Looking Back to Move Forward | Dr. Kwesi Daniels

The preservation of African American sites is often performed by everyday people who are not formally trained in historic preservation and may not regard themselves as preservationist. The stewards of these sites tend to be people who have personal connections to the histories they are protecting. It is often through their sheer will that the stories of triumph that are intertwined with the homes, churches, businesses, and communities have been preserved. Unfortunately, funding to address outstanding maintenance issues at these sites is not always sufficient or the sites are unable to hire the professionals required to provide the reports, conduct testing, write nominations, provide architectural services, or perform the construction work needed to protect the historic sites. The power of these historic sites, particularly the civil rights sites, is that many of the foot soldiers who were involved in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement or their children are still alive and able to communicate their experiences. Thus, when visitors come to the sites they learn the details of the sacrifices made by the families and religious congregations for things many take for granted today, like voting and integrated interstate travel. What makes these stories even more poignant is the continued marginalization of African-American voting rights in Alabama as seen in the 2023 Allen v. Milligan Supreme Court case over the gerrymandering of African-American voters. Failure to preserve these sites threatens the ability to create new histories of equality for our country’s citizens. 

In 2018, the Tuskegee University Department of Architecture began developing a historic preservation program. The primary goal was to use our historic campus as a laboratory, where the curriculum could serve as a mechanism for addressing the extant preservation needs of the University. A secondary goal was to provide the students with hands-on experience that could be used to address the preservation needs of African-American historic sites in rural Alabama. In 2020, Tuskegee University (TU) Department of Architecture partnered with the University of Pennsylvania’s (Penn) Department of Historic Preservation to support the preservation of the Armstrong School, a rural schoolhouse in Macon County, Alabama. In 2021, TU and Penn successfully secured a $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to further the development of TU’s preservation program and Penn’s recently established Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites (CPCRS). In 2023, Dr. Randy Mason, the initiator of the Center and its former director passed the reigns to Dr. Amber Wiley to embark on the next phase of the Center’s growth and to explore new opportunities for interaction between the two preservation programs. The following sets of interviews are respectively between Dr. Kwesi Daniels of TU and Dr. Randy Mason and Dr. Amber Wiley of Penn. The interviews provide an account of the learned experiences of working with Tuskegee University on the preservation of many of the most recognized Civil Rights sites in Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma, Alabama, along with future goals. The interview with Dr. Mason provides reflection on the journey for both programs, looking back after three years of work and the interview with Dr. Wiley, provides her vision for the next steps in the growth of CPCRS and the relationship with Tuskegee.  

To read the FULL ARTICLE, purchase a physical copy at https://cot.pennpress.org/home/, or visit Project Muse for digital access https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966940. Thank you for your support!