Joe Mabel CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In July 2022, the National Trust for Historic Preservation announced $3 million in grant funding for the rehabilitation of over 30 historical sites through its African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund (AACHAF). As the largest national fund focused on the preservation of African American historical sites, the AACHAF has invested $12.4 million into the rehabilitation and maintenance of 160 sites since its founding in 2017.
Grants from the Action Fund are divided in four categories: Programming and Education, Project Planning and Development, Increasing Organizational Capacity and Building Capital. This year, the Louis Armstrong House Museum (LAHM) in the Queens borough of New York City was awarded a Project Planning grant in order to “allow the house museum to continue to be sustainable and share Armstrong’s life and legacy.”
The Louis Armstrong House Museum celebrates the legacy of jazz musician Louis Armstrong through the preservation of his house in Corona, a neighborhood in Queens. The House officially opened for in-person tours in 2003, more than 30 years after Armstrong’s wife, Lucille, first began advocating for their home to become a museum and National Historic Landmark. The home has been a National Historic Landmark since 1976 and a New York City Landmark since 1988.
Today, the house remains almost untouched from its original state and often features local jazz bands in the garden, in addition to regular in-person and virtual tours. The National Trust grant joins a long list of LAHM sponsors, including the Fund II Foundation, which was founded by music lover Robert F. Smith, who also serves as the foundation’s President.
Robert F. Smith’s Efforts to Preserve Black Historical Sites
Robert F. Smith has a long-standing commitment to preserving Black history and culture, especially through the Fund II Foundation, part of whose mission is to “preserve the African-American experience.”
In addition to his capacity as founding director and President of Fund II Foundation, Smith is also on the Board of Trustees at the LAHM and played a critical role in digitizing the museum’s artifacts, especially its initiative to create a digital archive of Amstrong’s life. Founded in 2015, the archive includes photographs, audio recordings and other visual and auditory artifacts. A year later, in 2016, Fund II Foundation provided the LAHM with a $3 million grant, with $2.7 million going toward the digitization campaign.
A groundbreaking effort, which went live in 2018, digitized thousands of Armstrong’s artifacts and includes a “scrapbook compilation of Armstrong’s early days in New York, hundreds of hours of never-before-heard concert recordings, spoken word tapes, video concert footage and photographs of the trumpeter in his Queens home.”
Learn more about Smith’s efforts to preserve Black historical sites like the Louis Armstrong House Museum.
