Celebrate Constitution Day on Friday

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On September 13, 2021

Larry Gragg

Photo of Larry Gragg by Tom Wagner/ Missouri S&T

Celebrate national Constitution Day at Missouri S&T and hear Dr. Larry Gragg discuss two former students who were key to the campus’s desegregation in 1950.

The presentation will take place at noon Friday, Sept. 17, in St. Pat’s Ballroom B and C of the Havener Center on the Missouri S&T campus. Gragg, a Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor emeritus of history and political science at S&T, will speak about the role George E. Horne and Elmer Bell Jr. played in the desegregation of the university.

In the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned segregation in America if separate facilities were substantially equal. In Missouri, three lawyers working for the St. Louis branch of the NAACP drew upon this same constitutional argument to bring about the desegregation of what was then known as Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy in Rolla and other state universities.

Congress designated Sept. 17 as Constitution Day to commemorate the signing of the U.S. Constitution on Sept. 17, 1787.

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On September 13, 2021. Posted in Announcements