A dozen iconic sites of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement have been authorized by the federal government to be nominated for possible inscription on the World Heritage List. U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (pictured below left) announced the decision yesterday.

These locations of events of global significance during the 1950s and 1960s where protest marches, mass demonstrations, and violent suppression of nonviolent activists occurred are being considered as expressing Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) for all humanity, the hallmark of World Heritage.

Three of the proposed sites concern the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark ruling on school desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education. At Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, Black students walked out over their inferior school building and filed a lawsuit that joined a suit filed by Black families attending Monroe Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas, demanded equal access to the “whites-only” schools. At Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, the federal government enforced the Brown decision as the law of the land by escorting nine Black students to class.

Robert Roussa High School, Farmville, VA

Monroe Elementary School, Topeka, KS

Little Rock Central High School, AR

The significant role of the African American church in the movement is represented in several ways. Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church is identified with the Montgomery Bus Boycott where the federal courts applied the Brown decision to public transportation; and both Bethel Baptist and Sixteenth Street Baptist Churches in Birmingham reflect the struggle for equal access in public accommodations; so too Atlanta, Georgia’s Ebenezer Baptist Church reveals the new Black theology that underpinned the nonviolent strategy of the civil rights struggle led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Yet much of the dynamic drive of the movement came from Black youth conducting such nonviolent demonstrations as the sit-ins at the F. W. Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, that launched the student protests across the South in 1960; and the 1961 Freedom Ride that upon reaching the Anniston, Alabama, Greyhound Bus Depot met white resistance but continued on. Also proposed is the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Jackson, Mississippi, where planning of civil rights protests occurred and where a segregationist murdered Medgar Evers in 1963.

F. W. Woolworth Building, Greensboro, NC

Greyhound Bus Station, Anniston, AL

Medgar & Mrylie Evers Home, Jackson, MS

Places of mass gatherings in protest against white supremacy such as the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall where the March on Washington culminated in 1963 and the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where the state brutally beat nonviolent voting rights advocates in 1965 prior to the Selma to Montgomery March are nominated; as is the balcony of the Lorraine Motel where in 1968 an assassin shot King as he stood there on the eve of a march in support of nonviolent protest and striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Both the Lorraine Motel and the Greensboro Woolworth still require final federal approval before officially joining the serial nomination.

Lincoln Memorial & Grounds, Washington, DC

Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, AL

Lorraine Motel, Memphis, TN

Gaining World Heritage designation would recognize these places as important globally as Robben Island in South Africa, the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids of Egypt!

Click here to see the press release from the Department of the Interior.