Churches, Seminaries Among US Cultural Sites Awarded Funds to Preserve Black History

The action fund said it hopes to reaffirm the importance of promoting Black history through funding the projects. It also said it worries proposed federal budget cuts to national preservation programs will “destabilize the infrastructure that helps communities preserve and interpret their stories — particularly those that have long been excluded from dominant historical narratives.”

Three faith-related projects are receiving funding through the Conserving Black Modernism program, now in its third cohort. The program promotes the work of underrecognized 20th-century African American architects and designers and celebrates their contributions to the modernist movement.

The Founder’s Church of Religious Science in Los Angeles, founded by New Thought teacher Ernest Holmes, will receive $150,000 to finance its accessibility and interpretation plans. The church’s reinforced concrete building was designed by Paul R. Williams, the first Black member of the American Institute of Architects, in 1960.

First Church of Deliverance, a nondenominational Black church in Chicago, will receive $150,000 to fund its first preservation plans, which will include renovations to its sanctuary, community center, day care and children’s church. Its building, a repurposed hat factory covered in glazed terracotta tiles, was redesigned in 1939 by Walter T. Bailey, Illinois’ first licensed Black architect.

And the Interdenominational Theological Center, a Christian Africentric ecumenical theological seminary campus in Atlanta, will receive $150,000 for an audit of its administration building’s structures, the oldest on the campus. The center is also using the money to document the influence of the center’s architect, Edward C. Miller, the first Black architect in the state of Georgia, who completed the building in 1961.

The action fund also announced that it invested $5.2 million with the Mellon Foundation as part of a Descendant and Family Stewardship program to support descendant- and family-led organizations in managing their historic places.