Historic Black churches receive $4M in preservation grants

NEW YORK (AP) — Administrators of a trust fund established to preserve historic Black churches in the United States on Friday revealed a list of houses of worship receiving $4 million in financial grants.

The list of 35 grantees includes 16th Street Baptist Church Inc. in Birmingham, Alabama, where crucial civil rights organizing meetings were held during Jim Crow segregation in the 1960s and where four Black girls were killed after a bombing by members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1963.

Black churches in nearly every region of the U.S. are among the fund’s first round of recipients receiving grants ranging from $50,000 to $200,000.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund launched its “Preserving Black Churches” program in 2021 to help support ongoing or planned restoration work in historic congregations that are caretakers of cultural artifacts and bear monumental legacies. Some church renovations were imperiled or severely postponed three years ago after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, which reduced the capacity of many houses of worship to serve the public at an unprecedented time of need.

“Leaving an indelible imprint on our society, historic Black churches hold an endearing legacy of community, spirituality and freedom that continues to span generations,” said Brent Leggs, the fund’s executive director, who is also senior vice president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The Rev. Monica Marshall couldn’t agree with that sentiment more. She was a teenager in the 1970s when she became a member of Varick Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. It is the oldest continuous Black congregation in the borough and has been...