Slave Descendant Quotas Prove Disastrous for Historic Site Boards
- An Insider’s View of the Turmoil
August 2025 - April 2026
UPDATE 4/14/26 - Brent Leggs, active participant in the creation of the Rubric, is expected to replace Carole Quillen as president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in June. Recently, Montpelier’s board changed leadership. The executive committee is now evenly split between Montpelier Descendants Committee (MDC) and non-MDC board members. The question becomes whether Leggs as president of the National Trust will push Montpelier to save the Rubric.
From our insider:
Brent Leggs, Vice President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Executive Director of the African American Cultural Heritage Fund, aka the African American History Department of the National Trust, is a very impressive man. He is dapper, intelligent, and a talented architectural historian. Coming onto the staff of the National Trust in 2005, Mr. Legg has been able to facilitate and fund an ambitious project and steer the National Trust’s attention toward African American history and culture.
Glance at the National Trust website and you see evidence of this shift - not toward the inclusion of African American historic and cultural preservation, but toward the domination of the Trust’s entire attention. Many applaud this change saying that the Trust’s focus was too “white American” centric and that it is about time African American History be recognized by the Trust. However, the idea that the National Trust must encourage the public and historic institutions to “tell the whole truth” has, in the eyes of many, gone beyond a balanced telling of our collective history, which, after this change, has former contributors closing their purses and reducing their financial support for the National Trust.
The idea that our history must “tell the whole truth” is not debated among thinking people. How this is to be done is the question and is the dividing line which pits traditional preservationists against “next generation” preservationists. First, traditional preservationists want the whole story told, but without undermining the most important story. For example, at all four of the Presidential Founding Fathers’ homes in Virginia, the story of these Founders being slave holders has never been hidden. Besides the main houses, these properties exhibit both the ruins and reconstructed housing and outbuildings where slaves lived and worked. Mt. Vernon and Monticello are successfully telling the stories of Washington and Jefferson without being overwhelmed or eclipsed by the slave story. Montpelier and Highland have been repeatedly criticized for focusing on slavery more than the lives and contributions of James Madison and James Monroe.
As the story goes, members of the African American community, dissatisfied with the efforts of historical properties, latched onto the concept of “stakeholders” and demanded that historical sites, especially those with history of slavery, must and should share power in the administration and control of those properties.
This story is supported by what happened at James Monroe’s plantation, which is entrusted to William and Mary University. Dr. Michael Blakey, an anthropologist and NEH Professor of American Studies at William and Mary, can be credited with pushing this stakeholder concept among the slave Descendants, first at Highland and later at Montpelier. The two slave descendant groups were merged and came under the name Montpelier Descendants Committee.
A little-known fact is the Mellon Foundation gave William and Mary $1 million for “inclusive research and community development” in 2019. In late spring 2018, Montpelier encouraged and enabled the formation of the Montpelier Descendants Committee first presided over by James French.
In all honesty, it wasn’t African Americans’ descendants who pushed this stakeholder approach. It was the then-Presidents and Chairmen of both the National Trust and Montpelier Foundation that facilitated and propelled this concept forward. The result was that the National Trust and Montpelier Foundation convened a group to discuss the participation of “slave descendants” in the administrative functions of slaveholding historic sites. This meeting occurred in February, 2018. This meeting produced the Rubric for Best Museum Practices, which was later used as the basis of a policy being adopted at the National Trust having consequences at Montpelier that have endangered the Foundation by alienating long-time donors and supporters.
Montpelier, suffering from diminished community support, has struggled to stay afloat. The sea change in support started with the opening of the “Mere Distinction of Colour” exhibit in 2017 and got progressively weaker and almost non-existent after 2021. Without the backing of the National Trust, the African American Action Fund, and the Mellon Foundation, Montpelier’s doors would be closed.
The saddest story is, one major donor, so alienated and insulted by what occurred on Montpelier’s board level, recently gifted a small university over $10 million dollars, the amount he had intended to bequeath to Montpelier upon death. This is not the only supporter that has changed estate plans which would have benefitted Montpelier. It is rumored Montpelier has lost several million dollars in testamentary bequests.
Brent Legg, without a doubt, was and is a master at leveraging connections. He was also a beneficiary of living at the right time, historically, among the Nation’s best funded and endowed foundations - three power house foundations led by other African Americans and/or reputed leftist-leaning liberals. This exclusive club of African American leaders and liberals in major foundations, united and undertook a plan to use their institutions to further sympathetic, more inclusive and diverse communities and causes. That plan of united forces led to the creation of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund in November, 2017, which started with a combined $25 million donation by Ford, JPB (now Freedom Together), and the Open Society Foundations. Today the fund has an endowment of $140 million dollars.
And who are the players in this game? Elizabeth Alexander, President of the Mellon Foundation and Darren Walker, former President of The Ford Foundation until late 2025. He stepped down due to allegations that the Ford Foundation interfered with Kenyan governmental affairs by backing and funding anti-government protests. JPB Foundation’s president, Barbara Picower, and close friend of Darren Walker, founder of JPB foundation, was funded by Bernie Madoff investments and The Open Society, a George Soros founded charitable group.
But evidence shows the Mellon Foundation under the leadership of Elizabeth Alexander has been a primary benefactor of African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. From 1975 to 2017, the Mellon Foundation granted The National Historic Trust $2,070,000, given in eight separate grants ranging from $25,000 to $500,000.00. All these grants were labeled as arts and cultural grants. In 2018, under the new leadership of Elizabeth Alexander, the grants to the Trust exploded. These grants were labeled “Presidential Initiative” grants. Presidential Initiative refers to Alexander’s pet projects including the “Monument’s Project” and others. The smallest of these grants is $2 million in 2018 to establish the African American Cultural Fund at the National Trust (followed by 2019-$5 million, 2021- $1,15 million, 2022-$7.5 million, 2023-$5.25 million). Mellon, also circumventing the National Trust, gave Montpelier Foundation $5.78 million to build the “Montpelier Descendants Committee” (MDC) as an organization and for the creation of a slave memorial.
The Ford Foundation has given substantial support to the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. But the Foundation did not stop its former President Darren Walker from co-chairing the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund Advisory Board. This has produced frowns among people who find the apparent conflict of interest problematic. This advisory board also includes another foundation executive, Dana Bourland, of the JPB Foundation.
One of the most destructive actions of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, under Executive Director Brent Leggs, was to undermine the Montpelier Foundation Board by insisting that the Rubric was official National Trust Policy that had to be implemented post haste. This policy conceived as a guideline was imposed on the Montpelier Foundation, resulting in a brutal public fight, in which Montpelier Board members were labeled as “racist” for not wanting to hand over 50 percent of Montpelier’s board seats for new board members nominated by the “Montpelier Descendants Committee.” The “Descendants” Committee literally became comprised of anyone with an interest in participating, marginalizing true descendants of slaves.
What the Washington Post failed to report was the board had reservations. They did not know who and what the MDC was. They also could not come to an agreement on how descendant representation should be handled on the board level or negotiate an agreement as to MDC and Montpelier’s relationship.
After being forced to accept or hand over the board to the MDC, the majority of the board resigned in protest. With those board members went the grassroots supporters that conceived the Montpelier Foundation and built an organization which became renowned for its accomplishments.
Donors left because they thought the Foundation was more interested in slavery and Madison as a slave owner than in Madison’s life and the Constitution. They also rejected being called racist for not wanting to hand over half of the Board to the MDC.
Since June 2021, the Montpelier Foundation has struggled. Instead of equally distributing administrative oversight among various stakeholders as intended, the board has completely flipped and is dominated by MDC members. Not one board member who is not allied with MDC holds any executive position.
A former president, Eola Dance, resigned November 2024. Eola Dance, a black MDC hire, resigned citing personal reasons but it is high likely her exit was prompted by her inability to fundraise and deal with the fallout of having unfunded operations budgets. It is the staff that keeps the Foundation running, the same staff the MDC wanted replaced with 50 percent minority workers. And for all the people saying MDC should share power, half of its board members have not attended most of its board meetings, making it difficult to conduct business without quorums.
The question is, how long will the National Historic Trust, African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and Mellon Foundation continue to pay for their mistake at Montpelier? Almost the entire operating budget at Montpelier is now funded by them. And what effect will the changing political climate and Trump administration rejection of DEI ideology have on the National Trust? And how long will Elizabeth Alexander preside over the Mellon Foundation and what happens to her initiatives once she is gone?
The biggest question - how long will the National Trust survive given its policies that undermine the preservationist community and organizations which the Trust was founded to support and assist? The Historic Trust Board has already faced a lawsuit for undermining one of its affiliate historic sites. The board of the Oatlands, a Virginia Historic preservation Trust site, tried to sue the members of the National Historic Trust board individually over the a conservation easement and how funds were distributed. The Historic Trust got away with murder at Montpelier, but it has been paying the price ever since. The current situation is unsustainable.
- An Insider’s View of the Turmoil
August 2025 - April 2026
UPDATE 4/14/26 - Brent Leggs, active participant in the creation of the Rubric, is expected to replace Carole Quillen as president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in June. Recently, Montpelier’s board changed leadership. The executive committee is now evenly split between Montpelier Descendants Committee (MDC) and non-MDC board members. The question becomes whether Leggs as president of the National Trust will push Montpelier to save the Rubric.
- In 2018, a document known in short as “the Rubric” advocated that slave descendants be given representation at all levels of historical “institutions” and “organizations”, including museums and the nation’s historic sites. The result has been a disaster, as the insider account below shows.
The Rubric is formally entitled, “Engaging Descendant Communities in the Interpretation of Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites - A Rubric of Best Practices Established by the National Summit on Teaching Slavery”. It was produced by the National Trust for Historic Preservation African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund with questions to be directed to the Montpelier Foundation. The key section advocating slave descendant quotas - “Structural Parity” - states at p. 10: “Exemplary structural parity occurs when members of the descendant community are represented and empowered at every level of the institution – board, senior leadership, supervisors, junior staff, and volunteers.”
Where the Rubric has been implemented, the result has been mass board resignations, the loss of grassroots support and donations, foregone bequests, and bad feeling all around. Surely this cannot be the way forward.
From our insider:
Brent Leggs, Vice President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Executive Director of the African American Cultural Heritage Fund, aka the African American History Department of the National Trust, is a very impressive man. He is dapper, intelligent, and a talented architectural historian. Coming onto the staff of the National Trust in 2005, Mr. Legg has been able to facilitate and fund an ambitious project and steer the National Trust’s attention toward African American history and culture.
Glance at the National Trust website and you see evidence of this shift - not toward the inclusion of African American historic and cultural preservation, but toward the domination of the Trust’s entire attention. Many applaud this change saying that the Trust’s focus was too “white American” centric and that it is about time African American History be recognized by the Trust. However, the idea that the National Trust must encourage the public and historic institutions to “tell the whole truth” has, in the eyes of many, gone beyond a balanced telling of our collective history, which, after this change, has former contributors closing their purses and reducing their financial support for the National Trust.
The idea that our history must “tell the whole truth” is not debated among thinking people. How this is to be done is the question and is the dividing line which pits traditional preservationists against “next generation” preservationists. First, traditional preservationists want the whole story told, but without undermining the most important story. For example, at all four of the Presidential Founding Fathers’ homes in Virginia, the story of these Founders being slave holders has never been hidden. Besides the main houses, these properties exhibit both the ruins and reconstructed housing and outbuildings where slaves lived and worked. Mt. Vernon and Monticello are successfully telling the stories of Washington and Jefferson without being overwhelmed or eclipsed by the slave story. Montpelier and Highland have been repeatedly criticized for focusing on slavery more than the lives and contributions of James Madison and James Monroe.
As the story goes, members of the African American community, dissatisfied with the efforts of historical properties, latched onto the concept of “stakeholders” and demanded that historical sites, especially those with history of slavery, must and should share power in the administration and control of those properties.
This story is supported by what happened at James Monroe’s plantation, which is entrusted to William and Mary University. Dr. Michael Blakey, an anthropologist and NEH Professor of American Studies at William and Mary, can be credited with pushing this stakeholder concept among the slave Descendants, first at Highland and later at Montpelier. The two slave descendant groups were merged and came under the name Montpelier Descendants Committee.
A little-known fact is the Mellon Foundation gave William and Mary $1 million for “inclusive research and community development” in 2019. In late spring 2018, Montpelier encouraged and enabled the formation of the Montpelier Descendants Committee first presided over by James French.
In all honesty, it wasn’t African Americans’ descendants who pushed this stakeholder approach. It was the then-Presidents and Chairmen of both the National Trust and Montpelier Foundation that facilitated and propelled this concept forward. The result was that the National Trust and Montpelier Foundation convened a group to discuss the participation of “slave descendants” in the administrative functions of slaveholding historic sites. This meeting occurred in February, 2018. This meeting produced the Rubric for Best Museum Practices, which was later used as the basis of a policy being adopted at the National Trust having consequences at Montpelier that have endangered the Foundation by alienating long-time donors and supporters.
Montpelier, suffering from diminished community support, has struggled to stay afloat. The sea change in support started with the opening of the “Mere Distinction of Colour” exhibit in 2017 and got progressively weaker and almost non-existent after 2021. Without the backing of the National Trust, the African American Action Fund, and the Mellon Foundation, Montpelier’s doors would be closed.
The saddest story is, one major donor, so alienated and insulted by what occurred on Montpelier’s board level, recently gifted a small university over $10 million dollars, the amount he had intended to bequeath to Montpelier upon death. This is not the only supporter that has changed estate plans which would have benefitted Montpelier. It is rumored Montpelier has lost several million dollars in testamentary bequests.
Brent Legg, without a doubt, was and is a master at leveraging connections. He was also a beneficiary of living at the right time, historically, among the Nation’s best funded and endowed foundations - three power house foundations led by other African Americans and/or reputed leftist-leaning liberals. This exclusive club of African American leaders and liberals in major foundations, united and undertook a plan to use their institutions to further sympathetic, more inclusive and diverse communities and causes. That plan of united forces led to the creation of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund in November, 2017, which started with a combined $25 million donation by Ford, JPB (now Freedom Together), and the Open Society Foundations. Today the fund has an endowment of $140 million dollars.
And who are the players in this game? Elizabeth Alexander, President of the Mellon Foundation and Darren Walker, former President of The Ford Foundation until late 2025. He stepped down due to allegations that the Ford Foundation interfered with Kenyan governmental affairs by backing and funding anti-government protests. JPB Foundation’s president, Barbara Picower, and close friend of Darren Walker, founder of JPB foundation, was funded by Bernie Madoff investments and The Open Society, a George Soros founded charitable group.
But evidence shows the Mellon Foundation under the leadership of Elizabeth Alexander has been a primary benefactor of African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. From 1975 to 2017, the Mellon Foundation granted The National Historic Trust $2,070,000, given in eight separate grants ranging from $25,000 to $500,000.00. All these grants were labeled as arts and cultural grants. In 2018, under the new leadership of Elizabeth Alexander, the grants to the Trust exploded. These grants were labeled “Presidential Initiative” grants. Presidential Initiative refers to Alexander’s pet projects including the “Monument’s Project” and others. The smallest of these grants is $2 million in 2018 to establish the African American Cultural Fund at the National Trust (followed by 2019-$5 million, 2021- $1,15 million, 2022-$7.5 million, 2023-$5.25 million). Mellon, also circumventing the National Trust, gave Montpelier Foundation $5.78 million to build the “Montpelier Descendants Committee” (MDC) as an organization and for the creation of a slave memorial.
The Ford Foundation has given substantial support to the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. But the Foundation did not stop its former President Darren Walker from co-chairing the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund Advisory Board. This has produced frowns among people who find the apparent conflict of interest problematic. This advisory board also includes another foundation executive, Dana Bourland, of the JPB Foundation.
One of the most destructive actions of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, under Executive Director Brent Leggs, was to undermine the Montpelier Foundation Board by insisting that the Rubric was official National Trust Policy that had to be implemented post haste. This policy conceived as a guideline was imposed on the Montpelier Foundation, resulting in a brutal public fight, in which Montpelier Board members were labeled as “racist” for not wanting to hand over 50 percent of Montpelier’s board seats for new board members nominated by the “Montpelier Descendants Committee.” The “Descendants” Committee literally became comprised of anyone with an interest in participating, marginalizing true descendants of slaves.
What the Washington Post failed to report was the board had reservations. They did not know who and what the MDC was. They also could not come to an agreement on how descendant representation should be handled on the board level or negotiate an agreement as to MDC and Montpelier’s relationship.
After being forced to accept or hand over the board to the MDC, the majority of the board resigned in protest. With those board members went the grassroots supporters that conceived the Montpelier Foundation and built an organization which became renowned for its accomplishments.
Donors left because they thought the Foundation was more interested in slavery and Madison as a slave owner than in Madison’s life and the Constitution. They also rejected being called racist for not wanting to hand over half of the Board to the MDC.
Since June 2021, the Montpelier Foundation has struggled. Instead of equally distributing administrative oversight among various stakeholders as intended, the board has completely flipped and is dominated by MDC members. Not one board member who is not allied with MDC holds any executive position.
A former president, Eola Dance, resigned November 2024. Eola Dance, a black MDC hire, resigned citing personal reasons but it is high likely her exit was prompted by her inability to fundraise and deal with the fallout of having unfunded operations budgets. It is the staff that keeps the Foundation running, the same staff the MDC wanted replaced with 50 percent minority workers. And for all the people saying MDC should share power, half of its board members have not attended most of its board meetings, making it difficult to conduct business without quorums.
The question is, how long will the National Historic Trust, African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and Mellon Foundation continue to pay for their mistake at Montpelier? Almost the entire operating budget at Montpelier is now funded by them. And what effect will the changing political climate and Trump administration rejection of DEI ideology have on the National Trust? And how long will Elizabeth Alexander preside over the Mellon Foundation and what happens to her initiatives once she is gone?
The biggest question - how long will the National Trust survive given its policies that undermine the preservationist community and organizations which the Trust was founded to support and assist? The Historic Trust Board has already faced a lawsuit for undermining one of its affiliate historic sites. The board of the Oatlands, a Virginia Historic preservation Trust site, tried to sue the members of the National Historic Trust board individually over the a conservation easement and how funds were distributed. The Historic Trust got away with murder at Montpelier, but it has been paying the price ever since. The current situation is unsustainable.