A church in Selma is one of 31 historic Black houses of worship that will share $4 million in preservation funds from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Selma’s Tabernacle Baptist Church, constructed in 1922, will share in the funding, which comes from the trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. According to the trust’s announcement, the funding will be used to replace the church’s deteriorating, lead-coated copper dome room, which has been damaged from severe storms, including the devastating tornado that tore through Selma in January 2023.

With more than $95 million in funding, the action fund is the largest U.S. resource dedicated to preserving historic African American places, trust officials said.

Tabernacle Baptist was organized in 1884 for Selma University students, faculty and emerging middle-class Blacks, according to the church’s website. The church’s ministers and members were leaders in pioneering African-American Baptist organizations, including the National Baptist Convention, USA.

The church “is known for its Classical Revival architecture, with four identical quadrantes connected by an open dome and clerestory that brings continuous brilliance to the sanctuary’s interior, reflecting Jesus Christ as The Light of the World,” the trust said in its announcement. Tabernacle Baptist Church was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013 and is one of the sites on the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail.

The grant comes from the trust’s Preserving Black Churches initiative, a $20 million program launched in 2022 that “equips historic Black churches and their congregations with the critical resources and technical preservation expertise to protect the historic assets and legacies they steward.”

The sanctuary of historic Tabernacle Baptist Church in Selma. (Tabernacle Baptist Church)

The latest grants range from $50,000 to $200,000 and are designed to help congregations “solve urgent and ongoing preservation threats such as deferred maintenance, insufficient funding, demolition, water filtration and mold contamination,” trust officials said.

“We created the Preserving Black Churches program to ensure the historic Black church’s legacy is told and secured. That these cultural assets can continue to foster community resilience and drive meaningful change in our society,” Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, said in the announcement.

“We couldn’t be more excited to honor our second round of grantees and ensure that African Americans – and our entire nation – can enjoy an empowered future built on the inspiring foundations of our past,” Leggs said.

Since launching the Preserving Black Churches initiative, the action fund has provided $8.7 million in grants to more than 70 historic churches nationwide.

“Black churches have been at the forefront of meaningful democratic reform since this nation’s founding. They’re a living testament to the resilience of our ancestors in the face of unimaginably daunting challenges,” said well-known historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., an advisor to the action fund.

“The heart of our spiritual world is the Black church. These places of worship, these sacred cultural centers, must exist for future generations to understand who we were as a people,” Gates said.

Tabernacle Baptist Church, Selma. (Wikipedia)

In November 2017, the National Trust for Historic Preservation launched the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, designed to make “an important and lasting contribution to the American landscape by preserving sites of African American activism, achievement and resilience.”

Here are some of the other historic sites selected for this year’s Preserving Black Churches grants. The descriptions are provided by the National Trust for Historic Preservation:

• James AME Church, New Orleans – Founded by a group of freedmen, St. James is the oldest Black Protestant church in New Orleans. It served as the headquarters for the Louisiana Native Guards, Black Union soldiers during the Civil War, and was a staging site for marches during the Civil Rights movement. Funding will allow the church to make roof repairs that will stop 18 years of water intrusion in the upper sanctuary balcony and restore the church’s historic facade.
• Town Clock Church, New Albany, Indiana – Built in 1852 as Second Presbyterian Church, the building served as a station on the Underground Railroad. Oral histories claim that the structure’s basement hid fugitives and an adjoining tunnel led from the north side of the building to what was once a hotel across the street. Funding will support endowment growth to ensure that the 2014 restoration and preservation efforts are sustained in the future.
• Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Atlanta – The oldest predominantly African American congregation in the Atlanta metropolitan area, Big Bethel AME Church was founded in 1847 and is the birthplace of Morris Brown College, the first educational institution in Georgia to be owned and operated entirely by African Americans. The Church hosted the first national convention of the NAACP in 1920. Funding will support time-critical structural repairs and remedy safety concerns due to severe interior and exterior water damage.

To see the full list of 31 Black churches around the country receiving grants, click here.