The Out(sider) Preservation Initiative names pilot partners to help lead preservation efforts for and by descendant communities
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The Out(sider) Preservation Initiative (OPI) is a project established by Dr. Andrea Roberts that supports descendant-led projects that preserve Black placemaking, freedom-seeking, migration, and placekeeping heritage through creative storytelling, performance, and other forms of cultural production.
To support OPI’s goals in commemorating Black place preservation across research, grantmaking, educational and storytelling activities, five pilot partners were selected for their longstanding efforts and effective approaches to preserving, revitalizing, remembering, and protecting freedmen’s settlements. Each partner brings to the initiative unique expertise and will work closely with Dr. Roberts and her project team to support grantees and highlight how culture, performance, and heritage inform descendent communities’ approaches to preserving their histories.
Together their work will involve key activities to realize OPI’s aims including awarding grants for creative storytelling projects; developing an interactive web portal to feature the grantees’ work; hosting symposia and public forums; and creating preservation education for and by descendants.
These ideas are explored in depth in “Reconsidering Preservation,” a profile of Dr. Roberts and her work with the Center for Cultural Landscapes published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The piece highlights her commitment to reshaping the field of preservation by centering Black communities’ lived experiences, memory, and cultural expressions—a core value of the OPI framework. Similarly, the essay “Field Notes on Repair” in Places Journal situates Roberts’ work within broader practices of cultural repair and offers a vision for how descendant-led storytelling and spatial practices can serve as powerful tools of restoration and resistance.
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“These pilot project leaders are already making a difference in descendant communities in Texas, Virginia, and around the world leveraging technology and creativity to make largely invisible places and histories visible,” said Dr. Andrea Roberts, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Cultural Landscapes at the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture. “They will serve as great models for our Outsider Preservationist grantees who will create great creative work which raises awareness of endangered Black settlements everywhere.”
The OPI pilot partners are:
Bastrop County African American Cultural Center and Freedom Colonies Museum
Bastrop, Texas
President and Founder Doris Williams
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Founded in 2019 by eleven descendants, the Bastrop County African American Cultural Center and Freedom Colonies Museum (BCAACC) amplifies descendant voices and stories. The organization provides resources for the African American community in Bastrop County through educational programs. With Black Texans comprising less than 7% of Bastrop County's population today (down from 43% in 1890), the BCAACC is the only prominent public reminder of the diasporic history of Bastrop's freedom colony founders and their descendants. Their mission is to preserve and celebrate this rich cultural legacy.
With OPI support, the BCAACC will host a three-day Juneteenth Homecoming event (broadly titled Bastrop County Freedom Colonies Preservation Project) to promote community preservation and build sustainable practices for freedom colonies. They will develop a Homecoming Preservation Guide that serves as resources for other freedom colonies and OPI regions. BCAACC will be part of OPI’s working group to develop best practices for descendant communities’ site activation and preservation.
Learn more about the Bastrop County African American Cultural Center and Freedom Colonies Museum
Southern Android Productions
Houston, Texas
Creative Director Viktor L. Ewing Givens
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Viktor L. Ewing Givens is a freedom colony descendant and heritage preservation artist who is the Creative Director and Founder of Southern Android Productions. His practice centers around the gathering and arrangement of ancestral objects to activate spaces for site-specific public rituals and social interventions. By connecting the material culture of his ancestors with pre- and post-modern spiritual theologies, Givens extends and reimagines spiritual folk customs across the African Diaspora. His creative practice investigates how we transfer ancestral artifacts of history into contemporary platforms for reinvention and cultural transformation.
Southern Android Productions, led by Givens, will develop Mo’lasses: An Integrated Ancestral Technologies, a project that combines cultural preservation, arts, and community engagement to archive, reinterpret, and memorialize Black southern settlement histories. This project will include leading workshops on heritage preservation and storytelling. Givens will also be a key participant in discussions on data sovereignty and a contributor to OPI’s interactive web portal.
Learn more about Southern Android Productions
Sawari Tours
Houston, Texas
CEO and Lead Guide Lindsay Gary
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Sawari Tours is a Houston-based, Black woman-owned travel company that specializes in one-of-a-kind cultural and historical tours of Africa and the African Diaspora, locally, nationally, and abroad. The company’s mission is to educate, empower, and connect the African Diaspora through travel. Dr. Lindsay Gary is the CEO of Sawari Tours and leads engaging bus tours and specialty tours in Houston, highlighting some of the country's little-known African American sites. Additionally, Sawari offers international tours to Senegal and Ghana, connecting African Americans to their African roots.
Gary will lead the Freedom Colony Tourism Development Initiative, a project that collaborates with OPI and descendant communities to develop sustainable, equitable, and decolonized tourism processes for historical and cultural sites related to freedom colonies. The project, which focuses on placemaking, will build on Sawari Tours experience in developing tourism offerings that benefit local heritage. Gary will work with focus groups and community leaders to assess public engagement preferences for freedom colonies sites and lead a pilot tour in the Bastrop County and Austin, Texas region.
Kinfolkology
Charlottesville, Virginia
Co-founders Eola Lewis Dance and Jennie K. Williams
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In 2023, Eola Lewis Dance and Dr. Jennie K. Williams co-founded Kinfolkology with a vision of integrating ethics, primary source research, data and digital slavery studies with engagement of descendant communities and families. Kinfolkology is guided by an understanding that while enslaved ancestors are no longer living, they were and are part of communities and families that are very much alive. Online, Kinfolkology is a digital archive, collaborative database collective, and living memorial. In person, Kinfolkology facilitates community, kinship and belonging through record-linking, story-seeking, and family-finding.
Supported by OPI, Kinfolkology will convene workshops on structural parity, collaborating with descendant communities in Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, California, and Nova Scotia. The workshops will explore governance models for descendant-led projects and engage participants in sharing stories of historic Black towns and settlements. The project will also connect genealogical and historical data through AI tools. Dance and Williams will serve as consultants in the development of OPI’s web portal contributing to the creation of a descendant-only data zone, with a focus on data ethics.
Friends of Dunbar Schoolhouse
Palmyra, Virginia
Founder Carmen Smith
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Friends of Dunbar Schoolhouse is a nonprofit that creates a safe environment for youth and a place for family/community gatherings and community outreach events. Friends of Dunbar promotes education about community history and how to preserve it, develops programming to train youth to value and care for their environment and themselves, and fundraises to help community members in need. Named for recognized Black poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the Dunbar Schoolhouse is a Rosenwald school located in Palmyra, Virginia and was originally built in 1924 to educate Black children only. Fluvanna County native Carmen Smith bought the two-room schoolhouse and its property, which had stood empty for years, transforming it into a museum, community center and health hub for local children and elders.
As part of the OPI project, Friends of Dunbar Schoolhouse will serve as a hub for digitizing family and community records focused on Rosenwald schools in the Fluvanna County area. Their work will train community members, descendants, and staff in digitization practices through workshops with a goal of enhancing preservation efforts in the region by connecting descendants to their ancestral homeplaces. Smith and Friends of Dunbar will develop a guide for digitizing records, serving as a resource for other OPI regions. She will also serve as a key contributor to the development of OPI’s web portal, providing expertise on archival engagement.
Learn more about Friends of Dunbar Schoolhouse
The Out(sider) Preservation Initiative, funded by the Mellon Foundation, expands the mapping, technical assistance, and storytelling work of The Texas Freedom Colonies Project by engaging with places and communities in Washington, DC, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Louisiana, California, Texas and Nova Scotia. OPI prioritizes supporting artistic, cultural, and preservation work that’s created by descendants inspired by their memories, stories and place histories.