The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit group chartered by Congress, has a new leader.
Brent Leggs, 53, who has risen in the ranks during more than two decades at the organization, becomes president and chief executive on Monday, its board of trustees has announced. In taking the reins from Carol Quillen, who is leaving for family reasons, Leggs becomes the 11th leader of the trust since it was formed in 1949 to help safeguard historically and culturally significant U.S. sites, buildings and objects.
The trust has been in the news recently for the lawsuit it filed in federal court, seeking to block construction of the new White House ballroom after President Trump tore down the East Wing to make way for it. The organization also joined a suit challenging Trump’s authority to undertake sweeping changes to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Phoebe Tudor, board chair of the National Trust, said in an interview about Leggs that people “are very excited about him coming into this role.”
He was most recently executive director of the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, which he founded in 2017. A grant-making division, the fund has raised more than $200 million and assisted more than 400 projects, from protecting the Philadelphia gym where the boxer Joe Frazier trained to restoring the three-room childhood home of the singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone in Tryon, N.C.
He also served as strategic adviser to Quillen, a historian and former college president, including during the period in which the lawsuits were filed.
“Legal advocacy is the last resort, but it had to be deployed,” Leggs said in a phone interview. “As incoming C.E.O. of the National Trust I remain in support of the organization’s position.”
Leggs, a native of Paducah, Ky., pursued studies in the University of Kentucky’s master’s program in historic preservation after having earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in business administration there.
At the National Trust since 2005, Leggs has been part of a shift toward a more expansive focus for the group’s work. Long associated with buildings of architectural grandeur, the field now also devotes its efforts to sites that may be quite humble but that were important in the lives of Americans.
Even as preservationists have come to see such places as crucial to portraying a complete history of the country, the Trump administration has been pursuing changes in the opposite direction, asking museums to rewrite wall text to avoid what he referred to as “divisive or ideologically driven language” in favor of what he describes as “unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions” that some say downplay the experiences of marginalized groups.
“Telling a full American story is not about erasure,” Leggs said. “We will continue to advocate for an inclusive American story.”
Leggs said his immediate priorities would be formulating “a new strategic direction for the organization that is relevant to all Americans,” as well as raising funds and enhancing workplace culture at the trust, which is based in Washington. The National Trust is privately funded and has an annual operating budget of $54 million. It is also known for its annual list identifying the nation’s most endangered historic places.
There is also the ongoing litigation, part of a flurry of lawsuits that have been brought against some Trump projects — from painting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in blue to formulating plans for a 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery — as well as opposing appeals by the Trump administration.
Regarding the ballroom, a federal district judge blocked aboveground work on the structure but allowed construction of a bunker and other underground security facilities to proceed.
Trump initially characterized the 90,000-square-foot ballroom as necessary for large events, then seized on those security facilities as justification for the project after the security breach at the hotel hosting White House correspondents’ dinner in April. The Justice Department filed a motion, using the language and errant capitalization that Mr. Trump uses on social media, asking the judge to allow work on the ballroom to proceed; the motion called the National Trust’s name “FAKE,” and accused the organization of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” The department also wrote a letter to the National Trust asking the group to drop its case.
The National Trust declined.
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