The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has announced grants totaling $4 million to help preserve 31 historic Black churches across the United States.

In its second round of awards, the Preserving Black Churches fund awarded grants ranging from $50,000 to $200,000. The program helps congregations address urgent and ongoing preservation threats, such as deferred maintenance, insufficient funding, demolition, water filtration, and mold contamination. With leadership support from the Lilly Endowment, the Action Fund advances strategies that model and strengthen historic Black churches’ stewardship and asset management, interpretation, and fundraising activities across the country.

The latest recipients include St. James AME Church, the oldest Black Protestant church in New Orleans; Town Clock Church in New Albany, Indiana, which served as a station on the underground railroad; and Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Atlanta, which is the oldest predominantly African-American congregation in the Atlanta metropolitan area.

“Black churches have been at the forefront of meaningful democratic reform since this nation’s founding. They’re a living testament to the resilience of our ancestors in the face of unimaginably daunting challenges,” said Henry Louis Gates, Jr., historian and advisor to the Action Fund. “The heart of our spiritual world is the Black church. These places of worship, these sacred cultural centers, must exist for future generations to understand who we were as a people.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Jon Frederick)