The children and grandchildren of Mary Helen Rogers join the remaining member of the 1960s Big 6 civil rights leaders Wil T. Ussery, an organizer of the Birmingham children’s crusade, and John William Templeton, producer of the ReuUNION: Education-Arts-Heritage documentary BLACKWOMANCOMING: They Scared of Mary Helen Rogers, at 50-year-old Westside Community Services, a mental health agency Rogers led as board chair for decades.

The answer is five million: BLACKAMERICANDAY

SAN FRANCISCO—Historian John William Templeton invoked the impact of five million African American veterans since Crispus Attucks to affirm that Black life is the most important learning attribute for the success of Black students in the United States and globally on the 53d observance of the California state holiday Black American Day.

The Answer is Five Million concluded the 14th Come to the Water: Teaching Black History seven week course, which included five National Register nominations for 1852 founded institutions in San Francisco and lectures at Alabama A&M University in Huntsville; Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Central Brooklyn Economic Development in New York City, and the Russell Innovation Center for Entrepreneurs in Atlanta.

Templeton, creator of the 6,000 site California African American Freedom Trail and the first journalist to write about Black History Month in 1976, will further discuss his findings in April at the American Educational Research Association in Chicago. In 2008, as keynoter for the California Council for the Social Studies, he presented a commissioned study Black Heritage as Gap Closer: California Educator Capacity to Provide Culturally Responsive Social Science Instruction. His 2013 paper for AERA Personal Authenticity and Perceived Chance of Success illuminated the psychological processes that required Black students to have a full infusion of every aspect of Black life globally.

At Stillman, he spotlighted the most important African American speech in history, Let The Monster Perish, by Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, who spoke on Feb.12, 1865 in a speech that destroyed the moral basis for slavery and racial violence against Africans. The speech was published in 2020 by the Westminster/John Knox Press as a tesult of Templeton’s overture to the Presbyterian Church USA General Assembly in 2018.

Assemblyman Willie L. Brown Jr.passed the bill creating Black American Day on Aug. 22, 1970 with signing by Gov. Ronald Reagan, who had opposed the student strike creating Black Sudies at San Francisco State. The anniversary of Crispus Attucks death in the Boston Massacre on March 5 was a compromise choice instead of Brown’s original language of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Seventeen years later as President, Reagan would sign the King national holiday into law as well. The law requires every classroom in California to spend March 5, or March 6 this year, studying the contributions of African Americans to this nations. In his 2008 study, Templeton surveyed 200 social sciencevtrachers around the state. Not a single one knew about the observance.

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