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 Boston, according to the National Trust. 

A grant will support Virginia Humanities in establishing a statewide African American historic preservation advocacy and resource team, as well. The team, according to the National Trust, will "expand interpretation of the historic places and people affiliated with African American life in rural and urban Virginia."

Funding will help support the preservation of the God's Little Acre African burial ground in Newport, Rhode Island, the largest and most intact Colonial-era site of its kind, and a place where "the story of slavery and the European Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade is told."

The homes of Harriet Tubman, Langston Hughes, Satchel Paige, and 20th Century African American human rights activists Pauli Murray will be preserved using funding, as well. 

In New Orleans, the Preservation Resource Center's Treme Neighborhood Microgrants Program, which provides funding to homeowners so they can maintain and make preservation-friendly repairs in the rapidly gentrifying and historically Black neighborhood, will see a boost. 

In Atlanta, Morris Brown College's Fountain Hall, where W.E.B. Du Bois wrote his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, will be preserved, as well. According to the National Trust, Fountain Hall is the oldest surviving building associated with Atlanta University, one of the first Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) in the south. 

In a press release announcing the grant recipients, Brent Leggs, executive director of the National Trust's African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, said, “The recipients of this funding shine a light on once lived stories and Black culture, some familiar and some yet untold, that weave together the complex story of American history in the United States."

For a full list of grant recipients, see the National Trust for Historic Preservation website.