Efforts to recognize African American historic sites are taking flight across the country
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.
Antonio Pacheco via Archinect - News http://bit.ly/2O68lSJ
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