What’s being done to preserve Black history in the DC area
You can learn about history through books, videos or museums, but there is something significant about visiting the place where it happened.
“There’s a truthfulness when you go to these spaces that you can only experience when you’re there,” said Phillip Howard, director of the Legacy Places Initiative at the Conservation Fund. “I think there’s value in being able to touch history and being able to be in a space where history happens.”
Howard works specifically on preserving iconic civil rights sites across the country. The Conservation Fund helped protect Maryland’s historic Black beaches, where artists such as Duke Ellington, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin performed like at the famed Carr’s Beach.
The Elktonia-Carr’s Beach Heritage Park honors that cultural and musical history. The group has also protected land on Maryland’s Eastern Shore connected to Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad.
“I get to work in spaces and work to preserve spaces that are important and tell important stories in American history,” he said. “If there is properties or spaces in Maryland, Virginia, D.C., that are in need of protection, that’s a conversation that we would love to have.”
On Feb. 19, the Conservation Fund is teaming up with the Washington Association of Black Journalists for an event called “Protecting Legacy Places: A Black History Month Conversation.” It will be held from 6-8 p.m. at the Thurgood Marshall Center for Service and Heritage in Northwest D.C.
“This is an opportunity to raise those voices, uplift those spaces, really get the word out that this work is happening and that it needs to be bigger,” Howard said. “If we don’t do something, those spaces are going to be lost.”
The special guest at the event is Jannette Howard-Moore. She was 15 years old when she marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965 with her family, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge by police. She will talk about being part of a pivotal moment in history.
Howard said it’s a unique opportunity to hear directly from a Civil Rights foot soldier, while celebrating and honoring her.
“Hear from a person who was actually there at a moment that changed the world,” Howard said, calling it a “beautiful story of family, of sacrifice, love, strength, courage, of bravery.”
It’s the first time the Conservation Fund is partnering with the Washington Association of Black Journalists for this event, but Howard hopes it’s not the last.
“We’re all just trying to make sure that this history is not lost,” he said.