What’s it Like to Spend Your Summer with the Action Fund?
This summer, five interns from the undergraduate to doctoral levels joined the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation to support two multi-media design research projects.
For the Action Fund’s Preserving Black Churches program, interns Maggie Fleming, Angelo Suyosa Tarzona, and Tyler White combed through hundreds of grantee applications to construct an ArcGIS StoryMap of historically Black churches across the United States. This project not only revealed the broad geographic and architectural diversity of these sites, but the unique histories they hold dating from the 19th century to the present.
Interns Sallishah Ali and Nayeli Rey worked with the Action Fund’s Conserving Black Modernism program on case-study research, helping to define and categorize Black Modernist architecture, and delve into the stories of the architects who pioneered this innovative and socially-conscious design approach.
Keep reading to learn more about their experiences, and what they plan to do next now that back-to-school season has arrived.
Mapping Historically Black Churches
Maggie Fleming, Smith College
This summer, I contributed to a portion of the Action Fund’s work to map the Preserving Black Churches (PBC) program sites. Throughout my experience, I worked on various aspects of the project: from cleaning and verifying data; to understanding crowdsourcing methods; to researching historical sites; to writing about the deep histories of Black churches across the nation. My individual contributions created the base narrative for our final StoryMap which introduces the project and the Action Fund’s goals and details the cultural importance and impact of the Black Church in the United States.
In the future, I hope to continue learning and working to uncover the deep histories of the Black American experience. After undergraduate school, I hope to attend law school with aspirations of becoming a civil rights attorney and continuing the fight to protect those hurt by unjust systems. My internship with the Action Fund allowed me to gain experience working with communities and churches to preserve important cultural spaces for Black Americans and elevate personal histories.
I am extremely grateful to have gotten the opportunity to learn from and work with the mapping team and other National Trust colleagues.
Angelo Suyosa Tarzona, Georgia Institute of Technology
My experience with the mapping project has been deeply meaningful, connecting both my academic path and personal motivations. I was first drawn to preservation work during my undergraduate studies, when I conducted a ground-penetrating radar survey of unmarked burials at Mt. Tabor AME Church in Mt. Holly Springs, Pennsylvania. That experience sparked my commitment to using geospatial tools to help communities preserve their history.
I have carried this commitment into my PhD research, where I work with archival airborne radar data from Antarctica to recover and preserve historical scientific records for modern use. The Action Fund’s mapping project felt like a natural extension of that work, using geospatial techniques not only to process data, but also to honor the histories behind the data. Looking ahead, I hope to continue working at the intersection of geophysics, geospatial data, and preservation.
The Action Fund’s mapping project reminded me that mapping is not just about information, but safeguarding stories and histories for the future.
Tyler White, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Spatializing black history through the institution of the Church documents the various and interconnected ways that Black communities forged innovative material cultures and experimented with epistemic knowledge.
From the PBC grantee applications, we were able to establish core thematic connections that served as their own chronology of Black progress: Churches associated with the Underground Railroad; All Black Towns; Descendant Communities; Black architects and builders; places of Black American education; places of protest and activism during the Civil Rights Movement; and key women’s leadership. Each of these themes became a layered part of the narrative map of the PBC program.
Even more inspiring, these historic sites are not relics of a forgotten past but living heritage where new community members are charting their own commitment to service provision and spiritual leadership. Whether it is churches with a lifespan of 150 years, or those right at the “historic” designation cutoff of 50 years, these structures morph and adapt to meet the needs of their communities.
In the end, the StoryMap we built moved fluidly in and out of each of these moments, highlighting these places, and using multimedia documentation of major historic events in these churches to bring breath to this cartography. I am generationally indebted and thankful to the work of mutual aid, solidarity, and collective action that has sustained these institutions to this day.
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Conserving Black Modernism
Sallishah Ali, University of Pennsylvania
I am a recent graduate of the Master of History Preservation Program at the University of Pennsylvania and a recipient of the National Trust’s Mildred Colodny Scholarship. I was drawn to the Conserving Black Modernism (CBM) internship because it was an opportunity to research the period of architectural fascination that is the Modern movement, and to bring awareness to Black architects, communities, and histories that are not included in the story of Modernism.
Along with my co-intern Nayeli, we worked collaboratively on research, with each of us focusing on our area of expertise. We delved deeper into the histories of the past and CBM grant recipients and why those histories are important to the definition of Black Modernism.
For my research, I focused on the design context of CBM case studies, which included the usage of the spaces as well as the achievements of the architects. I translated my findings into a working timeline to draw correlations between the different legacies that existed for black architects.
Following the completion of my degree, I will return to New York to work on the restoration of historic buildings and pursue my licensure. One of my reasons for returning to graduate school to study historic preservation was to learn about all the facets of historic preservation so that I could be the best advocate for a historic building.
Nayeli Rey, Northwestern University
I am a senior at Northwestern University studying Cognitive Science and Black Studies, and I am also a Posse Scholar. I was drawn to the Action Fund at the National Trust not only because of its relationship with the Posse Foundation but also because I wanted the chance to immerse myself in historic preservation work and understand how it connects to questions of culture and social history.
Since I am deeply passionate about Black Studies, I was especially looking for an internship that spoke to my academic and personal interests. I thought it was exciting to contribute to work that is still evolving, being defined, and expanding, especially in ways that highlight the role of Black communities, architects, and institutions in shaping the built environment.
Through this internship, I was able to research the social conditions relevant to CBM grantee sites, conduct analyses of their physical locations and surrounding racial demographics, and bring a social science lens to questions of architecture and preservation. In doing so, I uncovered connections to redlining, the significance of naming practices, and the ways architects acted as agents of social change, which gave me a deeper appreciation of how Black Modernism reflects both cultural expression and community resilience.
