The National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and its work at Nina Simone’s Childhood Home in Tryon, North Carolina, were featured in the October issue of Elle Décor magazine in an article titled “It’s a New Dawn at Nina Simone’s Childhood Home.”

The piece explains the site’s importance in Simone’s development as an artist, noting: “Her childhood in North Carolina left its mark, good and bad. She experienced her share of racial injustice growing up—and never forgot it. At the height of the civil rights movement, she composed the era’s most defiant song, “Mississippi Goddam,” in response to the assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the murder of four Black girls in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.”

Read the full article and learn why Brent Leggs, the Fund’s Executive Director, hopes the project will inspire “another thousand artists to become involved in preservation to own and steward, while bringing life back to these kinds of spaces and honoring Black cultural legacies.’”

In September, the National Trust, in partnership with the World Monuments Fund and Preservation North Carolina, secured permanent protection of the home with a preservation easement. Learn more about this critical preservation step.