The National Park Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior has announced a series of grants totaling more than $12 million to preserve key sites relating to African American history. Among the sites receiving grants are the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four girls were killed by a Ku Klux Klan bomb in 1963, the last standing African American officers’ club at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and a baseball stadium used by the Negro National League in Paterson, New Jersey.
Four universities were among those receiving grants.
- Historically Black Howard University in Washington, D.C., received a grant to help fund the preservation of the homes of Mary Church Terrell and Walter E. Washington.
- Georgia State University in Atlanta received a grant for a project to nominate key sites of the civil rights era that should be added to World Heritage List of UNESCO.
- Ball State University in Muncie Indiana, received a grant to develop a virtual museum on the civil rights era in Indiana.
- Historically Black Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina, received funds to help preserve Trustees Hall on its campus.
