{"id":7025,"date":"2022-12-15T14:14:09","date_gmt":"2022-12-15T14:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/?p=7025"},"modified":"2022-12-15T14:14:09","modified_gmt":"2022-12-15T14:14:09","slug":"tuskegee-penn-partnership-advances-black-preservation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/2022\/12\/15\/tuskegee-penn-partnership-advances-black-preservation\/","title":{"rendered":"Tuskegee-Penn Partnership Advances Black Preservation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Special to The Truth<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Not long after Booker T. Washington became the founding principal of
\nTuskegee University, on July 4, 1881, he moved the campus from a one-room
\nschoolhouse to a 100-acre former plantation in Tuskegee, Alabama. In the
\nyears that followed, Washington worked with the Black architect Robert
\nRobinson Taylor to build out the core buildings of the campus. Far from a
\nsimple facilities expansion, the growth of the campus mirrored the
\ndevelopment of the curriculum. The University\u2019s first architecture
\nstudents learned to design and build structures by building the campus
\nitself.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor us, when you walk on our campus, you\u2019re actually walking into an
\neducational curriculum,\u201d says Kwesi Daniels, department head and
\nassociate professor of architecture at The Robert R. Taylor School of
\nArchitecture and Construction Science at Tuskegee University.
\n\u201cYou\u2019re not sitting inside a building to learn. The learning starts the
\nminute you get here.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than a century later, that approach continues. Tuskegee architecture
\nstudents today are studying the discipline of historic preservation through
\nexplorations of buildings on and near the historic HBCU campus, in part
\nthrough a collaboration with the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation
\nat the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.
\nTeaching collaborations between Penn and Tuskegee go back to a partnership
\nestablished in 2019, when Tuskegee created a minor in historic
\npreservation, and the launch of the Center for the Preservation of Civil
\nRights Sites (CPCRS) at Penn the following year. Tuskegee now offers
\ntwo courses in preservation, which have featured a series of guest speakers
\nfrom Weitzman. And it\u2019s in the early stages of developing an
\nundergraduate major in preservation\u2014potentially the first such program at
\nan HBCU.<\/p>\n

\u201cPenn is able to bring people to the table that have been doing it for 30
\nor 40 years,\u201d Daniels says. \u201cThe depth of knowledge they have\u2014it
\nallows us to understand how deep we need to go to build our program.\u201d<\/p>\n

Randy Mason, professor of historic preservation at Weitzman and faculty
\ndirector at CPCRS, says Penn\u2019s budding partnership with Tuskegee is part
\nof a broader effort to bring more diverse professionals into the
\npreservation field, and to correct a legacy of neglect for Black spaces and
\ncommunities. Part of that push has involved supporting the work of
\nBlack-led organizations through the CPCRS. Working with Black-led
\ninstitutions like Tuskegee advances those goals.<\/p>\n

\u201cHBCUs have an outsized influence as crucibles of Black culture,
\ncreativity and scholarship,\u201d Mason says. \u201cThe [Tuskegee] campus itself
\nis this incredible artifact that testifies to architecture and building,
\nand to preservation as a way of being good stewards of what you build.\u201d<\/p>\n

For students, the growing preservation curriculum at Tuskegee opens up new
\nprofessional possibilities. Jordan Lamar, a fourth-year architecture
\nstudent, enrolled at Tuskegee with the intention of building a career in
\nreal estate development. At the urging of Daniels, he attended a workshop
\non historic window restoration hosted by the HOPE Crew, an initiative
\nof the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which sparked an interest
\nin hands-on preservation work. In his sophomore year, Lamar enrolled in the
\nfirst of a two-part preservation course at Tuskegee, where he met Mason and
\nother scholars from Penn and around the country. As part of that course, he
\nworked on a historic structures report for the John H. Drakeford House.
\nWhile there wasn\u2019t much hands-on work because of the pandemic, Lamar says
\nit was eye-opening to realize that a report like that wasn\u2019t just
\npaperwork, but involved things like laser scanning and drones.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat interested me is the different paths you can take with historic
\npreservation,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Lamar later got a fellowship with the HOPE Crew. He says he\u2019s still
\nplanning to build a career in real estate, but with a focus on restoring
\nhistoric buildings.<\/p>\n

\u201cI definitely didn\u2019t expect to be doing any of this, at least to this
\nextent,\u201d he says. \u201cEvery time I get into something new [in
\npreservation] or find out something, it\u2019s shocking, because I didn\u2019t
\nknow it could go this deep.\u201d<\/p>\n

Daniels says that when it comes to preserving Black history, Tuskegee has
\n\u201ca narrative no one else has.\u201d The school is within five hours of every
\nmajor Civil Rights site in the country, and within 30 minutes of many of
\nthe most significant sites, he says. It\u2019s also embedded in a rural place.
\nIn that way, it\u2019s an ideal place for studying how to preserve cultural
\nartifacts in communities all over the world that haven\u2019t benefited from
\ntraditional approaches to historic preservation. All of those things,
\ncombined with the opportunities for hands-on work, are a draw for potential
\npreservation students, Daniels says. It\u2019s a natural extension of the work
\nthe school has already done.<\/p>\n

\u201cStudents love it when they get into it, but initially these are all
\nstudents who come to Tuskegee to study architecture. There\u2019s a case that
\nhas to be made to them that preservation is architecture,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

The collaboration between the universities has given Penn graduate students
\nnew opportunities, too. Over the summer, Calvin Nguyen, a second-year
\nMaster of Historic Preservation student at Penn, traveled to Alabama as an
\nintern with the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites. Working
\nwith a group of preservationists, including recent Tuskegee graduates,
\nNguyen contributed to site assessments for the First Baptist Church
\n(Brick-a-Day) in Montgomery, a hub of Civil Rights organizing, and the
\nTrinity Lutheran Church Parsonage, which was repeatedly bombed because
\nof its leader\u2019s involvement in the Civil Rights movement. More than an
\nexercise in recording the conditions of the structures, Nguyen says, the
\nproject was concerned with finding ways for preservation to contribute to
\nthe broader uplift of disinvested parts of the city.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was about representing public history and Civil Rights history but
\nalso sustainable heritage conservation,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was more than
\njust saving the building. We were thinking about how the building can be
\nused by the community.\u201d<\/p>\n

For much of its history, the preservation discipline has \u201cprioritized the
\nstories and places associated with a privileged few,\u201d says Brent Leggs, an adjunct associate professor of historic preservation at the
\nWeitzman School and executive director of the African American Cultural
\nHeritage Action Fund, a program of the National Trust. Black and brown
\ncommunities often haven\u2019t had the resources to \u201cinsure their permanence
\nand preservation,\u201d he says, and the field of practitioners hasn\u2019t
\nreflected the diversity of the country. On one hand, collaborations like
\nthe one between Penn and Tuskegee can help bring new professionals of color
\ninto the field of preservation. On another, they can contribute to the
\npreservation of invaluable cultural artifacts on the campuses of HBCUs like
\nTuskegee.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe big opportunity is to create a blueprint at Tuskegee that can be
\nreplicated at the other six HBCUs with schools of design,\u201d Leggs says.
\n\u201cWe, at Penn, are thrilled about this potential and our collaboration
\nwith Tuskegee.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Special to The Truth Not long after Booker T. Washington became the founding principal of Tuskegee University, on July 4, 1881, he moved the campus from a one-room schoolhouse to a 100-acre former plantation in Tuskegee, Alabama. In the years that followed, Washington worked with the Black architect Robert Robinson Taylor to build out the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"wf_post_folders":[152],"class_list":["post-7025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7025"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7026,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7025\/revisions\/7026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7025"},{"taxonomy":"wf_post_folders","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wf_post_folders?post=7025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}