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African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund: Another $4 million will go toward preserving Black churches

2024-02-02T12:20:00-05:00

The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation has announced another round of funding totaling $4 million that will be put towards preserving Black churches in 22 states across the country.

The program’s second round of funding for the two-year-old Preserving Black Churches initiative will help maintain the legacies of 31 churches.

Black churches in the United States are at the center of the country's lifelong fight for democratic reforms and are a key character in the story of African American's survival and resilience in America. As the historian and advisor to the Action Fund, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., explained, “Black churches have been at the forefront of meaningful democratic reform since this nation’s founding. They’re a living testament to the resilience of our ancestors in the face of unimaginably daunting challenges.”

“The heart of our spiritual world is the Black church. These places of worship, these sacred cultural ...

African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund announces $3.8 million in 2023 grants to preserve 40 historic sites

2023-06-13T17:43:00-04:00

The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund has announced $3.8 million in 2023 grant funding to protect and preserve 40 sites representing African American history. Established in 2017, the Action Fund, which has raised more than $95 million, is the largest U.S. fund dedicated to preserving historic African American sites.

Since its inception, the Action Fund has received a total of 5,638 funding proposals requesting $655 million. The program has been able to support 242 grantee projects through its investment of $20 million.

2023 grant site: Morgan State University’s Jenkins Hall in Baltimore, Maryland. Photo: Troy Pumphrey Jr., image courtesy National Trust for Historic Preservation.

“The Action Fund’s investment in and celebration of 40 historic African American places illustrates our belief that historic preservation plays an important role in American society,” said Brent Leggs, African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund exe...

New $3.1 million Conserving Black Modernism grant program announced by the Getty Foundation and National Trust for Historic Preservation

2022-09-19T14:37:00-04:00

The Getty Foundation together with the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund has announced the commitment of $3.1 million in the form of institutional grants to individuals and organizations that are working to preserve the legacy of historic modern architecture designed by Black architects nationwide.

Under the title Conserving Black Modernism, the two-year grant program, part of a larger $80 million effort overseen by the Action Fund, will support the documentation of 16 overlooked sites across the country while providing useful preservation training and storytelling resources to their future stewards.

The Getty says they are remiss at not including any works by one of America’s many underappreciated Black designers in its otherwise successful Keeping It Modern initiative and will look to address this absence with a new program that helps enshrine their contributions to what became the most defining architectural movement of the ...

African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund: More than $3 million in grants to sites and organizations announced

2021-08-24T19:29:00-04:00

On July 15, 2021, the National Trust for Historic Preservation announced more than $3 million in grants to 40 sites and organizations through its African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. Over the past four years, the National Trust has funded 105 historic places connected to Black history and invested more than $7.3 million to help preserve landscapes and buildings imbued with Black life, humanity, and cultural heritage.

Grants were awarded across four categories: capacity building, project planning, capital, and programming and interpretation. Grantees include the Oakland Public Library, City of Sacramento, Indiana Landmarks, African American Heritage Trail of Martha’s Vineyard, Save Harlem Now!, and Huston-Tillotson University.

Since the inception of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund in 2016, the effort has accumulated $50 million in funding, making it the largest preservation effort ever undertaken to support African American historic sites. This year’s announcement marks the largest single disbursement in the fund’s four-year history, made possible by a $20 million grant to the Action Fund by philanthropists MacKenzie Scott and Dan Jewett.

The full list of African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund grantees can be seen here.

Previously on Archinect: African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund receives $20 million grant from MacKenzie Scott as part of a $2.7 billion over...

African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund receives $20 million grant from MacKenzie Scott as part of a $2.7 billion overall gift

2021-06-21T17:25:00-04:00

The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund has been awarded a $20 million grant from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott in an unprecedented move that will nearly double the amount of funding the organization has received since its inception in 2017.

Scott’s grant was announced in a Medium post she authored, which outlines some of her motivations for supporting causes with a progressive social agenda.

The donation is part of a larger $2.7 billion gift Scott and husband Dan Jewett gave to a variety of arts organizations with a focus on African diasporic cultural concerns, including the Souls Grow Deep Foundation and the Studio Museum in Harlem, which is currently undergoing a radical transformation at the hands of Adjaye Associates.

Holmes Hall at Morgan State University. Image courtesy Baltimore Heritage.

The money will allow the fund to pursue its stated goals of promoting a “national identity that reflects the nation’s true diversity...

Efforts to recognize African American historic sites are taking flight across the country

2020-01-28T12:30:00-05:00

Since its founding, the National Register of Historic Places has helped to generate an estimated two million jobs and more than a hundred billion dollars in private investments. But, because many biases were written into the criteria that determine how sites are selected, those benefits have gone mostly to white Americans. One of the criteria for preservation is architectural significance, meaning that modest buildings like slave cabins and tenement houses were long excluded from consideration.

Writing in The New Yorker, Casey Cep profiles Brent Leggs, director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The lengthy, eye-opening report delves into the work of preservationists like Leggs who are fighting to uncover, highlight, and preserve a vast but under-acknowledged collection of vital African American sites, structures, and spaces across the United States. That includes growing rosters of African American burial grounds, Historic Black Colleges and Universities, and collections of private homes and other sites once occupied by African American communities.

National Trust for Historic Preservation forwards the preservation of African American cultural sites

2019-07-08T20:00:00-04:00

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has unveiled $1.6 million in grant funding dedicated to preserving historical sites that demonstrate significance with relation to Black history and African American cultural heritage from around the country.

The funding, part of a larger, multi-year $25 million effort, is being awarded to 22 organizations with the goal of "uplifting the largely overlooked contributions of African Americans by protecting and restoring African American historic sites and uncovering hidden stories of African Americans connected to historic sites across the nation," according to a press release.

The list includes, for example, the Museum of African American History in Boston, an organization that is housed within a building designed by British architect Richard Upjohn in 1835. The building exists today as the oldest extant Black church in the United States and, when originally built, made up the first public educational facility for free Black children in B...