Juneteenth 2010: Crowd-Sourcing Wikipedia in Honor of E. Frederic Morrow

Today, we celebrate Juneteenth.  On this day in 1865, the slaves in Galveston, Texas learned from Union General Gordon Granger that they had been freed by the application of the Emancipation Proclamation with the end of the American Civil War.

The Central Texas 9-12 Project continues to focus on educating ourselves about American history.  We are inspired by “Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black and White” by David Barton (available at Amazon.com).  This book discusses the contributions that African Americans made to our American culture well before the modern civil rights movement.  As we did further research we found a list of African-American Republicans on Wikipedia.  There were only 98 listed here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Republicans

While we maintain a non-partisan position for our organization, we feel that this list of 98 Republicans drastically underestimates the number of politically conservative African-Americans. We have just added this gentleman to the list, E. Frederic Morrow (1906-1994).  Morrow was the first African-American to hold an executive position at the White House.  He served under President Dwight D. Eisenhower as Administrative Officer for Special Projects from 1955 to 1961. 

Wikipedia is edited by the users. There are no pre-requisites and no costs associated with contributing accurate, factual information to this resource. In the spirit of honoring the contributions of African-Americans from both sides of the aisle, and with a desire to reach further back in our country’s history than the last fifty years, we issue this call to action. Who can you add? Will you help us “Set the Record Straight” by adding the names of great African-American Republicans?

Read the original story at Central Texas 912 Project