Historic Preservation for a Living City

As part of its fiftieth anniversary celebrations, the Historic Charleston Foundation commissioned a history of the organization and its accomplishments. The result is Robert R. Wey-eneth's Historic Preservation for a Living City. Given that this is an “official” histor y, Wey-eneth assures readers at the outset that the foundation wanted him to tell its story “warts and all.” In fact, he has not hesitated to point out a number of the foundation's failures and misadventures, though he is careful to couch his criticisms in polite language. Nowhere, for example, does he label the foundation's early policies as racist, even though it used historic preservation during the 1950s to bring about “Negro removal” through the gentrification of the Ansonborough section of Charleston. Fortunately, the foundation and allied groups, including the city government, realized the error of their ways and in the 1970s began promoting programs in African American neighborhoods such as Wraggborough that coupled historic preservation with home ownership for black families. By the 1990s the foundation had dedicated itself to preserving sites that would illuminate the lives of slaves in urban Charleston (the Russell House) and in the surrounding countryside (the McLeod Plantation). This change of direction parallels and reveals much about the struggle in the South—and in the nation at large—to come to terms with race

Archaeology · Foundation (evidence · Gentrification · Parallels · Political science · South carolina · White (mutation · American Environmental and Regional History · Engineering · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Public Administration · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

• Urban Dialectics, Misrememberings, and Memory-Work

  Open Access•Sarah E Platt•International Journal of…•2020

  Add to list