The New Yorker has a fascinating article on the effort to preserve historic sites where African Americans lived, worked, and struggled for freedom. For decades after Emancipation, too many white Americans acted as if Black people had no history. One could travel through villages and parts of cities with large Black populations and find no markers or memorials to the triumphs and travails of anyone who wasn’t white.
I remember stopping to look at pretty much every Civil War monument in every village square along Route 1 and none of them made even a single mention of the Black men who joined the United States Colored Troops. I sometimes asked why the statues only listed men who served in the Confederate army. The answer was that the monument was to recall those who defended the community. “Weren’t the Black soldiers also local men defending their community?” I asked. Why leave them out? Well, we pretty much “left out” every part of Black history in marking the landscape of American memory.
Fortunately, for the last several decades there has been a revival of interest in the geography of Black history. The New Yorker article focuses on the preservation work of Brent Leggs:
Leggs speaks eloquently about the “powerful collision of culture, heritage, and public space” that produced the tragedy in Charlottesville, and about the way that it has simultaneously obscured and illuminated the work that he and his colleagues do. Since Charlottesville, the debate over Confederate monuments has garnered far more attention than questions about what other sites and histories deserve to be preserved. At the same time, that debate has only reinforced what Leggs has believed for decades: that preservation is political, and that the kinds of places and structures that we protect are less an indication of what we valued in the past than a matter of what we venerate today.
It was after Charlottesville that Leggs and his colleagues created the Action Fund, the largest-ever campaign to preserve African-American historic sites. In its first year alone, the Fund received more than eight hundred applications requesting nearly ninety-one million dollars in grants. Last year, the National Trust funded twenty-two recipients, including the oldest extant black church in the country, the African Meeting House in Boston; the house that Harriet Tubman bought from Senator William Seward in Auburn, New York, in 1858, and lived in for more than fifty years; and the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, where, five years ago, nine members of the congregation were murdered by a white supremacist.
To support those and other efforts, Leggs has so far raised more than twenty million dollars for the Action Fund, from private individuals and nonprofits, including the Ford Foundation, the J.P.B. Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Elizabeth Alexander, a poet and the Mellon Foundation’s president, told me that for a long time communities of color have had to “carry around knowledge and stories in our bodies,” because resources were not devoted to preserving the spaces that held those stories. She describes what Leggs and his colleagues do as “rescue work.”
Pursuing and maintaining relationships with donors like Mellon is essential to the success of the Action Fund, especially since the federal government stopped allocating funds to the National Trust in 1997. Leggs is gifted at that work, in part because he talks about historic sites with the kind of affection and enthusiasm that most people reserve for their children; given a single ceramic tile from a sanitarium or the boarded-up window of an abandoned motel, he can conjure a forgotten world with exuberant precision, converting entire audiences to his cause. But he is also persuasive because he understands the economics of historic preservation—not only how costly it can be but how profitable. Parks, monuments, and historic registers are not just designations; they are also funding directives. In a virtuous cycle, they can enable infrastructure improvements for beautification and safety, which promote tourism, which in turn promotes business development. Traditionally, however, the communities that benefit the most from historic preservation are the ones that need it the least. Critics of historic preservation often regard it primarily as a way for wealthy property owners to fend off development, including, all too frequently, affordable or high-density housing. In less affluent areas, designations are rare, and the same forces that are caustic for residents also corrode their history. At Weeksville, for instance, it took decades of penny drives and neighborhood bake sales to secure the sort of preservation that Colonial and Confederate sites often attain in a few years. Even then, the site’s status remained precarious: encroached on by development in the thirties, forties, and fifties, it was rescued in the sixties, only to have one of its protected homes burned down in the eighties and another vandalized in the early nineties. Only last spring, after the Weeksville Heritage Center launched a crowdfunding campaign to stave off closure, did New York City formally partner with the center, insuring increased financial support.
Anyway, it is a long article and you should click the link to read it.
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