Elevating Civil Rights Sites in the South

The National Register of Historic Places recognizes sites for their historical significance and importance. Nevertheless, many face disrepair and lack educational programming and activation befitting their designation. This is particularly true for sites that focus on the experiences of Black Americans, which make up only 3 percent of the register’s listings and compete with more than 95,000 sites for a limited pool of federal grant dollars.

Enter TPL’s Alliance for Civil Rights Historic Sites, a partnership formed in 2022 with the National Park Service to support and elevate eight such storied places.

Medgar Wiley Evers, civil rights activist, voting rights activist, and organizer. 

The first was Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home and National Monument in Jackson, Mississippi. Medgar Evers was a civil rights crusader and the NAACP’s first field secretary in that state. Among other things, he fought for voting rights, access to public facilities, and economic opportunity. Medgar and his wife, Myrlie, led public investigations into the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till.

Their home was firebombed in 1962. The following year, Medgar was assassinated in the home’s carport. While the house was designated a national monument in 2020, it sat mostly closed to the public except for limited tours. A solitary sign and a few photos outside were all that hinted of the couple’s extraordinary story. That changed in 2023 when TPL joined with the park service and others to refurbish the home and grounds and open them fully to the public. Other improvements included enhanced parking and the addition of a garden dedicated to Myrlie.

“TPL raised more than $500,000 and hit the ground running to complete the work before June 12, 2023, 60 years to the day after Medgar Evers was assassinated,” says George Dusenbury, TPL’s vice president for the southern region. “We did it, and it was great to have Myrlie Evers attend the ribbon-cutting.”

In February 2026, TPL and partner organizations including the Prince Hall Masons, NPS, and other philanthropic partners completed a $14 million fundraising and restoration project—the Prince Hall Masonic Grand Lodge in Atlanta. In addition to being part of the oldest and largest fraternity of Black men in North America, the lodge housed the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the civil rights organization led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The building also contained the studios of WERD, the nation’s first Black-owned radio station.

Over the decades, the lodge, on Atlanta’s historic Auburn Avenue, slid into disrepair; that deterioration accelerated after the Masons moved to a new building in 2020. The building remained vacant and inactive, a blight at the edge of Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park. In 2018, two years before his death, Representative John Lewis, himself a giant of the civil rights movement, successfully championed legislation that redrew the boundaries of the park to include the lodge. 

The fully restored lodge is now officially part of the national historical park, and the public will be able to tour the building. The Atlanta History Center is working with the Masons to catalog papers and artifacts that were located there. Meanwhile, the park service plans to conduct extensive oral histories with community members who played roles with SCLC, Prince Hall Masons, and WERD.

Listen to our episode of People. Nature. Big Ideas. recorded in the restored WERD studios to hear from members of the community about what this building and its restoration mean to the city of Atlanta and to Black history and culture across the country.

Jocelyn Imani, national director of TPL’s Black History and Culture program, says including the lodge in the historical park will give visitors a deeper appreciation of Dr. King’s daily routine in a neighborhood that included both the SCLC and Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he was co-pastor with his father until his assassination in 1968.

“The park service can now tell a fuller story of who Dr. King was as a human being,” Dr. Imani says. “He’s a real person, he’s moving and grooving in the community. Maybe he spent some time at the church in the morning and now he is walking to his office. Part of the reason ‘place’ is so critical is that it allows us to take the past off a magic pedestal and put it in our hands.”

The Alliance for Civil Rights Historic Sites has identified half a dozen other historic places in Alabama and Mississippi for restoration, improved public access, and programming. They include Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument, Freedom Riders National Monument, Natchez National Historical Park, the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site, and Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site. TPL currently is partnering with NPS to restore and build exhibits at Freedom Riders. The renovated site should open in early 2028.

Dusenbury, who also serves as TPL’s Georgia state director, says crucial financial support for the work so far had come from the National Park Foundation; Southern Company, an Atlanta-based utility; and Georgia-Pacific, a pulp and paper company. With a couple of projects under its belt, the alliance is in a good position to attract broader support, he says.

“When we first launched this, there were a lot of companies that were interested in preserving this vital part of American history, but they didn’t quite understand how the program would work,” Dusenbury explains. “Now that we have opened the Evers home and the lodge, we are looking to recruit more companies to support the program and become members of the alliance.”

Mark S. Berry, senior vice president of research for environment and sustainability at Southern Company, says activating civil rights sites was critical for the public’s appreciation of a pivotal period in American history. “Once these places are open, you can continue to tell those stories, and people will come,” he says. “This is living history. We can’t just rely on our schools to teach the history of the civil rights movement. Parents should also be able to take their children to visit the sites.”

Lisa W. Foderaro is a senior writer and researcher for Trust for Public Land. Previously, she was a reporter for The New York Times, where she covered parks and the environment.