Ongoing restoration of Hinchliffe Stadium in Paterson, NJ, former recipient of an African American Civil Rights Grant; Hinchliffe Stadium is the only historic stadium within a national park./NPS, Stephanie Roulett
More than $16 million in grants has been awarded to help preserve sites associated with the African American Civil Rights movement in the United States.
National Park Service Director Chuck Sams announced the awards during a stop in Paterson, New Jersey, to visit to Hinchliffe Stadium, a National Historic Landmark that is one of the few surviving Negro League baseball stadiums. That stadium, located within Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park, received a grant in 2018.
"The New York Black Yankees regularly used the Hinchliffe Stadium from 1933-1937 and 1939-1945," according to the stadium's history. "The stadium hosted the 1933 Colored Championship of the Nation (the Negro leagues equivalent of the World Series). The home team, the New York Black Yankees, lost to the Philadelphia Stars."
This years’ awards will benefit 44 projects in 15 states and support the continued preservation of sites and history related to the African American struggle for equality, a National Park Service release said.
“The African American Civil Rights grants are critical to helping preserve and interpret a more comprehensive narrative of the people, places, and events associated with African American Civil Rights movement," said Sams. "Sites like Hinchliffe Stadium are rare, and they provide a tangible reminder of this complex history. It was exciting to see the ongoing preservation work at a site that bore witness to more than 20 baseball Hall of Famers in its time and has inspired generations to follow in the footsteps of their heroes."
The African American Civil Rights grants fund a variety of projects from rehabilitation to oral history documentation, in coordination with state, Tribal, local government, and nonprofit partners. The rehabilitation project at Hinchliffe Stadium, was funded in part by this grant program and is expected to reopen to the public later this year.
This years’ grants will support the preservation of the Masjid al-Ansar in Miami, the first mosque in Florida, which records the story of how Black Muslims were instrumental in the civil rights campaigns in the Deep South; the Schooner Clotilda in Mobile, Alabama, the last known ship to import enslaved Africans to the United States; and in Tulsa, Oklahoma, funds will help tell the rich stories of the African American struggle for equality through oral histories of Selma’s foot soldiers and those with personal and family connections to Greenwood Avenue or “Black Wall Street."
This year's grantees can be found on this site.
Applications for $21.7 million in FY2022 funding will be available in late summer 2022. Learn more about the African American Civil Rights grant program, and how to apply for future grants on NPS.gov.
Comments
Again, if you look at the list of sites that were funded by the NPS, NONE of them are NPS sites. Many are religious sites that our gov't has no buisness funding...and many of them are in private hands!
Why is the NPS funding non-NPS sites?
ENOUGH!
NPS is funding these sites because Congress appropriated money for this exact purpose.
Enough of what? Congress made the appropriations and gave NPS the authority to make determinations and distribute the funds for these preservation efforts. This is no different than NPS's congressionally determined role in administering the National Register of Historic Places, which are primarily not going to be composed of NPS administered sites.
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/index.htm
Besides that, the article specifically notes that one of these grants went to an historic stadium that is part of an NPS site.
https://www.nps.gov/pagr/learn/photosmultimedia/multimedia.htm
The history of the African-American baseball is important; and certainly the entire thrust of the money (Since it's earmarked for that) is going to go to the enhancement and story of the Negro Leagues that played there. I love any kind of history. Well deserved.
Cloaked however by any newspaper article or even the parks association is a lot of other history- not neccessarily African American, that will not be a centerpice or even a 1/4 piece. Auto racing (Yes, a multimillion $ sport these days) had one of it's biggest starts racing in that stadium through the 1930's-40's. A lot of pioneers in the sport of auto racing started there that eventually moved on to grow the sport nationally and internationally. It's a significant fact. But people today will always remember baseball and relate to that. It's a huge, special but different type of people these auto racing fans. I'm thinking the first thing I'll ask the tour guide once it's all done was who raced at that track, BOXED there (Some of the greats) and played football there. I'm as confident as I am seeing it posted on a park sign they will have any idea.