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National Park Service Announces Over $7.5 Million in Grants
to Preserve African-American Civil Rights Movement Sites
Special to The Truth
The National Park Service (NPS) today announced funding for 39
projects in over 20 states that will preserve and highlight
the sites and stories associated with the Civil Rights
Movement and the African American experience.
“Through the African American Civil Rights Grant Program, we’re
helping our public and private partners tell unique and
powerful stories of the African American struggle for
equality in the 20th Century,” National Park
Service Acting Director Michael Reynolds said.
Congress appropriated funding for the new NPS African American
Civil Rights Grant Program in 2016 through the Historic
Preservation Fund (HPF). The HPF uses revenue from federal
oil leases on the Outer Continental Shelf to provide
assistance for a broad range of preservation projects
without expending tax dollars.
States, Tribes, local governments, and non-profit organizations,
including Historically Black Colleges and Universities,
applied for a broad range of planning, preservation, and
research projects for historic sites associated with the
Civil Rights Movement and the African-American experience.
The competitive grant program is funding 39 projects worth
$7,750,000, including surveys, documentation,
interpretation, education, oral histories, planning, and
bricks and mortar preservation.
Projects receiving grants include those that will educate about
and preserve resources like Rosenwald Schools across the
nation, Civil Rights struggles at Sixteenth Street Baptist
Church in Alabama and Central High School in Arkansas, women
that fought for civil rights like Modjeska Simkins in South
Carolina, and figures like Oscar DePriest, Emmett Till and
Martin Luther King, Jr. Statewide surveys to find stories
and sites that are not well known will be funded in
Michigan, Rhode Island, Ohio, Maryland, Idaho, District of
Columbia, California, and New York.
A 2008 National Park Service study,
Civil Rights in America: A Framework for Identifying
Significant Sites, served as
the principal reference for determining the eligibility of
proposed projects for the grant program.
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