$3 million: That’s the amount committed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation to protect and showcase American sites significant to African-American history. The Washington-based NGO is using its dedicated program, the African-American Heritage Action Fund (AACHAF), to support 30 sites, which will receive grants ranging from $50,000 to $150,000. The investment will fund restoration projects, development, and the creation of educational programs dedicated to the public.
The sites concerned represent African-American history in all its diversity: schools, sports clubs and even cemeteries are benefiting from the endowment this year. The funding has been allocated, among others, to the African-American university association “Alpha Gamma Omega House” in Los Angeles (California), Chickasaw Park, a park reserved for African-Americans when segregation deprived them of access to the large public parks of Louiseville (Kentucky), or The Lefferts Historic House, a former slave owners’ house still in its original state in Brooklyn (New York).
In 2024, half of the funds will go to sites of modernist architecture designed by African-American architects. Coming from the second edition of the “Conserving Black Modernism” program, dedicated to the preservation of African-American modernist architecture, the sites concerned will receive funds for the preservation of the buildings and the promotion of their architects.
“By preserving African American modernist architecture, we have taken a step forward in saving endangered sites that represent the activism, creativity and resilience of African American artists.” “We are pleased to announce that the Getty Foundation (California) is pleased to announce that Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, where African-American architect Leon Allain built three halls in the 1970s, is one of the sites to benefit from this funding program. A total of eight architectural complexes are involved: they will receive $1.2 million financed by The Action Fund and the Getty Foundation.
The African American Heritage Action Fund was created in November 2017 by a member of Congress. Partly funded by states, the fund is also supported by private funding such as the Mellon Foundation, which provided $1.5 million to AACHAF, the Ford Foundation and the Robert D.L. Gardiner Foundation. Since its creation, 304 African American heritage sites have received $27 million.
Over the past ten years, the fund has provided $1 million to the State of Maryland. Last year, AACCHAF increased its contribution fivefold, with $5 million going to all 24 sites and organizations in Maryland alone, as reported in The Washington Post. Thanks to these new grants, a former Baltimore fire station will be transformed into a museum dedicated to African-American firefighters.
The Henry Hotel, an 1895 establishment reserved for African-American tourists in the seaside town of Ocean City, will also be transformed into a museum to bear witness to the living conditions of African-Americans when the city’s beaches were closed to them.
The United States seems to be increasingly attentive to the recognition and promotion of African-American heritage, also in museum institutions. In June 2023, the International African-American Museum, telling the story of slavery, opened its doors in Charleston (South Carolina). Recently, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in New York organized “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism”, an exhibition dedicated to New York African-American artists that ended on July 28.
