Where Activism and Preservation Meet: Author Talk with Catherine Fleming Bruce

In this Preservation Book Club event, author Catherine Fleming Bruce discusses her award-winning book The Sustainers: Being, Building and Doing Good through Activism in the Sacred Spaces of Civil Rights, Human Rights and Social Movements. Catherine touches on her inspiration for the book, the importance of writing for a general audience, and her own grassroots preservation campaigns to save places related to civil rights — restoring the physical buildings and preserving the stories of the people who made history there. Catherine’s work makes an argument for the act of preservation being in itself a form of activism. It also shines a light on the importance of African American women in particular, who have spearheaded so many efforts to preserve the history and places connected to the Civil Rights movement.

Now in its second edition, The Sustainers is a full color pictorial book that provides a space where social actors in transformative times will find connection between servant-leaders like Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, who themselves have hallowed certain spaces with their sacrifices for justice, and the sustainers, who ensured the transformation of Robben Island Prison, the Selma to Montgomery trail, and other sites into permanent symbols of equality. Builders, actors, preservers, scholars, storytellers and activists, by returning again and again to these sites, hallow these grounds anew.

Catherine Fleming Bruce is the author of The Sustainers: Being, Building and Doing Good through Activism in the Sacred Spaces of Civil Rights, Human Rights and Social Movements, which received the 2017 Historic Preservation Book Prize from the University of Mary Washington Center for Historic Preservation. Bruce founded TNOVSA Global Commons, a company that supports historic and cultural preservation, global norms and ethics and engagement in transformational politics.

The Sustainers was named one of "15 Essential African American History Books" by National Trust for Historic Preservation. In addition to her writing, Catherine has been involved in many grassroots preservation campaigns, including taking a leading role in the restoration of the Modjeska Monteith Simkins House in Columbia, South Caroline. Catherine is currently working on the restoration of the Cyril O. Spann Medical Office, also in Columbia, South Carolina. The Cyril Spann Medical Office is part of a new vaccine hesitancy project including museums and libraries called "Victory Through COVID19 Vaccines with South Carolina Black Heroes in Medicine" funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the CDC. To hear more from Catherine, check out this interview she did on Preservation Maryland’s PreserveCast.

Thank you to our sponsor, the Peggy N. & Roger G. Gerry Charitable Trust.