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Park Service Distributes $7.75 Million In Grants To Preserve African American History

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Published Date

January 16, 2017

A grant will help restore the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, site of the Emmett Till murder trial, in Mississippi/Mississippi Department of Archives and History

On the same day that President Obama designated three national monuments to preserve African American history, the National Park Service announced $7.75 million in funding for projects that highlight sites and stories associated with the Civil Rights Movement and the African American experience.

The grants, announced Thursday, will support 39 preservation and history projects in 21 states and the District of Columbia. Congress appropriated funding for the Park Service’s new African American Civil Rights Grant Program in 2016 through the Historic Preservation Fund. The fund uses revenue from federal oil leases on the Outer Continental Shelf.

“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 in a release.

States, tribes, local governments, and nonprofit organizations, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities, applied for planning, preservation, and research projects for historic sites associated with the Civil Rights Movement and the African American experience. The winning programs include surveys, documentation, interpretation, education, oral histories, planning, and brick-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, the District of Columbia, California, and New York. For the full list, visit this page.

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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