The entire career of Brent Leggs (Exec Dir at the @NationalTrustforHistoricPreservation) has been about preserving places of significance to African American history. So when he witnessed the demolition of @OprahWinfrey’s Harpo Studios in Chicago, he was gutted.
“You can imagine the pain that I felt because I knew that one day it would be a National Historic Landmark or National Monument … to never forget her remarkable legacy. But it was being demolished. And so I instantly thought we have to, as preservationists, be more proactive.” By raising millions for African American Cultural Heritage, that’s exactly what Leggs aims is doing now.
Hear more from Brent Leggs — and the projects of significance to Black history he’s helped preserve — in our latest episode.
In August 2017, white nationalists rallied around the Thomas Jefferson sculpture on the University of Virginia campus to protest violently. As Brent Leggs and his colleagues at the National Trust for Historic Preservation watched the news, they felt compelled to do something, to wield their expertise in historic preservation as a tool for education and understanding and healing.
Brent had already piloted a fund to preserve and protect African American sites in his state of Maryland. But it was time to think bigger. “We envisioned a five year, 25 million campaign to support the preservation of 150 black history sites,” he told us in our latest episode. Six years later, Brent and his colleagues have raised almost $90 million, supported and partnered with more than 200 preservation projects, and have established a $14 million endowment to sustain the perpetual leadership of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.
In this episode, Brent pulls back the curtain of how they accomplished this remarkable feat of fundraising — and why securing funding is his greatest priority for preserving African American cultural heritage.
(Also big shout out to the folks who helped Brent make this possible – Darren Walker of the Ford foundation, Ms. Phylicia Rashad, the Mellon Foundation, the The JPB Foundation, Lily Foundation, and Mackenzie Scott and others.)
Urban v. Rural Historic Main Streets
In our latest Urban Roots Podcast episode with Dionne Baux and Amanda Elliot from Urban Main—a program of the Main Street America and subsidiary of the National Trust for Historic Preservation— we discussed the importance of offering a wide-range of community-driven economic development services to help under-resourced older and historic neighborhood commercial corridors restore economic vitality in an effort to #buildbackblack.
Learn more about Dionne, Amanda, and their work in our latest bonus episode: https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/2kaQiUZO4yb.
Back in 2020, Desiree Powell was sick and tired of her urban planning job — the work just wasn’t aligned with her values or how she wanted to be working with communities.
So she quit. She got a position at the Congress for the New Urbanism. And then she decided to start her OWN people-based planning firm Do Right by the Streets (BRBTS). At first, she just wanted to try make the nuts and bolts of urban planning more accessible to communities of color. But as Desiree started working with folks in South Dallas, and began collaborating with them on the creation of community-based places, like the Sunny South Dallas Food Park, she realized that actually making places with community has been the best way to educate and inform people about what planning is all about.
Learn more about Desiree and her firm’s work in our latest bonus episode. https://bit.ly/3WVpf6W
If you’re an urbanist, then you know Houston is famous for being zoning-free. The lack of zoning has a lot of implications on the city, both good and bad. But how does it impact Houston’s communities of color? When we were at the Historic African American Neighborhood District Summit last year, we got the chance to ask this question of Tanya Debose, and she was adamant.
It hurts more than it helps.
Ms. Debose is a fourth generation descendant of the people who founded Independence Heights, the first municipality incorporated by African Americans in Texas. Because she’s so proud of her heritage, she feels a drive to preserve and protect it — and ensure future generations can remain in place, thrive, and continue to appreciate the rich history of her community.
That’s why she became the Executive Director of the Independence Heights Redevelopment Council, a nonprofit with a mission “to empower the people of Independence Heights to be the change agents for a better community,” and why she helped start Preserving Communities of Color. Learn more about Tanya and her organizations’ great work in our latest bonus episode. http://bit.ly/3WVpf6WIf
Between 2010 and 2017, the Getty Conservation Institute and Los Angeles City Planning started SurveyLA to survey hundreds of thousands of parcels in the city and surface places historically significant to communities of color. Of over 800,000 parcels, they found that only 3% were of significance to African American history.
Since then, the Getty has started the Los Angeles African American Historic Places Project, and hired Rita Cofield to work “with local communities and cultural institutions to more fully recognize and understand African American experiences in Los Angeles.”
Learn more about Rita and Getty’s important, community-based work in LA in our latest Urban Roots episode. https://anchor.fm/urbanrootspodcast/episodes/Preserving-Black-Heritage-in-L-A-e1tbkf5
When you work as preservationist in minority communities, you can’t always depend on traditional methods of preservation — the buildings that were once important to the community, or where an important person of color lived or worked, likely no longer exist. There are likely fewer newspaper clippings, deeds, or other archives that would help you paint a picture of what once was.
That’s why you have to focus your attention on parcels, not buildings, and you need to ask the community to tell you: what used to be here? What are the (hi)stories we may not know about? What should we be celebrating?
That’s the approach that the Getty Conservation Institute and Los Angeles City Planning took between 2010 and 2017 with SurveyLA, which surveyed over 800,000 parcels. Of those parcels, they found that, at the time of the survey, only 3% were of significance to African American history.
Today, Rita Cofield is working for the Getty to keep this important work going through the Los Angeles African American Historic Places Project. Learn more about it in our latest Urban Roots episode. https://anchor.fm/urbanrootspodcast/episodes/Preserving-Black-Heritage-in-L-A-e1tbkf5
“I thought about my great-grandfather. He didn’t have a voice when they put that freeway through and took his home from there in 1959. But today when they came for us with a freeway, we had a voice.”— Tanya Debose of Independence Heights viscerally understands why history matters.
Without that historical DNA, that knowledge of what happened to those who came before you, how they fought and won and lost, how can you stand up for your community today? How can you find your voice? Knowledge = power.
Tanya was one of the many empowering speakers we heard at Historic African American Neighborhood District Summit - subscribe to the Urban Roots podcast to hear more from preservationists like Tanya working to protect historic African American neighborhoods around the country.
