Brent Leggs

Brent Leggs is the founding executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, the largest preservation campaign in U.S. History on behalf of historic African American places. Through the Action Fund, he leads a broad community of leaders and activists in honor of the clarion that preserving African American cultural sites is fundamental to understanding the American story. Brent is a Harvard University Loeb Fellow, author of Preserving African American Historic Places, and the 2018 recipient of the Robert G. Stanton National Preservation Award. His efforts to protect the Alabama’s A.G. Gaston Motel, New York’s Villa Lewaro, North Carolina’s Nina Simone birthplace, New Jersey’s Hinchliffe Stadium, and Pennsylvania’s Joe Frazier’s Gym is exemplary of his successful campaigns to protect many cultural monuments throughout the U.S. Brent is also an Adjunct Associate Professor of the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation and Senior Advisor to the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design.