The U.S. is facing a pivotal moment: the battle to preserve and teach its history, American history, Black history, with all of its ugly bruises and sickening scars. The Republican Party has found its dog whistle, and as we enter the season of midterms and slide into another presidential election, we see the attack on history, aka critical race theory, gaining steam and traction. So where does that leave the physical symbols of Black people and their spaces?
Most historians would agree that the preservation of important physical spaces is vital. But somehow when those spaces include buildings within communities of color, the urgency and importance dissipate.
Black Americans have survived unthinkable depravity heaped upon them for centuries, and yet they (we) have and will continue to overcome. But the race to save numerous Black-owned and historic spaces has not come without awe-inspiring efforts.
Right now in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood, a building that once housed the National Negro Opera Company, founded in 1941, looks like something out of a dystopian nightmare. The roof has fallen in on one section of the manor, trees and bushes have grown into and around the building, and windows are boarded up to prevent further damage.
The house was constructed in 1894 and was purchased in the ‘30s by William A. “Woogie” Harris, one of several wealthy Black businessmen who bought up buildings in the 1920s.
Harris never lived in the house. Instead, Jonnet Solomon, an accountant who bought the manor in 2000, says Harris bought it to give Black Americans a place where they could live, stay, and gather.
“He knew it would be a residence for people who couldn’t stay anywhere else,” Solomon tells Saving Places. “It was a community. He wanted people to have a safe space to really just be who they are.”
Here’s a list of some of those who frequented the house: Lena Horne, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and Duke Ellington, as well as athletes such as Joe Louis and more.
The house also became a permanent space for Mary Cardwell Dawson, a classically trained opera singer who rented the third floor and formed the National Negro Opera Company—one of the largest, most well-known, and longest-running companies of its kind in the country. Sadly the company shuttered after Dawson died in 1962. The Harris family kept the house until it was eventually taken by the Bank of New York and Solomon bought it.
Solomon has been fighting to restore the house ever since, but without much support. “The path to preservation is not a golden road,” she says.
In the 20 years Solomon has been working to save the property, it fell into deep disrepair. But in 2020, somehow the building received a reprieve, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the National Opera House one of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places, sparking a tidal wave of support.
In January, grants for $500,000from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation came in, matching the Richard King Mellon Foundation’s grant from April 2021. In July 2021, the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund provided $75,000.
Solomon says her goal is to restore the house to what it was: a space where artists can train and brands and businesses have a place to develop, as well as a museum to tell the story of the National Negro Opera Company.
“The community is more behind it than ever before,” Solomon says. “I think the community sees the importance of cultural spaces preserved. They see the value of preservation … they see the value of that kind of social equity … they want to tell their stories, too.”
Alexandra Unthank, an education program associate at the Latimer House, told Apartment Therapy that preserving and restoring Black spaces depends largely on photographs—the kind of documentation reserved for the wealthy.
The Latimer House and museum is a Queen Anne Victorian house in Queens, New York, owned by Lewis Latimer, the son of fugitive slaves who worked as an inventor, drafter, and artist in the early 1900s.
“It was expensive to have photographs taken. Most of the people that have that documentation are people who have wealth,” Unthank says. Latimer was one of the few who did amass wealth thanks to his patents and inventions.
“There is no Black urban community that is not under threat from that cultural heritage being tampered with, erased completely, or developed over,” LeJuano Varnell told Apartment Therapy. Varnell is the executive director and main street manager of Sweet Auburn Works, a preservation organization working to promote the legacy of Atlanta’s historic Sweet Auburn District.
Sweet Auburn is home to numerous Black historical buildings: the Odd Fellows Building and Auditorium, Big Bethel AME Church, Atlanta Life Insurance, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s childhood home. But despite the deep history of the area, gentrification took precedence and the Federal Highway Act of 1956 made room for the building of a freeway that split Sweet Auburn in half.
This spring, Sweet Auburn Works will partner with the Fourth Avenue Historic District in Birmingham, Alabama, and the Network for Developing Conscious Communities to present a webinar series highlighting the movement to preserve Black landmarks and historic districts.
The first Black-owned hospital in Kansas City, Wheatley-Provident Hospital, was the only space in the city where Black doctors and nurses could practice and receive clinical training. It was where the Black community went for health care from 1918 to 1972. It has been neglected for over 45 years.
Opened in 1903 by Dr. John Edward Perry, a Black doctor from Texas, the hospital opened in 1918 on the western edge of the city’s predominantly Black neighborhood in a former Catholic boys’ school.
In 1972, Wheatley-Provident closed down and its patients were moved to the newly built Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital, leaving the hospital vacant. It briefly served as a haunted house, known as The Asylum in the 1980s and Dr. Deadly’s Haunted Hospital in the 1990s. In 2012, it was placed on a dangerous buildings list after having been set on fire twice in one day. In 2018, it was saved from destruction after it was purchased by a development group with plans to renovate it into offices.
The developer told NPR’s KCUR 89.3 that the planned redevelopment is fully backed by the city and it also may be eligible for financial help from the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation.
“The Trust has established a special fund to invest in African-American resources,” Erika Brice of Rector Development Ventures told the NPR station.
But preserving the culture of a people does not only apply to the physical spaces they inhabited. It also includes preserving its tortured past—even if that means taking a deep dive.
Diving With a Purpose (DWP) was founded in 2003 by divers Ken Stewart and Brenda Lanzendorf. It is a volunteer underwater archaeology program that started with members of the National Association of Black Scuba Divers (NABS) and the National Park Service (NPS) in Biscayne National Park.
DWP trains experienced divers, including youth, to become underwater archaeology advocates on submerged heritage preservation and conservation projects worldwide, focusing on the African Diaspora. That means finding the remains of the ships along the Middle Passage that carried Africans into slavery.
The Guerrero was a ship that wrecked on a reef in the Florida Keys in 1827 after a battle with a British warship trying to enforce anti-slave trade laws. Of the 561 enslaved Africans on board, 41 drowned.
”The stories that we tell are important and, more importantly, the untold stories. These stories, the Guerrero, and then many other ships as we got more involved in the search for these ships, became exciting, because most people haven't heard the story, including myself,” Jay Haigler, a member of DWP, tells PBS.
After centuries of systemic oppression and so many efforts, including the current drive to erase the history of Black Americans in classrooms across the nation, the legacies and culture remain. In the buildings, the artifacts, in the oral histories, and even under the ocean, despite the immense attempts to whitewash history, Black Americans stand strong and the preservation of their spaces defies all misinformation about their story.