What Rocky Mount Can Learn From: Brent Leggs – Continuing the Legacy

In the heart of every historic building is a story. Brent Leggs has made it his mission to make sure we hear all of them.

As the founding Executive Director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, Leggs leads the largest preservation campaign ever undertaken to protect sites of Black history in the United States. Under his leadership, the Fund has invested over $90 million in restoring churches, homes, cemeteries, schools, and neighborhoods once overlooked or left to ruin.

But Leggs isn’t just saving bricks and mortar. He’s building power—teaching communities how to claim, fund, and protect their own heritage.

Born in Kentucky, educated at the University of Kentucky and Cornell, Leggs came to preservation with a business mind and a moral calling. He understood early that the places African Americans built—and the lives they lived there—were not side stories. They were central to the American story.

And yet, time and again, these places were razed, neglected, or forgotten.
Leggs has helped change that. Under his guidance, sites like the home of civil rights leader Pauli Murray in Durham, NC, and the Mt. Zion AME Church in Philadelphia have received critical funding and national attention. In every effort, Leggs insists: This is not just Black history. It is American history.

What does this mean for Rocky Mount?
It means the churches in South Rocky Mount, the schoolhouses once filled with Black teachers and students, the homes that bore witness to struggle and triumph—they matter. They are not relics of the past. They are anchors of identity. They deserve preservation, not as a favor, but as a right.

Brent Leggs teaches us that when we save a place, we don’t just honor its past—we give it a future. We invest in pride. We say to every child walking past that building: Your story belongs here, too. If Rocky Mount wants to preserve its soul, it must do what Leggs has done: see value where others overlooked it. And fight to protect it—for all of us.

FYI: A great article on Brent Leggs: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/conserving-black-modernism-brent-leggs