Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Hosted at the Cotton Club Museum and Cultural Center, this event will feature a conversation with Brett Leggs of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and University of Pennsylvania with community leaders of African American neighborhoods and sites.

Reception to follow

This event is part of the Center for Humanities and the Public Sphere’s “Rethinking the Public Sphere: 2022-23” Speaker Series.

Brent Leggs is the founding executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund – a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and largest preservation campaign in U.S. History on behalf of historic African American places. Through the Action Fund, he leads a broad community of leaders and activists in honor of the clarion that preserving African American cultural sites is fundamental to understanding the American story. Leggs is a Harvard University Loeb Fellow, author of Preserving African American Historic Places, and the 2018 recipient of the Robert G. Stanton National Preservation Award. His efforts to protect the A.G. Gaston Motel, Madam C.J. Walker estate, John and Alice Coltrane and Nina Simone residences, and Joe Frazier’s Gym is exemplary of his successful campaigns to preserve many cultural monuments throughout the U.S. Leggs is also an Adjunct Associate Professor and Senior Advisor to the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design.