Join us on Zoom for a live author talk with Catherine Fleming Bruce, winner of the 2017 Historic Preservation Book Prize. Catherine will be discussing her book The Sustainers: Being, Building and Doing Good through Activism in the Sacred Spaces of Civil Rights, Human Rights and Social Movements. 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.
You can follow Catherine on Twitter @tnovsa.
Click here to purchase a copy of The Sustainers.
This event is part of the League’s Preservation Book Club. Thank you to our program sponsors, the Peggy N. & Roger G. Gerry Charitable Trust.
Catherine Fleming Bruce is author of The Sustainers: Being, Building and Doing Good through Activism in the Sacred Spaces of Civil Rights, Human Rights and Social Movements. In 2017, she became the first Black author to win the University of Mary Washington Historic Preservation Book Prize, awarded by their Center for Historic Preservation.
Bruce led the effort to rescue, preserve and restore the home of South Carolina civil rights activist Modjeska Monteith Simkins as a Civil and Human Rights Center. It is now a permanent Columbia, South Carolina landmark, listed on the US Civil Rights Trail. She is currently preserving the Cyril O. Spann Medical Office and the Visanska Starks House and Carriage House through her organization Tnovsa Global Commons. 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 (IMLS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Bruce and her work have appeared in US News and World Report, National Geographic Traveler Magazine, The Post and Courier (SC) and South Carolina Public Radio. Recent work include, 'The South Carolina Democratic Party During the Fight for Racial Justice and Civil Rights: A Black History Month Timeline', published in the Richland County Party newsletter, and an op-ed in the (SC) State Newspaper lifting up some of the Black women preservationists behind the phenomenon of Richland County SC having the highest number of historic sites commemorating Black women in the nation. A new article is forthcoming later this year in the United Kingdom-based C20 Magazine - the Twentieth Century Society.
Bruce has presented at a number of book events - among them, the George Mason University Fall for the Book Festival; Deckle Edge Literary Festival (SC) and Black Ink: A Charleston (SC) African American Book Festival. Bruce has also participated as a speaker in a number of conferences: the Association for the Study of African American Life and History; speaking on 'Negotiating Power Lines: Economic Justice and the Ethics of Public History' at the National Council on Public History Annual Meeting; discussing 'What Needs to Change', for the Providence (RI) Preservation 2020 Symposium; a panelist at this year's Colorado Preservation, Inc.'s Saving Places Conference; and at Bronx (NY) Green Middle School Black History Month Weekly Series. In 2020 she was a guest on Preservation Maryland's PreserveCast podcast, hosted by Nicholas Redding, a podcast which has 'thousands of listeners across the United States and hundreds in the UK, Canada, Australia, and India'.
An alumna of Agnes Scott College with a dual degree in English/Creative Writing and Art, Bruce received her MA in Mass Communication and Information Studies at the University of South Carolina, and pursued doctoral studies there. She has a long history of activism, including work with Occupy Columbia, an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement; civic engagement with Black Voters Matter Fund, the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center, and global work at the United Nations’ World Summit for the Information Society. Bruce was also presented with the Seal of the City of Columbia, Mississippi after mutual disaster relief efforts between Columbia, Mississippi and Columbia, South Carolina, and achieving sisterhood status between the two historically linked cities.