33 Historically Black U.S. Churches Receive $8.5 Million in Preservation Grants

The Banner has a subscription to republish articles from Religion News Service. This story by Adelle M. Banks was published Feb. 24, 2026 on religionnews.com. It has been edited for length.

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and Atlanta, Georgia’’s Ebenezer Baptist Church are among 33 Black churches receiving millions of dollars for preservation of their sacred and historic buildings.

They are recipients of the fourth annual round of grants from the Preserving Black Churches program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. The program, a $60 million initiative of Lilly Endowment, also announced $5 million in grants for five churches on Martin Luther King Day. It has supported 170 churches across the United States with a total of almost $34 million to provide funding and technical expertise to protect the assets and legacies of historically Black churches.

The Birmingham church, which was bombed in 1963, will receive $300,000 for organizational and capacity building.

Theodore (Ted) Debro, campaign chair for 16th Street Baptist Church, said the grant will allow the church to hire a director of development and fundraising for the building where four young Black girls were killed when members of the Ku Klux Klan set off dynamite as the children were preparing for the Sunday morning worship service.

“As a site of deep historical significance—central to the Civil Rights Movement and a living symbol of resilience, faith, and community—16th Street Baptist Church deserves strategic, professional capacity to preserve its physical fabric, sustain its ministries, and protect the stories it holds for future generations,” Debro told Religion News Service in a statement.

“This grant addresses persistent inequities in preservation funding that have left many Black churches under-resourced despite their outsized cultural and historical importance.”

Ebenezer Baptist, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was baptized and went on to co-pastor with his father in the 1960s, will receive $100,000 for programming and interpretation. Ebenezer Baptist hosted the early meetings that led to the start of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights organization King co-founded. Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, of Georgia, is now the church’s senior pastor.

The funding will support a graduate fellow from a historically Black college or university to design the “Preserving the Oral History Tour of Ebenezer Church” program.

Capital project grants were awarded to help restore edifices from Puerto Rico to Connecticut.

Iglesia San Mateo de Cangrejos, or “Church of Saint Mateo de Cangrejos of Santurce,” in San Juan, was constructed in 1832 by free Black people, freedom-seeking maroons and migrants from nearby Caribbean islands. The Catholic church, whose building was damaged in 2017 during Hurricane Maria, will receive a $500,000 capital project grant to help repair its parish house and chapel.

Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ in New Haven, founded in 1820, is one of the first Black churches established in Connecticut and the oldest formally recognized Black Congregational United Church of Christ in the world. A $400,000 grant will aid in the restoration and preservation of its historic stained-glass windows.

“America’s 250th anniversary is an opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate the remarkable legacy of our nation’s historically Black churches,” said Brent Leggs, executive director of the fund and strategic adviser to the CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, in a statement. “They are essential civic institutions that have anchored democracy, community leadership, and collective care for generations. By investing in their preservation today, we are safeguarding not just historic buildings and architecture, but a living legacy of resilience and social progress for the future.”

A total of $8.5 million in grants was awarded, ranging from $50,000 to $500,000, for capital projects, programming and interpretation, or project planning. Full list of recipients in the original RNS article.

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c. 2026 Religion News Service