The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has announced grants totaling $3 million in support of efforts to preserve African-American landmarks.

Forty grants were awarded to save and enhance historic sites that tell stories about how African Americans faced their fate with courage, ingenuity, creativity, and genius; help shift the narrative around the value of Black lives; and correct inaccuracies and omissions in the American story. Recipients include the Alabama African American Civil Rights Consortium in Birmingham, which will create a new position to lead fundraising and communications and build the organization's capacity to serve the state's civil rights sites; the Asbury United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C. — a site associated with the largest nonviolent mass escape of enslaved persons in U.S. history and where trespassers burned the church's Black Lives Matter banner in 2020 — which will use its grant for repairs; and the Black American West Museum and Heritage Center in Denver, which will provide board training on best governance practices for a viable, vibrant, and sustainable museum.

Other recipients include the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge in Atlanta, which once housed the headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a Madam C.J. Walker Beauty School, and WERD, the first African American-owned and -programmed radio station; the League of Women for Community Service headquarters in Boston, which provided rooms to Black women college students who were not allowed to stay in dormitories due to segregation, including Coretta Scott King; and Karamu House in Cleveland, the apartment of poet and playwright Langston Hughes at America's oldest producing African-American theater, which will be restored for use as short-term housing for emerging artists of color.

Since it was launched in 2017 with $25 million from the Ford, JPB, Open Society, and other foundations, the fund has secured a total of $50 million in contributions — including a $20 million gift from MacKenzie Scott in June — and is the largest effort ever undertaken to support the preservation of African-American historic sites. This year's funders also include the Andrew W. Mellon and Chapman foundations, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust, President George W. Bush and Laura Bush, and an anonymous donor who gave in memory of Ahmaud Arbery.

For a complete list of 2021 grant recipients, see the National Trust for Historic Preservation website.

(Photo credit: Kelly Paras)