Following a tour of Hinchliffe Stadium in Paterson, New Jersey, National Park Service (NPS) Director Chuck Sams announced the award of $16,247,500 in African American Civil Rights grants. Listed as a National Historic Landmark, Hinchcliffe Stadium is one of a few surviving Negro League baseball stadiums and previously received an African American Civil Rights Grant in 2018. This years’ awards will benefit 44 projects in 15 states and support the continued preservation of sites and history related to the African American struggle for equality.
“The African American Civil Rights grants are critical to helping preserve and interpret a more comprehensive narrative of the people, places, and events associated with African American Civil Rights movement. Sites like Hinchliffe Stadium are rare, and they provide a tangible reminder of this complex history. It was exciting to see the ongoing preservation work at a site that bore witness to more than 20 baseball Hall of Famers in its time and has inspired generations to follow in the footsteps of their heroes,” said NPS Director Chuck Sams.
The African American Civil Rights grants fund a variety of projects from rehabilitation to oral history documentation, in coordination with state, Tribal, local government, and nonprofit partners. The rehabilitation project at Hinchliffe Stadium, was funded in part by this grant program and is expected to reopen to the public later this year.
This years’ grants will support the preservation of the Masjid al-Ansar in Miami, the first mosque in Florida, which records the story of how Black Muslims were instrumental in the civil rights campaigns in the Deep South; the Schooner Clotilda in Mobile, Alabama, the last known ship to import enslaved Africans to the United States; and in Tulsa, Oklahoma, funds will help tell the rich stories of the African American struggle for equality through oral histories of Selma’s foot soldiers and those with personal and family connections to Greenwood Avenue or “Black Wall Street”.
Applications for $21.7 million in FY2022 funding will be available in late summer 2022. Learn more about the African American Civil Rights grant program, and how to apply for future grants on NPS.gov.
Congress appropriated funding for the African American Civil Rights Grant Program in FY2021 through the Historic Preservation Fund (HPF). The HPF uses revenue from federal oil and gas leases on the Outer Continental Shelf, assisting with a broad range of preservation projects without expending tax dollars, with the intent to mitigate the loss of a nonrenewable resource to benefit the preservation of other irreplaceable resources.
Established in 1977, the HPF is authorized at $150 million per year through 2023 and has provided more than $2.7 billion in historic preservation grants to states, Tribes, local governments, and nonprofit organizations. Administered by the NPS, HPF funds may be appropriated by Congress to support a variety of historic preservation projects to help preserve the nation’s cultural resources.
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