In recent years, including through the events of 2020, we’ve tracked several ways in which philanthropy is stepping up to preserve historic Black history and civil rights sites. Billionaire Robert F. Smith, for instance, gave nearly $39 million to the National Park Foundation in 2016, including to preserve MLK’s birth home and home during his life. When I interviewed Smith in 2021, he told me he was motivated by wanting to make history come alive and touch future generations.
More recently, I connected with the National Park Foundation about its funding for a series of major civil rights sites including the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, the Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site, and the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, honoring the young Chicago boy who was lynched while visiting family in Mississippi.
While skepticism about Black history and controversy around presenting and teaching it is not new at all, this preservation work takes on more significance these days, in the wake of significant right-wing attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, critical race theory and teaching African American history — such as the Arkansas ban on AP African American Studies.
Now comes news that the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington D.C., is giving $3 million in grant funding to preserve 30 Black history sites. Since its 2017 founding, the Action Fund has raised more than $140 million and calls itself the largest resource dedicated to the preservation of African American historic places. Along the way, the Action Fund has raked in support from institutional powerhouses like the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Getty Foundation.
Inside Philanthropy recently caught up with Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, to find out more about its work, how the fund has been able to rake in support, including from Mellon, why there’s such urgency around the preservation of Black history sites now, and where he sees the fund’s work heading next.
“An opportunity for telling unknown stories”
Born in Kentucky, Brent Leggs at one point considered a corporate career on Wall Street, but soon pivoted to the historical preservation graduate program at University of Kentucky. At the school, he conducted a statewide inventory of historic Rosenwald Schools, which were created by Booker T. Washington and Jewish businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, who built schools for Black youth around the country. Leggs also discovered that his parents were part of this movement and was moved to act. “I was inspired by the complexity of American history, but also saw an opportunity for telling unknown stories,” Leggs said. “And ever since that moment, I’ve dedicated my career to revealing to our nation the complex and beautiful stories imbued within African American historic places.”
Leggs joined the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2005. But in 2017, on the heels of the events in Charlottesville, Virginia — including the deadly car attack that took place there — the National Trust for Historic Preservation created the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund to rectify historical inequities and back historic preservation. “That moment of cultural reckoning centered the role culture had in public spaces in a way that challenged us at the National Trust to demonstrate the role of historic preservation in society,” he said.
Initially, the National Trust envisioned a $25 million, five-year campaign to uplift 100 Black heritage sites nationwide. But in over six years, Leggs said it’s raised almost $150 million and supported 304 Black heritage sites around the country with the help of large funders that have given big money, including the Lilly Endowment ($60 million), the Mellon Foundation (over $20 million), the Ford Foundation (over $10 million), the JPB Foundation (over $10 million) and one MacKenzie Scott ($20 million).
The Action Fund’s major backers “understand that our nation may be rich in diverse history, but it’s often been poor in the funding and preservation of that history,” Leggs said.
Preserving institutions
The Action Fund uses its support, in part, to sustain historic institutional sites — like Black churches and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
The fund runs a project called Preserving Black Churches, which focuses squarely on the oldest institutions created by Black Americans, starting in pre-colonial days and during slavery, through Jim Crow and civil rights. Leggs spoke of the Black church’s “unmatched” legacy in social justice. In the here and now, the Action Fund wants to make sure this legacy endures.
The project’s ongoing second phase will invest $40 million to support the preservation of 100 Black churches. Behind the scenes, the Action Fund is working to make sure that these institutions have the technical knowhow and financial investment to become strong stewards of their historic spaces so that they can continue to be pillars in their communities.
One of those churches is the historic 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, the site of a 1963 white supremacist terror attack that killed four Black girls. While Leggs noted that the church might be known for that one event, which sparked outrage around the world, its legacy is much more far reaching. The Action Fund invested several grants to restore and reimagine a parsonage building at the church, which is now a museum that tells the story of Wallace Rayfield, one of America’s earliest licensed Black architects, who designed 16th Street Baptist in 1911, as well as a slew of other churches and residences in the Jim Crow south, and beyond to Chicago.
The Action Fund also seeded a $200,000 investment to help 16th Street Baptist permanently sustain its preservation and management as a historic national asset. Having permanent resources on hand in the form of an endowment can be a game changer for struggling nonprofits — which includes many American churches, excepting outliers like D.C.’s National Cathedral and New York’s Trinity Church. With 16th Street Baptist’s congregation waning, Leggs reframed the conversation. “We also believe it’s an unfair stewardship responsibility for the church to have the sole financial responsibility for caring for our nation’s history. We wanted to ensure they had an endowment that would help cover the long-term costs of preserving the building.” The church is now actively fundraising to establish a $2 million endowment.
Inside Philanthropy has also reported on how philanthropy can step in to safeguard HBCUs. While HBCUs have historically been underfunded by the sector, there appears to be a modest uptick in funding for HBCUs of late, including from givers like MacKenzie Scott and Ronda Stryker — a recent snafu at FAMU notwithstanding.
The Action Fund has partnered with 25 HBCUs, including Morris College in South Carolina and Talladega College in Alabama, to protect their cultural assets by instituting campus-wide preservation plans to help school leaders and administrators know where to direct their capital investments. Leggs calls that work a “critical campus planning tool” that most HBCUs have not yet integrated into their master planning process. The Action Fund has also been preserving individual buildings on campus, including Ira Aldridge Theater at Howard University, named after a Black thespian who played a range of Shakespearian characters.
In a partnership with the Getty Foundation’s Conserving Black Modernism program, the Action Fund is also currently working at Morehouse, Howard and Virginia State University to create conservation management plans to guide these schools in future historic building rehabilitation projects, Leggs said.
What’s next?
Since 2017, the Action Fund has received $709 million in funding requests from nearly 6,170 funding proposals. This speaks to the field’s deep need and the many other projects out there that could use support. “African American historic places have been underfunded and undervalued for decades, and we have a bunch of catching up to do,” Leggs said.
Throughout our discussion, Leggs spoke of current times using urgent language and said he believes African American preservation is currently in a “renaissance.” He’s hopeful that over the next10 years, the Action Fund will continue to raise hundreds of millions of dollars.
He ended our conversation by talking about Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald and the kind of interracial partnership they fostered, as well as abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, who met at the African Meeting House in Boston to build a movement that ultimately helped set the groundwork for an end to the scourge of slavery.
“These are the kinds of stories and places that provide wisdom and lessons that are all the more important at this moment in our history,” Leggs said. “We are a diverse coalition, from white Americans, Jewish Americans, African Americans and beyond, that together are collectively building a true national identity that reflects America’s diversity.”
