Historic preservation has its own history. The first preservation laws in the United States protected the land itself, beginning with Ulysses S. Grant’s designation of Yellowstone National Park, in 1872. But, with the Civil War barely over, battlefields, cemeteries, and burial sites quickly became a priority for preservation. The passage of the Antiquities Act of 1906 gave Presidents the right to create national monuments, and that meant that they could protect both the terrain and the artifacts of indigenous cultures found there.
Ten years later, the creation of the National Park Service (N.P.S.) granted federal lawmakers more power “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and wild life therein.” In subsequent years, the category of “historic objects” broadened, and the N.P.S. got involved in preservation efforts at places like Jamestown; eventually, the agency set national policies for surveying historic and archeological sites, protecting significant properties, and erecting historical markers. In 1949, Harry Truman signed legislation creating the National Trust, and in 1966 Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Historic Preservation Act (N.H.P.A.), which, among other things, established the National Register of Historic Places and the standards of the National Historic Landmarks Program, provided federal funding for the National Trust, and opened preservation offices in all fifty states.
Since its founding, the N.H.P.A. has identified nearly two million locations worthy of preservation and has engaged tens of millions of Americans in the work of doing so. It has helped to generate an estimated two million jobs and more than a hundred billion dollars in private investments. But, because many biases were written into the criteria that determine how sites are selected, those benefits have gone mostly to white Americans. One of the criteria for preservation is architectural significance, meaning that modest buildings like slave cabins and tenement houses were long excluded from consideration. By the time preservationists took notice of structures like those, many lacked the physical integrity to merit protection. Destruction abetted decay, and some historically black neighborhoods were actively erased—deliberately targeted by arson in the years after Reconstruction or displaced in later decades by highway construction, gentrification, and urban renewal.
While state and federal institutions were largely neglecting these areas, communities of color began protecting them on their own. Leggs dates the formal beginning of African-American historic preservation to 1917, when the National Association of Colored Women organized a campaign to pay off the mortgage on Cedar Hill, a Gothic Revival house in Washington, D.C., that had belonged to Frederick Douglass. “Even when it wasn’t called ‘preservation,’ this work was already happening,” Leggs told me on a visit to Cedar Hill in December. The estate sits high above the neighborhood of Anacostia, offering a clear view of the Capitol and the Washington Monument. Leggs, who is forty-seven, bounded up the hundred brick steps from the visitors’ center to the house as though it were his first time there, eager to show me Douglass’s bookshelves and writing desk, his portraits of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the table where he dined with Harriet Tubman and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. “It’s a tangible way of learning about his life, of interacting with all that he accomplished,” Leggs said of the site, which is now managed by the N.P.S. We talked about the dumbbells in Douglass’s bedroom, and how he liked to lift weights; Leggs, who is roughly the same height as the six-foot-tall abolitionist, wondered why the bed was so short (a question apparently asked at historic sites around the world).