In February 2022, a group of Black preservation advocates in the Philadelphia area launched a fundraising campaign to save the Henry Ossawa Tanner House in the city’s Strawberry Mansion neighborhood. Despite its status as a National Historic Landmark, the 1872 rowhouse that bears the name of the preeminent Black painter who once called it home had been declared unsafe by the city. It was in danger of immediate collapse and at risk of being demolished.

The grassroots efforts by this group, called the Friends of the Tanner House, to save the historic home were buoyed by the property’s inclusion in the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s 2023 list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places. Along with the city’s Chinatown, the Tanner House was one of two Philadelphia sites included in the list, and it was one of two Black artist homes that were featured, alongside the L.V. Hull Home and Studio in Kosciusko, Mississippi.

“Adding the ‘11 Most’ designation really allowed folks nationwide to be aware of this project,” says Christopher R. Rogers, Ph.D., a founding member of and co-coordinator at Friends of the Tanner House, “and to match this hyperlocal grassroots organizing we were doing in the community with a national call around, ‘How can we place Black heritage? What can these places become? How are they sustained over time?’”

“We’re coming alongside people who are already working, giving them a national platform,” adds Jennifer Sandy, senior director of preservation programs at the National Trust. “The Friends of the Tanner House and community members have done amazing work recognizing the story and starting to tell the story more broadly.”

In the summer of 2023, Friends of the Tanner House also received a $100,000 grant from the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund to proceed with emergency repairs to stabilize the house. The grant, which highlighted the impact of systemic racism and related redlining and gentrification on majority-Black neighborhoods like Strawberry Mansion, was “a way of also supporting the community itself by bringing visibility to the urgent and critical need to preserve its rich history,” said Lawana Holland-Moore, director of the Action Fund’s Fellowships and Interpretive Strategies program.

A Long and Distinguished History

The Henry Ossawa Tanner House at 2908 W Diamond St. in North Central Philadelphia was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976. A marker outside the home describes the accomplishments of Henry Ossawa Tanner, a gifted painter who in the late 19th and early 20th centuries became one of the first Black visual artists to attain international recognition.

Tanner spent much of his life in Paris and was known largely for his religious works, such as his 1898 painting “The Annunciation,” on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Another of his prominent works, the 1893 painting “The Banjo Lesson” (now part of the collection at Hampton University Museum in Virginia) features an elderly Black man teaching a young boy how to play the West African-derived instrument.

Tanner, however, was hardly the only notable member of the family. His father, Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner, who purchased the house in 1872, was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and served at the Christian Recorder, an influential, national Black-owned newspaper. Henry Ossawa Tanner’s mother, Sarah Elizabeth Tanner, had been enslaved at birth and self-emancipated as a child with assistance from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.

Tanner’s sister Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson, graduated with honors from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, becoming a pioneering female physician in the country. She became the first woman of any race to practice medicine in the state of Alabama when none other than Booker T. Washington asked her to help establish and teach at the nursing school at Tuskegee Institute. Tanner’s niece, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in economics and one of the first to receive any doctoral degree, was born in the house in 1898. Alexander was also the first national president of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc..

The Tanner House was therefore an important gathering place for Black intellectual life in Philadelphia well into the 20th century. That history of excellence made the property a perfect candidate for financial support from the Action Fund. “We can talk about the stories of the Tanners, but there’s really something about being in this tangible place where this accomplished family was,” said Holland-Moore.

The Future of the Tanner House

Rogers first learned about the precarious conditions of the Tanner House from an article by reporter Valerie Russ that ran in a local newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, in late 2021. At the time, Rogers was the public programs coordinator at the Paul Robeson Museum & Home, another historic Black home in Philadelphia that received an Action Fund Grant in 2020.

Friends of the Tanner House, which has also received support from the City of Philadelphia, and operates in fiduciary partnership with the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, is currently in the process of acquiring the house from the current owner, Dr. Michael Thornton, who inherited the property from his father and is actively working to clear the property’s title so that it can be transferred to the nonprofit.

The pace of the title clearance process and the need for additional structural repairs means that it will be a few years before the Tanner House is ready to open to the public. In the meantime, Friends of the Tanner House has undertaken what it calls a “Community Visioning Process” to solicit input from Strawberry Mansion residents about how the Tanner House can best support the needs of the community.