Thanks to Knight funding, Levine Museum of the New South is working with MorrisDesign to create two travelling panel exhibits affiliated with COURAGE: The Carolina Story that Changed America.

PARA TODOS LOS NINOS/Fighting Segregation before Brown v Board explores the important but little-known Mendez v Westminster case of 1946, in which California parents sued successfully to abolish segregated “Mexican” schools. The resulting law ending separate education in California was signed into law by Gov. Earl Warren, who went on to preside as US Supreme Court Justice in the national desegregation case Brown v Board in 1954. NAACP Legal Defense lawyer Thurgood Marshall filed a “friend of the court” brief in Mendez, a warm-up for his leading role arguing Brown. The Para Todos Los Ninos (For All the Children) exhibit is created in partnership with the Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, filmmaker Sandra Robie, and noted exhibit developer Darcie Fohrman. It will be on display at Levine Museum January 2011 – December 2011, as a complement to the major installation on Brown, COURAGE: The Carolina Story that Changed America. It will then be available for loan to other venues in the Charlotte area.

Levine has also developed a portable panel version of COURAGE. Using rare family photos, it traces the saga of Rev. J.A. De Laine and his neighbors in Clarendon County, South Carolina, who organized to file the first of the five lawsuits that came together as Brown v Board. The exhibit will to debut in January 2011 at the National Park Service’s Brown v Board Of Education National Historic Site in Topeka, Kansas, then be available for loan.

To borrow the exhibits, contact Kate Baillon – Case, Vice President of Exhibits for Levine Museum of the New South (704) 333 – 1887 x231 [email protected]