural changes to eliminate disparities and achieve racial justice; and Winter, former governor of Mississippi, who has fought for education reform and equal opportunity for all races.

The COURAGE exhibition, developed by Levine Museum in 2004, has recently been on national tour from New York to Los Angeles. It tells the powerful grassroots story of the Rev. J.A. De Laine and the other brave citizens of Clarendon County, S.C., who brought the first lawsuit in America seeking to end racial segregation in public schools. Combined with four other national lawsuits, the result was the 1954 Brown decision, which ruled school segregation unconstitutional, sparking massive change in race relations in the U.S.

The Museum also will display Para Todos Los Niños: Fighting Segregation before Brown v. Board about the 1946 U.S. Court of Appeals case, Mendez v. Westminster School District, which ended school segregation for Mexican Americans. This exhibit was created by the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles.