Preserve or let go: Blacks debate fate of their landmarks

Here in Turin, population 300, the schoolhouse restoration is playing out with down-home drama and small-town suspicions about the town's motives for preserving the structure, says Mr. Penson.

"I think it brings up a lot of [bad] memories," acknowledges Mayor Allen Smith.

Since states and the federal government launched an effort in the late 1970s to preserve key landmarks, attention has been devoted mostly to rescuing homes of great writers and renovating rotting Queen Annes. To be sure, black urban centers such as Macon, Ga., became models of how historical renovation could spur revitalization.

But interest in preservation barely penetrated rural reaches. Cabins of emancipated slaves, popular juke joints, and baptism ponds were, if not ignored, overlooked because of a lack of historical record about such sites.

"What looks to me like an old shack with an aluminum roof and moss all over it used to be the juke joint where budding bluesmen got their start," says Mr. Bartley at Clemson. "Too often, we don't understand the significance of these places."

But attitudes are changing. The first national African-American preservation conference met in Memphis last summer, and last week the South Carolina African-American Heritage Commission held its first annual conference, headlined by Rep. James Clyburn (D).

The number of recognized black buildings and landmarks in South Carolina has grown to 300, from a few dozen designations in 1992. In Georgia, a network of volunteer preservationists has gone from 350 to 2,200 in the past six years. Last year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation handed out four $2,500 grants from a new African-American preservation fund – its first such disbursements.

Other works in progress to preserve black landmarks include the following:

• An effort in Florida to bring back American Beach, a neglected patch of coast that was once a haven for wealthy blacks.

• A new grant program in South Carolina's Richland County to save African-American landmarks, including the Harriet Barber House, a 200-year-old cabin built by freed slaves.

• An educational program in Rock Hill, S.C., in which children go to a renovated, but very rustic, schoolhouse and "work" as sharecroppers.

• Federal funding to preserve and attract tourists to the Gullah-Geechee Heritage Corridor, former rice plantations in South Carolina and Georgia where African slaves first worked in North America.

"You're seeing a kind of catalytic conversion in African-American communities that have been reluctant to look at [their historic] resources and to deal with challenging issues," says Jeffrey Harris, director for diversity at the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington. "People are beginning to recognize the loss."

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