The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) just launched a brand new initiative called the What’s Out There Guide to African American Cultural Landscapes. So far, the digital guide documents over 140 sites associated with African American culture lifeways as well as nearly 30 biographies and is part of the foundation's four-year-old Race and Space program.

The TCLF says the production of the guide required some rethinking of its four existing categorizations of cultural landscapes. Nine themes (Enslavement, Impacts of African Cultures on the American Landscape, The Underground Railroad, Reconstruction, The Civil Rights Movement, Education, Public Accommodations, Commemoration and Healing, and Elevating Designers and Shapers) were created to reconstrue them into their proper contexts.

This will be of value to future research endeavors, the TCLF says, while equally helpful in promoting the stewardship of the sites, both of which are related to its organizational mission to "connect people to places."

"The fragility and invisibility of these landscapes make them vulnerable to change or even worse, erasure. Working with academics, kin keepers, local and state non-profits, state and federal agencies, TCLF aims to amplify the awareness and understanding of these unique places where history happened," President and CEO Charles A. Birnbaum said. "TCLF also hopes that by including them in this digital guide we can begin to build a better contextual understanding of this distinct cultural landscape legacy that will lead to their protection, documentation, commemoration, designation, and public engagement so that they can endure and thrive for future generations."

A few sites featured in the growing digital guide include the African Burial Ground National Monument in Lower Manhattan, the new Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C., and the Hiawatha Golf Club in Minneapolis, among other significant and overlooked examples that are equally important touchstones to past and future generations. 

The TCLF was able to put the resource together with additional funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. It plays into two of the organization’s four larger programs — What’s Out There and Pioneers of American Landscape Design — and forms the 22nd overall city and regional guides, or thematic guide, published by the TCLF since being founded in 1998.