The Work of Sharing Black Stories

A photo of a mural at St. James AME Church in Mayfield, Kentucky, that survived a 2021 tornado that severely damaged the rest of the church.

In the crowded field of marketing, the Washington, D.C.-based Creative Theory Agency stands out for a few reasons, including the fact that the firm is Black-owned and focuses specifically on achieving cultural diversity and equity through its campaigns.

So, when the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund was looking for an agency that would help tell the hugely important story of its work preserving Black places, the fit felt natural. 

Danielle Burgess is one of the creative producers who has been working with the Action Fund to tell these compelling stories. But Burgess says she’s gotten something from the work, too. She says her work with the Action Fund has ignited a love of architecture and Black history. Creating campaigns that physically take up space and highlight underrepresented communities has been increasingly on her mind as her home city, Los Angeles, prepares to host the Olympics in 2028.

She also thought about this as she was working on a video campaign for the Action Fund’s Preserving Black Churches program that was released earlier. The program provides annual grant funding to preserve historic religious sites within the Black community. 

Burgess was on the team that traveled to Mayfield, Kentucky, to film during the rebuilding of St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church following a tornado in 2021. The Action Fund, which granted the church $100,000 through its emergency grant program, said the significant damage to the building was “just one example of the harmful effects of climate change on historic structures and communities.” The poignant video captured by Creative Theory showcases clergy and churchgoers inside a shell of the building. The church is in the midst of fundraising to complete the final stages of construction work, and is hoping to announce a set date for reopening in the coming year. 

I spoke to Burgess about working with the Action Fund to highlight stories about historic preservation and Black history. 

What type of brands does Creative Theory Agency typically work with, and how has the work you’ve produced for the Action Fund been different? 

We’ve established some great relationships with long-term partners, the Action Fund being one of them. Being able to grow [in] storytelling with the same brand teams has been really exciting for all of us. We work largely with Google, Meta, and those types of tech brands. It’s cool with the Action Fund to do community-specific work.

We became baby preservationists and really started to understand the importance of preserving [Black] spaces.

From a production standpoint, how do you showcase the agency’s mission in your work?

People just think of the asset or the final deliverable, but it goes all the way down to how we treat talent, how we hire crew, how we engage the client. We’re truly community-minded. It informs everything. 

We really come from a perspective of [asking ourselves], “How do we make this truly personal for the person watching?” It’s not about pushing an agenda necessarily. It’s about really thinking about what the work needs and how we can engage the audience from a communal point of view, instead of a singular point of view. 

What’s an example of one of the campaigns you’ve done for the Action Fund recently?

For me, our hallmark project was Preserving Black Churches, which wrapped earlier this year. We went to four different churches, largely across the South, and documented the stories of these churches. It can be hard to connect to a physical space; however, as we began to research, we really began to understand how a space can hold so many important moments. 

We were at Sixteenth Street [Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama] and … to be able to tell the story of how important that building is to that community was really exciting. We went in [asking ourselves], “How do you personify space?” It really is just showing the beautiful work and dedication that went into physically making the space, while telling the story of the people that occupied it. 

Has there been a project where you’ve worked to tell the story of a space that isn’t actively in use, or the folks that once occupied that space are long gone?

One of the churches we covered in that series was not in use. There was a church [St. James AME] that we covered in Mayfield, [Kentucky] that was flattened by a tornado and so it was currently being rebuilt. This beautiful mural by Helen LaFrance was still standing. We filmed the pastor’s interview [at] the church. 

Has there been a preservation story you’ve worked on that has taught you something about Black history that really resonated with you?

The biggest one is Paul R. Williams. I had no idea who this man was, but he was a Black modernist architect, and he did a lot of buildings here in LA. It’s interesting because the Action Fund also partnered with Getty to preserve a lot of Black modernist work. 
Finding out about Paul R. Williams, I live right up the street from his Golden State Life building [and] it’s just cool to know that there’s this really cool Black architect that I don’t [think] most people know about. There’s this [site] called the Theme Building, and it looks like a spaceship. It looks like something out of The Jetsons. It’s just a really, really cool part of Black history.

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