Iowa

In 1868, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that a 12-year-old Black girl named Susan Clark couldn't be turned away from her neighborhood school because of her race. That was 86 years before the U.S. Supreme Court said the same thing in Brown v. Board of Education.

Susan's father, Alexander Clark, a barber, real estate investor, and Underground Railroad conductor in Muscatine, sued the school board after they told his daughter she had to walk over a mile to a separate, underfunded school. The Iowa court sided with Susan and declared that all children were equal before the law.

The Ioway, Meskwaki, Sauk, and other Native peoples had lived across this land for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. French explorers Jolliet and Marquette paddled through in 1673, and Iowa became the 29th state in 1846.

After the government forced the Meskwaki off their land and onto a reservation in Kansas in 1842, the tribe did something no other Native group had done. In 1857, they pooled their money, came back to Iowa, and bought 80 acres near Tama. They still live there today.

Iowa entered the Union as a free state, but equality was far from guaranteed. Black Iowans couldn't vote, testify in court, or attend public schools for years. The Civil War pushed things forward. Iowa sent a higher percentage of its men to fight for the Union than any other state, and in 1869 the Iowa Supreme Court made Arabella Mansfield the first woman admitted to the bar in the country.

You can walk through the Effigy Mounds National Monument in northeast Iowa, where Native peoples built animal-shaped earthworks along the Mississippi River more than a thousand years ago. In Dyersville, step onto the baseball diamond at the Field of Dreams movie site.

At the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, try a pork chop on a stick and see the famous butter cow. And out west, drive the Loess Hills, rare wind-sculpted ridges found in only two places on Earth, here and in China.