Brent Leggs to lead National Trust for Historic Preservation

Brent Leggs is poised to move to the top of the National Trust for Historic Preservation at a moment when the organization is treating preservation less as nostalgia than as a fight over whose history is protected and publicly honored. The shift puts the leader of the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund in position to guide an institution that has recently taken on the Trump administration over projects involving a ballroom and the Kennedy Center.

Leggs is currently the executive director of the Action Fund and a strategic advisor to the National Trust’s chief executive. Carol Quillen remains listed as the trust’s president and CEO, so Leggs’ rise would mark a leadership change at the organization’s top tier. The trust says its mission is to “activate the power of place to serve the public good,” language that now carries sharper political weight as preservation becomes entangled with public-memory battles and the debate over which places merit national attention and money.

The Action Fund itself was launched in 2017 in the wake of the racial unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has grown into one of the trust’s most visible programs. It says it has raised more than $150 million and supported more than 378 grantees nationwide, backing projects that range from historic Black churches to Harlem’s Apollo Theater and other culturally significant sites. In another recent funding round, the fund announced $3 million for 24 African American historic sites across the country, including sites in Oregon. In 2026, it also announced $5 million in grants for historically Black churches.

That work has become central to how the trust is framing the nation’s 250th anniversary. The organization is expanding its focus on historically Black churches and other places tied to American history and democracy, a push Leggs has described in moral terms as well as historic ones. He has called those churches “essential civic institutions” that have anchored democracy, community leadership and collective care for generations. With preservation fights now unfolding in the open, Leggs’ elevation would signal a more confrontational National Trust, one prepared to defend not just buildings, but the public story those buildings are meant to tell.