historic preservation 
-
SOURCE: CBS News
2/25/2023
Black History Month Traces to a Key Meeting in a Chicago YMCA
Chicago historian Shermann Thomas, aka "Dilla," makes the Wabash Avenue YMCA where educator Carter Woodson was inspired to launch Negro Achievement Week a centerpiece of his guided tours of Black Chicago's history.
-
SOURCE: CBS News
2/19/2023
The HistoryMakers: Preserving Untold Stories of African American Achievement
60 Minutes covers a nonprofit group working to preserve and document Black American history. Julieanna Richardson's team has conducted, transcribed and posted more than 3,500 oral history interviews.
-
SOURCE: New York Times
2/15/2023
Even In Death, Black Americans Denied Dignified Rest
by Greg Melville
Lacking legal protection, historic African American cemeteries face serious threats from neglect and redevelopment.
-
SOURCE: Boston Globe
2/9/2023
An Unlikely Coalition Trying to Save a Nashville Black Landmark
A Nashville Elks lodge building was the 1960s home of a music club where superstars of Black music—and the yet-to-be famous Jimi Hendrix—played during the segregation era. Like many such landmarks, decades of highway building broke up the surrounding community and made the building endangered today.
-
SOURCE: Boston Globe
2/7/2023
Nashville's Historic Woolworth Building is in Trouble
America faces a choice between preserving the sites of its civil rights history within the evolving fabric of cities and towns, or erecting more plaques explaining what happened in the buildings that used to be there.
-
SOURCE: Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/02/11/
Two Brothers Pushed the National Historic Landmark Program to Include Black History
Although there are dozens of dedicated landmarks to African American history today, the activism of the DeForrest brothers to push the National Park Service toward inclusion has been forgotten.
-
SOURCE: New York Times
2/5/2023
8 Sites Illuminating African American History Show the Need for Preservation
The National Trust for Historic Preservation is working against time and redevelopment to prevent the loss of key sites of African American history across the nation. So far the project has helped protect a museum of the Buffalo Soldiers, Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, and Louis Armstrong's house in Queens, among other sites.
-
SOURCE: Natchez Democrat
12/30/2022
Stanley Nelson Lauded for Work Preserving Records of Violence Against Civil Rights Workers
Nelson wrote two books on "cold cases" linked to Klan activity in Louisiana and Mississippi.
-
SOURCE: BBC
10/24/2022
The Hidden History of Black Coal Towns
The New River Gorge is one of the newest National Parks. Beyond natural beauty, the region allows visitors to learn the history of African American coal miners and their communities in West Virginia.
-
SOURCE: Washington Post
9/4/2022
Landmark Building Embodies Past and Present of DC's Black Community
The True Reformer Building in Washington is likely the first in the nation to be designed, funded, built and owned by African Americans as part of a comprehensive mission of economic and social self-reliance and uplift in the early 20th century.
-
SOURCE: Christian Science Monitor
9/1/2022
New Approach at Montpelier: Let All Voices Rise
After a controversial battle over how to incorporate the descendants of people enslaved by James Madison, Montpelier is beginning to highlight artifacts—and the process of discovering them—related to the lives of enslaved people at the estate.
-
SOURCE: NBC News
8/14/2022
Airbnb Listings Latest Case of Trivializing, Commercializing Slave Cabins
Preservationists like Joseph McGill Jr., founder of the Slave Dwelling Project, say the commercialization of plantation sites has been happening for decades.
-
8/14/2022
Remembering David McCullough Off the Page, as a Champion of Preservation
by Richard Moe
Having known the late David McCullough through his work advocating historic preservation, the author says McCullough lived a maxim of John Adams he often quoted: while he achieved success, he was more driven to work to deserve it.
-
8/7/2022
Climate Change Just Erased the Past in Kentucky. Where Will it Happen Next?
by Tina A. Irvine
The archives of the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County were inundated by flood waters on July 28—a devastating loss of one community's history and culture, and a warning to historians that our knowledge of the past is at risk from climate change.
-
SOURCE: Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star
3/16/2022
Montpelier Board Appoints 11 Members from Descendants Committee
The move may finally deliver on the board's promise to grant parity in the governance of the James Madison estate to the descendants of persons enslaved at Montpelier.
-
SOURCE: The Atlantic
5/2/2022
Is Historic Preservation Ruining American Cities?
by Jacob Anbinder
Historic preservation laws often have a loose relationship to the actual historic significance of buildings, and an even looser relationship to the interests of cities in meeting their residents' social needs.
-
SOURCE: James Madison's Montpelier
4/27/2022
Montpelier Board Pushes Back Against Accusation they Excluded Descendants' Committee Leadership
The Montpelier Foundation board argues that the organization representing the descendants of those enslaved at James Madison's estate has rejected good faith cooperation in order to score political points in the latest escalation of the battle over how the Founder's relationship to slavery should be portrayed.
-
SOURCE: Our Towns Foundation
4/28/2022
How Powerful Stories are Rebuilding a Church
by Deborah Fallows
"The stories of Mt. Holly have become the sinew that could connect the town, or borough, as it is officially designated, from its past glory days, through some recent decline, to a new version of thriving."
-
SOURCE: Richmond Times-Dispatch
4/19/2022
Reversal on Power-Sharing Shows Montpelier Really Wants to Stop Talking About Slavery
by Michael Paul Williams
“They wanted to yank the narrative of Montpelier away from slavery, despite all of their protestations to the contrary,” said board member James French, chair of the Montpelier Descendants Committee.
-
SOURCE: NPR
4/20/2022
Montpelier Descendants Call Foul on Board over Firings
The firing of three senior staff members who support the involvement of the Montpelier Descendants Committee in the public presentation of James Madison's estate, and the slavery practiced there, has raised questions about whether Montpelier is committed to historical honesty.
News
- Chair of Florida Charter School Board on Firing of Principal: About Policy, Not David Statue
- Graduate Student Strikes Fight Back Against Decades of Austerity, Seek to Revive Opportunity
- When Right Wingers Struggle with Defining "Woke" it Shows they Oppose Pursuing Equality
- Strangelove on the Square: Secret USAF Films Showed Airmen What to Expect if Nuclear War Broke Out
- The Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
- New Books Force Consideration of Reconstruction's End from Black Perspective
- Excerpt: How Apartheid South Africa Tried to Create a Libertarian Utopia
- Historian's Book on 1970s NBA Shows Racial Politics around Basketball Have Always Been Ugly
- Kendi: "Anti-woke" Part of Backlash Against Antiracist Protest Movements
- Monica Muñoz Martinez Honored for Truth-Telling in Texas History