Enduring Guardians and Emergent Guarantors of African American Place Preservation an Martha’s Vineyard and Beyond | Dr. Fallon Samuels Aidoo

Martha’s Vineyard, a Massachusetts island profiled in the National Museum of African American History and Culture, is best known for Black respite not Black resistance. Yet, African Americans of every income, complexion, nationality, and ethnicity have repeatedly countered destruction, displacement, and discursive erasure of community refuges such as Bradley Memorial Church in the island town of Oak Bluffs. This article posits mainstays in African American place preservation—Black church congregations, community associations, charitable organizations, and civil rights and cultural institutions—make space in the pluriverse of African American place preservation for newfound heritage guarantors experienced in community development. Equity planning practiced by organizations seeking to save the Bradley Memorial building and landscape—both the Island Affordable Housing Fund and Trust and Martha’s Vineyard branches of the Habitat for Humanity and NAACP—reveal interracial, interfaith consensus on Black placekeeping can result in Black heritage loss, including foreclosure, auction, and demolition. Still, I argue, tangible benefits for intangible heritage materialize such as funded development proformas, approved design plans, demolition delays, and tested partnerships. This case study draws on archival sources and engages living stewards to demonstrate people of color entrusting their heritage’s preservation to emergent Black allies neither abstain from conservation nor acquiesce to real estate speculation. Rather, Black heritage futures developed with housing and community land trusts—and the foundations and charities that fund them—reflects resistance to hollow partnerships in Black placekeeping with preservationists long entrusted with white placemaking.

INTRODUCTION

“…Each time someone gives to a church’s building fund, that person is helping rebuild historic fabric. Whenever volunteers mow the grass at a historic cemetery, they are conserving an important cultural landscape. When relatives gather at the family farm for a reunion or to celebrate Juneteenth…they are honoring their past.”

With these prophetic words, Brent Leggs opens a 2012 report on the Preservation of African American Places with a declaration of inclusivity.^[i] Leggs and co-authors take stock of new support for places significant to African American history and culture, specifically sponsorship of charitable organizations that stewarded these places when others wouldn’t. The supporters they identify range from Black church congregants, sororities, fraternities, mutual aid societies and business owners to white philanthropists, evangelists and missionaries. Read more critically, their report on contributors to Black heritage conservation sheds light on the absence of organizations long dedicated to preserving homes, communities, and landscapes, namely land trusts, housing trusts, community trusts, and preservation trusts.^[ii] The report, in effect, justifies the need for systemic reorganization of conservation and preservation finance around endangerment and precarity of Black heritage, not just the Emergency Fund for African American churches that the National Trust for Historic Preservation launched a decade after the report.^[iii]

[i] Leggs, Brent, Kerri Rubman and Byrd Wood. Preserving African American Places. https://www.freemancenterbpt.org/article2.pdf. Page 3. Accessed 17 April, 2023.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Perkins, Alfred. Edwin Rogers Embree: The Julius Rosenwald Fund, Foundation Philanthropy, and American Race Relations. Indiana University Press, 2011

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