The mission of the Louise B. Miller Memorial and Freedom Garden is to create an abundant, Black Deaf centric space. Gallaudet University is committed to confronting its past and leading a national reckoning with the destructive legacy of segregation through a memorial that both witnesses and honors the Black Deaf community’s fight for educational justice in America.

In 1952, Louise B. Miller, the mother of a deaf child, and other parents filed a class action suit against the Washington, D.C. Board of Education of for the right of Black Deaf children including Mrs. Miller’s son, Kenneth, to attend the Kendall School for the Deaf on the campus of Gallaudet College. The resulting victory in Miller v. Board, which pierced the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of “separate but equal,” was a watershed moment in Black Deaf history as well as the American civil rights movement. In ways that are significant yet historically overlooked, Miller v. Board, its mandate to create the Kendall School Division II for the Negroes on campus, and the school’s 24 Black students and four teachers helped lay the foundations of a civil rights movement that resulted in Brown v. Board, and over the next decade, methodically dismantled educational segregation in America.