American brilliance is often rooted within Black communities, and our communities hold stories more robust than our history books typically share to introduce millions of children to U.S. history. This is why I work in historic preservation. Every day I have an opportunity to move beyond the textbooks into real world examples of freedom, ingenuity, and brilliance.
Black history is frequently relegated to the margins of the national conversation. Most of our history isn’t covered in textbooks; and historical information about Black people is often locked into niche literature. But there’s something about visual representations of our history that make it feel more alive; and Black history has always been a living, breathing thing for me.
As a native of Waco, Texas, I enjoy several aspects of the traditional Black, southern experience–family, Black music, working with my hands, catfish, dominoes. It is, perhaps, the richness of these experiences that moves me as a historic preservationist. They have the same capacity for storytelling and facilitating community building.
All of our history is a counternarrative to the story of American exceptionalism. Expanding this narrative helps in better understanding the humanity of Black people through our lived experiences from the stories we tell, to the places we built.
With over a decade of preservation work under my belt, I have traveled the country conducting research and working hands-on at historic sites. As the Director of Resource Management for the National Park Foundation, I now administer grants for this work and lead the strategy for engaging African American and Latinx communities in our national parks.
My work to preserve Hinchliffe Stadium is evidence of this. The project reconnected over 700 people with the historic Negro League baseball stadium in Paterson, New Jersey. While the city had largely written off and ignored its young people of color, I engaged them. They painted over graffiti and learned about the history of the Negro Leagues and the stadium itself. The project didn’t just allow them to embrace the history that many had forgotten. It allowed them to be a part of history, too. Not only did Hinchcliffe Stadium become a historic landmark at the conclusion of the project, but it is also the only Negro League stadium in the U.S. national park system.
This level of community engagement isn’t a one-off for me. In my five years as the Founding Director of HOPE Crew, the largest national effort to engage young and diverse people in historic preservation, I trained and paid 750 young people and veterans in traditional trades, engaged over 3500 volunteers, and completed over 165 preservation construction projects. The work provided a template for local, state, and national groups looking to engage these demographics in ways that have long-term impacts on the communities and participants.
It’s this kind of work that takes history from the abstract to the tangible. Creating access in preservation doesn’t just provide extra hands. It also allows communities to see themselves and their roots reflected in the mainstream. And when it comes to expanding and building upon our knowledge of our history, what better time is there than now?
Join me on this journey to highlight and uncover more of our history and contributions. We’ll talk traditions, we’ll talk preservation, we’ll talk music, but most of all, we’ll talk community.