How We Work

Everyday Spaces and Iconic Sites

CPCRS seeks to preserve the heritage of the United States civil rights in all its forms. This includes iconic sites already recognized as heritage places, vernacular buildings, cultural landscapes as well as the everyday spaces.

Building on Traditions 

CPCRS strives to honor and support our organizational partners’ traditions of education, storytelling as well as community stewardship to remember the profound and significant civil rights stories — tragic and triumphant — across the country.

Always in Partnership

CPCRS collaborates with preservation advocates, government agencies, stewardship organizations as well as other educational organizations engaged in remembering, studying and stewarding the legacy of the United States civil rights history.

Our Methods

Research

CPCRS undertakes research on several fronts. Our team explores basic questions about understanding, responding to and sustaining heritage places associated with civil rights. We are probing the history and geography of civil rights heritage, the practical preservation needs and potentials specific to civil rights sites, and the community values connecting these sites to their stakeholders’ lives. Our research also aims to illuminate the history of specific sites, documenting interpreting them in collaboration with other disciplines. 

We are searching for deeper understanding and more effective practices. We are interested in questions about what make a place a “civil rights” site? What are the benefits of acknowledging, repairing and reusing such places? How well are the full range of sites and narratives represented in current practice and scholarships? How must our practices and field shift to meet the future heritage needs of society? 

Civil rights heritage work, we believe, will change the community of practice around historic preservation in the US – but how? The Center’s research produces basic knowledge; tests ideas and methods; and discusses, debates and publishes models for conservation, design and management for places marked by civil rights narratives. 

Teaching 

In classrooms, studios, labs, and in the field – and now, through Zoom – Weitzman School of Design educators and students collaborate to bring preservation philosophies and principles “down to the ground.” This is done both literally, where building meets site, and metaphorically, where desires to commemorate and reflect on the past meet the urgent political and pragmatic needs of the present. 

Penn faculty and Center partners are actively applying new methods and new questions into curriculum, conversations, and initiatives. As our colleague Brent Leggs frames it, "we are telling the full story of the American experience.”  

CPCRS is dedicated to creating training and educational opportunities for future ranks of preservation professionals. Deepening existing partnerships and continuing to create new partnerships is essential to success. We acknowledge that preservation must embrace sites and narratives representing core, abiding issues of civil rights for progress to be actualized -- and ultimately decolonize traditional preservation practices. 

Fieldwork

The Center organizes field projects to apply research and teaching to the practical challenges faced by sites, their organizations and stakeholders. These projects challenge us to forge ideas, techniques and partnerships that can be applied on the ground and in the community. 

Through fieldwork CPCRS can test ideas from research, reinforce learning goals, and work to achieve community impact. All our efforts are directed to holistic approaches to preservation – in terms of scale, community needs, material realities, creative opportunities, management and financing. Initially, the Center’s fieldwork focuses on Philadelphia and Alabama, and on sites of modest scale. 

Fieldwork undertaken by other research groups in the Weitzman School of Design – for instance the Urban Heritage Project, Architectural Conservation Lab and PennPraxis – also provide opportunities to link civil rights heritage issues with cultural landscape, planning, conservation, design and management projects. 

Student Internships & Fellowships

CPCRS currently offers graduate research assistant positions during the academic year and summer to current Penn students. In these roles, students support various projects, from events to research, design, and communications. Positions are posted via the Historic Preservation Department at the beginning of the academic year and summer for current Penn graduate students to apply to. 

We also offer select fellowships to emerging and early career professionals to expand their current research via invitation. 

Our Partners

We partner with and support organizations that make and manage heritage sites marking profound stories of the American experience. 

Cover Image: Entrance to Federation of Southern Cooperative Rural Training and Research Center, established in 1967 to create community-based economic development opportunities throughout the rural South for black farmers and rural communities. Sumter County, Alabama. Photo by Elizabeth Donison.