National Negro Opera Company House Named One Of The Most Endangered Places In U.S.
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The National Trust for Historic Preservation has announced its annual list of most endangered places. One of the places on the list is the National Negro Opera Company House in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
National Negro Opera Company House Named One Of The Most Endangered Places In U.S.
There's a house that sits on top of a hill in Pittsburgh. The windows are boarded up. The roof is falling in. But once it was a bustling hub of Black art and culture. Today the National Trust for Historic Preservation named it one of 11 of the most endangered historic places in the U.S. because, as NPR's Andrew Limbong reports, it was home to a pioneer of Black opera.
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For more than 27 years, the African American Heritage Preservation Foundation (AAHPF) has advocated to mitigate the threat to endangered African American sites across the United States.
The Founder and President, E. Renee Ingram, was driven to save her family cemetery, the historic Stanton Family Cemetery, in Central Virginia, from a state highway improvement project that would have impacted the site. Working with community and state officials, her family was able to preserve the 49 burials and have the state highway department realign their improvement plans. Ingram's passion reached beyond her family's victory and she embarked on a mission advocating for the preservation of endangered African American sites across the country.
Now AAHPF locates, registers, and shares information for saving as many notable endangered African American Historic Sites as possible. Here's a list of many of those sites.
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WILLIAMSBURG, Va. (AP) — The brick foundation of one of the nation's oldest Black churches has been unearthed at Colonial Williamsburg, a living history museum in Virginia that continues to reckon with its past storytelling about the country's origins and the role of Black Americans.
The First Baptist Church was formed in 1776 by free and enslaved Black people. They initially met secretly in fields and under trees in defiance of laws that prevented African Americans from congregating.
By 1818, the church had its first building in the former colonial capital. The 16-foot by 20-foot (5-meter by 6-meter) structure was destroyed by a tornado in 1834.
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ANNAPOLIS, MD. — Rita Coates fought a feeling of panic as the water gushed toward the graves.
Coates, a longtime member of the Brewer Hill Cemetery Association, watched a torrent of stormwater wash over this historic African American graveyard last year, erasing the engravings on headstones and the legacies they represented.
"All the water was running through washing away the soil from the graves," Coates recalled in a recent interview with E&E News. "There were some grave markers that were so ruined or messed up that you could not tell the names on them."
Brewer Hill Cemetery is the oldest Black graveyard in Annapolis. It contains the remains of more than 7,000 slaves and freed African Americans who were not allowed to be buried alongside white people.
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