DC Trip 17 Day 2

Day 2: Started with optional run around Capitol Hill at 645 and optional Mass at 8. Props to Graham and Jack for opting in on both. Mass at beautiful little church - St Vincent de Paul's.

Left hotel at 930 - much cooler than yesterday. First stop was at Air and Space for an hour visir.

Then we headed to the new National Museum of African-American History and Culture - we were very lucky to get tickets having reserved them two months ahead.

The museum has three floors of history below ground and three levels of culture above ground. The long line was to see the history section - warms a history teacher's heart.

We were at the museum for almost four hours, and I spent the whole time in the history floors - kind of inverse to the Holocaust Museum, you start at the bottom and work your way up chronologically from early slavery to the present.

Highlights included the many tributes to great leaders,

and the section on Emmitt Till featuring the casket he was originally buried in (long line to see this, no pics).

Will have to go back several times before really seeing the museum.

Great cafeteria too. From there we took a nice walk down Constitution Ave

to Impact Hub for our STAND conference run by Mac Hamilton (HHS alum). Colin and Kori helped, and our keynote was by Myra, a refugee from the violence in Burma.

We were brought up to date on a variety of crises that STAND is pushing for our government to act on. We learned the issues to prepare for our Lobby Day presentations tomorrow. Kept the synapses firing with pizza and salad. The conference consisted of our group of 22 and 24 from Pathfinder Tech in Palmer, MA. We then went together on a three hour Monument Tour - White House, Iwo Jima, Jefferson, FDR, MLK, Lincoln, Vietnam, and Korea.