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POSTPONED – Preserving Galaxy of Black Landmarks is an Act of Racial Justice – Brent Leggs
February 11, 2022 @ 2:00 pm
POSTPONED
***Events with Brent Leggs have been postponed to September 23, 2022.***
Brent Leggs (Executive Director, African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and University of Pennsylvania)
Without a thorough reckoning with the complex and difficult history of our country, especially when it comes to race, we will not be able to overcome intolerance, injustice, and inequality. That is why, in November 2017, the National Trust for Historic Preservation launched its African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a $25 million campaign to reconstruct a true national identity that reflects America’s diversity. Preserving this tapestry of America’s shared culture, pride and heritage is an act of racial justice and should be viewed as a civil right.
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.