A Trailblazing Campaign to Celebrate and Conserve Black Modernism
The Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts is home to Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, perhaps the best-known work of folk art in the country. But another landmark there is awaiting recognition. The handsome circa 1970 Watts Happening Cultural Center was once a community hub for artists, writers, musicians, and political organizers. Now the two-story building, designed by the Black architects Robert Kennard and Arthur Silvers, is closed to the public. Brent Leggs, a senior vice president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, would like to see it thrive again—and he is working to make that happen.
In fall of 2022, the center became one of eight grant recipients from the new Conserving Black Modernism program, part of the trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. Focused on protecting and celebrating the contributions of African American architects to the modernist movement, the initiative is backed by a $3.1 million gift from the Getty Foundation, the trust’s partner in the program. Joan Weinstein, the foundation’s director, says the goal is to identify buildings “that speak to the experiences of Black communities and shed light on the talents
and resilience of Black architects in 20th-century America.”
The project began when executives at the Getty, which has made preserving modernist architecture a priority, decided to do more to recognize the contributions of minorities within that movement. For advice, they reached out to Mabel O. Wilson, a Columbia University professor of architecture and African American studies. She suggested they speak to Leggs, executive director of the trust’s African American Cultural Action Fund. In its first six years, that program has raised more than $95 million, thus far dedicating $20 million to support 242 sites, including the estate of Madam C. J. Walker in Irvington, New York, and Nina Simone’s birthplace in Tryon, North Carolina.
“At the National Trust we believe the design contributions of African Americans have been underappreciated,” says Leggs. Now based in Washington, DC, he grew up in Paducah, Kentucky. After receiving a BA and an MBA at the University of Kentucky, he was “soul-searching” when a 15-minute conversation with the director of the historic preservation department, he says, “changed my life.” Soon after, he became the first African American to enroll in that program, later working at the Kentucky Heritage Council before joining the trust in 2005. In the years since, he has built a national network of preservationists fighting to save landmarks of African American history.
On a recent visit to Watts Happening Cultural Center, Leggs recalls, “I was excited to see that the building is highly visible and has not been significantly altered.” The coffeehouse, he notes, is still decorated with memorabilia redolent of Black culture. Its $150,000 Conserving Black Modernism grant will be used to create a plan not just for restoring the building but for again making it, Leggs says, “a beloved resource and community asset.”
Carson City Hall, some 10 miles south of Watts, is another 2023 grantee selected by Leggs, the trust’s Action Fund, and his external jury of nine architects, historians, and preservationists. The early 1970s building exemplifies late-modernist public architecture, California-style, with nautical motifs incorporated into its bright-white, vaguely Brutalist exterior. This time, the lead architect was Kennard and his firm, the Kennard Design Group. (Born in LA in 1920, he completed a number of important local buildings, among them parts of Los Angeles International Airport and the entrance to the Hollywood Bowl.) Carson’s grant will help create a framework for both restoring the building and for letting the world know about Kennard’s role.
Four other Conserving Black Modernism grants went to churches, which, as Leggs points out, were among the first institutions created by African Americans in this country. They include the First Baptist Church-West in Charlotte, North Carolina, designed by Harvey Gantt, who was also the city’s first Black mayor. Another grantee is Jenkins Hall at Morgan State University in Baltimore, designed by Louis Edwin Fry, the first African American to get a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard. Morgan State is one of a number of HBCUs that gave Black architects a chance to design what Leggs calls “intentional monuments, buildings that are stately and permanent,” when nobody else would. (Thanks to another trust program, the HBCU Cultural Heritage Stewardship Initiative, six schools received nearly $700,000 last year to preserve that legacy.)
The city of Wichita, Kansas, meanwhile, received a grant for a public swimming pool designed by and recently renamed for Charles McAfee, who has served as president of the National Organization of Minority Architects. McAfee, a Wichita native, recalls that “McAdams Park was always very important to me, as it was the only park Black people could attend when I was growing up.” So when he got the chance to build a pool there in the late 1960s, he notes, “I used materials that were going to last forever.”
But nothing lasts forever, which is where Leggs comes in. His goal? Not just to physically restore the pool and its distinctive modular shade structures, but to make its construction, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, part of the American story. Cheryl McAfee, Charles’s daughter and the first African American woman to receive an architecture license in the state of Kansas, says: “Black contributions don’t just need to exist—they need to be elevated.”
This story appears in AD’s February 2024 issue. Never miss an issue when you subscribe to AD.
All site below are 2023 grant recipients from the National Trust For Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, which includes the Conserving Black Modernism initiative, a partnership with the Getty Foundation.
Photo: André Jones1/12Carson City Hall in Carson, California.
Photo: Corey Johnson2/12Second Baptist Church of Detroit’s Education Building.
Photo: United Order of Tents Eastern District3/12United Order of Tents, Eastern District #3 in Brooklyn.
Photo: Troy Pumphrey Jr.4/12Morgan State University’s Jenkins Hall in Baltimore.
Photo: Tema Nicole Stauffer5/12First Baptist Church-West in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Photo: Morris College6/12Morris College in Sumter, South Carolina.
Photo: Tema Nicole Stauffer.7/12Zion Baptist Church in Philadelphia.
Photo: Nicole Bissey8/12Charles McAfee swimming pool and poolhouse in Wichita, Kansas.
Photo: Jennifer Tarango9/12Lincoln Theater in Los Angeles.
Photo: Elon Schoenholz10/12Watts Happening Cultural Center in L.A.
Photo: Tema Nicole Stauffer11/12Fourth Baptist Church’s Educational wing in Richmond, Virginia.
Photo: Hampton University12/12Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia.
