Bob Graham Center for Public Service

Without a thorough reckoning with our country’s complex and challenging history, especially when it comes to race, we will not be able to overcome intolerance, injustice, and inequality. That is why, in November 2017, the National Trust for Historic Preservation launched its African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a $25 million campaign to reconstruct a true national identity that reflects America’s diversity. Preserving this tapestry of America’s shared culture, pride and heritage is an act of racial justice and should be viewed as a civil right.

This event is part of the Center for Humanities and the Public Sphere’s multi-year speaker series “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” which responds to current challenges to rational public debate. Following Part II of the series in 2020-2021 entitled “Data & Democracy,” and Part I in 2019-2020 “Race and the Promise of Participation,” the 2021-22 speakers series turns to the question of transforming institutions in public life. For more information about the series, visit this link.

BRENT LEGGS is the founding executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund – a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the most extensive preservation campaign in U.S. History on behalf of historic African American places. Through the Action Fund, he leads a broad community of leaders and activists in honor of the clarion that preserving African American cultural sites is fundamental to understanding the American story. Leggs is a Harvard University Loeb Fellow, author of Preserving African American Historic Places, and the 2018 recipient of the Robert G. Stanton National Preservation Award. His efforts to protect the A.G. Gaston Motel, Madam C.J. Walker estate, John and Alice Coltrane and Nina Simone residences, and Joe Frazier’s Gym is exemplary of his successful campaigns to preserve many cultural monuments throughout the U.S. Leggs is also an Adjunct Associate Professor and Senior Advisor to the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

UF Series Funders and Co-Sponsors:
Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment); College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; UF Research; African American Studies Program; Bob Graham Center for Public Service; Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship; Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research; Cotton Club Museum and Cultural Center; Department of Biology; Department of Classics; Department of History; Department of Political Science; Department of Urban and Regional Planning; George A. Smathers Library; Levin College of Law; One Health Center of Excellence