WASHINGTON/TALLAHASSEE (AP) – President Barack Obama has designated five new national monuments, using executive authority to protect historic or ecologically significant sites.
Vice President Joe Biden and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar joined Obama Monday in the Oval Office as he signed five proclamations designating the sites under the Antiquities Act. The ceremony was closed to reporters.
The sites are the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument in Maryland and the Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument in Ohio, as well as the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument in New Mexico, the First State National Monument in Delaware and the San Juan Islands National Monument in Washington state.
Meanwhile, in Tallahassee, Gov. Rick Scott recently inducted into Florida’s Civil Rights Hall of Fame two married civil-rights
activists who were killed on Christmas 1951 when a bomb exploded beneath their house as they slept.
Scott tapped Harry T. and Harriette Moore of Brevard County for the honor.
Harry Moore organized the Florida State Conference NAACP and fought for voting rights and against unequal teacher pay. The Moores’ deaths have never been officially solved but have been attributed to Ku Klux Klan members.
Scott also named James B. Sanderlin to the hall of fame. He was the first black judge in Pinellas County and had fought against segregation as an attorney.
Margarita Romo was also inducted. She is a farmworkers’ advocate who was named Hispanic Woman of the Year in 2010.
In another move, Scott named Clara C. Frye, a black hospital founder, to the Florida Women’s Hall of Fame.
Frye was a pioneer, who was taught to hunt and fish by Seminole Indians and a national safety leader. She transformed her Tampa home into a temporary hospital in 1908 and then established the Clara Frye Negro Hospital there in 1923.
Scott also named to the hall of fame Lillie Pierce Voss, who, in 1876, was the first non-native child born between Jupiter and Miami. She survived the wilds of Palm Beach County and joined with her brother to compile a manuscript titled Pioneer Life in Southeast Florida.
Aleene Kidd Mackenzie, 92, of Ocala, who founded the Florida Commission on the Status of Women and was the first president of the National Association of Highway Safety Leaders, was also inducted into the hall of fame.
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