If Walls Could Talk
Conserving buildings central to African American history—including the safe havens listed in a guidebook for Black travelers—tells a fuller, more honest American story
Crowds fill the street outside Clifton’s Cafeteria during V-J Day celebrations, August 14, 1945. Security Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library
Body Content
“Carry your Green Book with you. You may need it.”
This message appeared on several covers of Victor H. Green’s Green Book, a vital guide for African Americans driving through Jim Crow–era America.
First published in 1936 as The Negro Motorist Green Book, it listed hotels, restaurants, gas stations, private homes, and other locations where Black travelers could expect safety and dignity at a time when segregation laws and racial violence made even routine road trips risky.
Cover of the 1947 Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide that helped Black travelers navigate segregated America. From The New York Public Library
A page from The Negro Motorist Green Book featuring Los Angeles recommendations. From The New York Public Library
Los Angeles was one of its most active hubs. Over the publication’s 31‑year run, the city was home to an estimated 224 listed sites, from familiar eateries like Clifton’s Cafeteria, to nightlife destinations such as Jack’s Basket Room, to cultural anchors like the Dunbar Hotel. Yet today just 56 of the LA locations still stand—survivors of racially targeted government redevelopment and freeway construction, disinvestment, and neglect—conserved in part through the efforts of local historical societies and organizations like the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
These losses underscore why conserving cultural heritage matters. Conserved sites tied to African American history help tell a fuller, more honest American story. Why, then, do so many sites central to Black built heritage remain overlooked, their stories under-told and preservation uncertain? Only about 3 percent of sites on the National Register of Historic Places were designated for their importance to Black history, despite the abundance of Black heritage sites nationwide.
Bill Sampson (left) performs with a band at Jack’s Basket Room, the famed South Central after-hours jazz club known as “the place where everyone comes to play.” Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge
Exterior of the Dunbar Hotel, the historic Black-owned landmark that anchored Central Avenue’s 1930s–’40s jazz scene and was later restored as part of the Dunbar Village redevelopment. Cbl62, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Marginalized communities, marginalized histories
As architectural historian and preservationist Brent Leggs writes in the Fall 2025 issue of Conservation Perspectives, the biannual magazine published by the Getty Conservation Institute, decisions about what is protected, where investments are made, and how resources are allocated all communicate whose stories are deemed worthy of care and remembrance.
The widespread failure to conserve African American historic sites is rooted in America’s longer history of racial injustice. Throughout the nation’s 250-year history, places significant to marginalized communities have received far less recognition, funding, and protection than sites tied to dominant narratives, reflecting past preservation frameworks that privileged Euro-American histories.
As of March 2025, for instance, just over four percent of LA’s 1,319 designated landmarks were associated with African American history, while many others have already been lost, erased by decades of discriminatory government planning and housing practices such as redlining—government-backed policies that denied mortgage loans and insurance in predominantly Black neighborhoods—and racially restrictive covenants that barred African Americans from most areas of the city. Meanwhile, African Americans make up about seven percent of National Park Service employees and even smaller shares of archaeologists, architects, and preservation professionals, shaping which histories are identified, interpreted, and protected.
Even when the will to conserve exists, practical obstacles remain. Chronic underinvestment in Black communities has limited access to capital for restoration and maintenance, and preservation often competes with pressing community needs such as affordable housing, transportation, education, and public services. At the same time, historic designation criteria have long favored architectural significance—unique design, construction, or aesthetic value—rather than a site’s broader cultural meaning. Under standards derived from the National Register of Historic Places, buildings must demonstrate architectural integrity and embody a recognizable type, period, or method of construction, or be the work of a master. This emphasis on physical and artistic qualities has historically sidelined buildings central to African American history, such as cabins built to house enslaved people, boardinghouses, and tenement homes. Excluded from protection, many of these places were left to decay beyond saving.
The remains of Berkeley Square, an exclusive Black neighborhood in West Adams/Sugar Hill that was demolished in the early 1960s to make way for the Santa Monica Freeway (I-10). Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library
Progress is further hindered by interdisciplinary silos. Conservation policies and processes are not always well integrated into broader government planning and development work, limiting those actions. In cities like Los Angeles, these challenges contribute to and can intensify gentrification, shifting demographics, and the ongoing effects of structural racism. Practices such as redlining and racial zoning hindered investment and homeownership for decades.
New funding sources, national initiatives, shared expertise
One step forward begins with acknowledging that conservation cannot rely solely on federal designation or funding. Protecting historic places requires support from a broader base, including philanthropies, corporate partners, state and local governments, and the communities most connected to these sites.
The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund (AACHAF), an initiative of the National Trust for Historic Preservation launched in 2017, offers one model for expanding how preservation is funded and sustained. The Getty Foundation partnered with AACHAF to create Conserving Black Modernism (CBM) in 2022, a four-year, $4.6 million grant program to preserve modern sites across America by Black architects and designers.
Conserving Black Modernism workshop attendees review materials from the Paul R. Williams Collection. The Getty Research Institute holds the archive of architect Paul R. Williams (1894–1980), the first African American AIA member, including original sketches, drawings, and personal papers. Jointly owned by the University of Southern California School of Architecture and the Getty Research Institute. © Della M. Williams Trust. Dated December 15, 1988
The initiative seeks to broaden and secure the architectural record by identifying and conserving Modernist buildings whose contributions have long been undocumented or undervalued, even as they have quietly shaped cities across the country. By supporting sites designed by 20th-century Black architects, the program is helping bring these works into the national narrative of American design.
Beyond grant making, CBM is strengthening the field itself. The program supports convenings that foster peer-to-peer learning and professional connections among project participants, consultants, and conservation practitioners. Led by the Conservation Institute, the CBM workshops create space for shared expertise and lasting networks of collaboration—ensuring that conservation work is not only better resourced but also more inclusive, connected, and resilient.
Conserving Black Modernism workshop attendees touring Carson City Hall, a Late Modern architectural gem designed by a diverse team led by prominent Black architect Robert Kennard.
Empowering communities
Funding, however, is only part of the equation. Conservation is most effective when communities are empowered as stewards of their own heritage. Getty’s partnership with the City of Los Angeles’s Office of Historic Resources advances this approach through the African American Historic Places Los Angeles (AAHPLA) project, which places community engagement at the center of every stage of its work.
The project’s current phase focuses on developing cultural preservation strategies to manage, protect, conserve, enhance, interpret, and celebrate the tangible and intangible heritage of three historically African American neighborhoods in Los Angeles: Oakwood in Venice, Pacoima in the Northeast San Fernando Valley, and the Central Avenue Jazz Corridor.
The AAHPLA project team and the City of Los Angeles are developing these strategies in partnership with local stakeholders and will begin with cultural-asset‑mapping workshops that identify what remains—as well as what has been lost—drawing directly on community knowledge, storytelling, and lived experience.
Central Ave Saxophone Market celebrating Central’s jazzy history in Los Angeles. Jengod at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
AAHPLA also invests in long‑term capacity building. Since 2021, the project has offered undergraduate and graduate internships for African American students and emerging professionals while cultivating a network of community‑based preservation advocates. Through hands‑on training—such as shadowing preservation consultants during historic nominations—community members gain the skills needed to lead future preservation efforts themselves, strengthening both local expertise and collective stewardship.
A future taking shape
Conserving Black built heritage demands more inclusive and just approaches that value both people and places. This means centering the personal histories as well as neighborhoods, businesses, homes, and gathering spaces that defined everyday Black life, locations not unlike those once listed in the Green Book, where community, culture, and survival converged.
There is growing momentum toward this work. In December, the California Arts Council announced the selection of 10 new California Cultural Districts, expanding a program first established in 2017 that helps communities leverage their cultural assets to support local economies, attract tourism, preserve historic sites, and cultivate vibrant, inclusive, creative ecosystems. Among them is the Historic South Los Angeles Black Cultural District.
“The success of this work will ultimately be measured by how effectively communities feel empowered and equipped to identify and conserve their heritage, and how conservation efforts have benefited these communities,” says Susan Macdonald, head of the Buildings and Sites department at the Conservation Institute. “The hope is that AAHPLA—and like‑minded initiatives—can help lead the way toward more inclusive, equitable, and just approaches to conserving underrepresented heritage, inspiring similar efforts far beyond Los Angeles.”
