Asheville African American Heritage Architectural Survey

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Table of Contents

List of Figures ...... 3 Introduction ...... 9 Methodology ...... 10 Historic Overview ...... 12 Asheville, 1800–1860 ...... 12 Asheville 1865–1898 ...... 14 Jim Crow and Segregation ...... 20 The African American Community Responds ...... 26 The Boom Ends and the Great Depression ...... 32 World War II 1940-1945 ...... 37 Post-War, 1945–1965 ...... 39 Fighting for Public Accommodations and Jobs ...... 47 School Desegregation ...... 52 Highway Construction and Urban Renewal—An Overview ...... 58 Asheville since Urban Renewal ...... 61 Neighborhood Histories and Descriptions ...... 63 East End-Valley Street ...... 65 Southside/French Broad ...... 83 Clayton Hill/South Asheville/St. John ‘A’ Baptist ...... 112 Stumptown ...... 119 Hill Street ...... 124 Asheville Loan & Construction Company/Magnolia Park ...... 133 Inventoried Properties ...... 137 Chestnut Hill/Heart of Chestnut...... 138 Park View/Burton Street ...... 144 Brooklyn/Shiloh ...... 153 1

National Register Study List ...... 175 Wilson Building, 13 Eagle Street...... 175 Rabbit’s Motel, 110 McDowell Street ...... 175 Walton Pool, 570 Oakland Road ...... 175 Priorities for Future African American Heritage Surveys ...... 176 Bibliography ...... 182 Books and Book Chapters ...... 182 Journals ...... 185 Theses and Dissertations ...... 186 Newspapers & Magazines...... 186 Government Documents ...... 187 Archival Collections ...... 188 Inventoried Properties ...... 189

List of Figures

Figure 1. 1939 WPA Race of Household Map and Asheville neighborhoods. (Works Progress Administration)...... 8 Figure 2. Model of Pack Square in 1924 showing 1915 racial restrictions. African Americans were restricted to the benches in the bottom square, whites to the top (Rory Krupp, model, Pack Memorial Library)...... 23 Figure 3. Burton Street resident E. W. Pearson in his United Negro Improvement Association uniform, ca. 1922...... 28 Figure 4. An advertisement from the United Negro Improvement Association newspaper Negro World accusing Pearson of corruption...... 29 Figure 5. Teenagers attend a reading at the Y.M.I. library. (Pack Memorial Library, North Carolina Room Collection)...... 31 Figure 6. Asheville 1937 Home Owners Loan Corporation residential security map...... 35 Figure 7. West Asheville resident Hattie Love (fifth from left) at NAACP national convention in late 1940s (Ramsey Library Special Collections UNC Asheville)...... 38 Figure 8. East End and Southside housing in 1946. Photos 1 and 4 were on Poplar Street, Photograph 2 was on Asheland Ave. Number 3 was on McDowell St. (© Asheville Citizen- Times) ...... 39 Figure 9. Asheville Colored Hospital, later the Jesse Ray Funeral Home (Photo: Amy Ridenour)...... 41 Figure 10. Asheville jeweler and ASCORE advisor William Roland. (D. H. Ramsey Special Collections, UNCA)...... 50 Figure 11. Marvin Chambers became the first African American to work in American Enka’s engineering department in 1963 (© Asheville Citizen-Times)...... 51 Figure 12. Asheville student leader Leo Gaines in 1972 (© Ashville Citizen-Times)...... 53 Figure 13. Asheville High School 1969 rebellion advisor Preston Dobbins (left) burns a Confederate flag at a UNC, Chapel Hill, white fraternity after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death (Daily Tarheel)...... 54 Figure 14. Asheville high school students walk out while Principal Clark Pennell (foreground) watches (©rogerball)...... 55 Figure 15. New residents at Klondyke Homes in 1975 (Ramsey Library Special Collections, UNC Asheville)...... 60 Figure 16. The Erskine barricade is a relic from the war on drugs of the 1990s...... 61 Figure 17. East End/Valley Street in 1939 (Works Progress Administration)...... 64 Figure 18. Stephens-Lee Annual 1952-1953 with shop class house under construction...... 68

Figure 19. Pine Street house constructed by the 1952-53 Stephens-Lee shop class (Rory Krupp)...... 69 Figure 20. Stephens-Lee High School band and music teacher Madison Lennon...... 70 Figure 21. 1953 Architect’s rendering of the Allen School Dormitory (© Asheville Citizen- Times)...... 71 Figure 22. An Allen School advertisement from the late 1960s...... 72 Figure 23. Lee-Walker Heights public housing complex after its opening in 1951 (Pack Memorial Library, North Carolina Room Collection)...... 73 Figure 24. Downtown and East End-Valley Street Surveyed properties...... 78 Figure 25. East End-Valley Street neighborhood surveyed properties...... 79 Figure 26. East End-Valley Street neighborhood surveyed properties...... 80 Figure 27. Southside neighborhood map in 1939 (Works Progress Administration)...... 82 Figure 28. Asheville resident Julia Ray, nee Greenlee (far right) in the January 16, 1932 Pittsburgh Courier...... 84 Figure 29. Walton Pool in the 1950s (Courtesy of the Isaiah Rice Photograph Collection, Special Collections, Ramsey Library, UNC Asheville. ) ...... 87 Figure 30. Walton Street Pool in the 1950s (Courtesy of the Isaiah Rice Photograph Collection, Special Collections, Ramsey Library, UNC Asheville)...... 88 Figure 31. Rabbit’s Motel at 110 McDowell Street (Rory Krupp)...... 91 Figure 32. 1966 Jade Club advertisements. (Copyright: Asheville Citizen-Times)...... 92 Figure 33. Cornelia Vanderbilt, seated on left pillow, at her twenty-first birthday masquerade party. Hair styled by Mae McCorkle, 87 Blanton Street...... 94 Figure 34. Rev. Wesley Grant Sr.’s Worldwide Missionary Baptist Tabernacle on Choctaw Street...... 95 Figure 35. A 1966 Southside block map showing houses to be demolished or rehabbed (Housing Authority of City of Asheville, Ramsey Library Special Collections)...... 98 Figure 36. Livingston Apartments in the Southside (Rory Krupp)...... 99 Figure 37. Aerial photographs of the Southside in 1963 (left) and 1975 (right) showing areas with removed houses and landscape changes in the Livingston Street area (City of Asheville).101 Figure 38. Livingston and Depot Streets in 1975 (Housing Authority of City of Asheville, Ramsey Library Special Collections, UNC Asheville)...... 101 Figure 39. Intersection of South French Broad and Livingston Street in 1975 (Housing Authority of City of Asheville, Ramsey Library Special Collections)...... 102 Figure 40. Lacy Haith developed Oakland Forest in the late 1960s...... 103 Figure 41. An urban renewal infill house on Ora Street built by Lacy Haith in 1975 (Rory Krupp)...... 104 Figure 42. James Green, founder of Greens Mini Mart & Deli on Depot Street (2010 Youtube video still [Ray Mapp])...... 106 Figure 43. Southside neighborhood surveyed properties...... 107 Figure 44. Southside neighborhood surveyed properties...... 107

Figure 45. Surveyed Southside properties...... 108 Figure 46. South Asheville neighborhood in 1939 (Works Progress Administration)...... 111 Figure 47. St. John ‘A’ Baptist Church in South Asheville (Rory Krupp)...... 113 Figure 48. The Withers family operated a grocery store at 86 Wyoming Road from 1929 to the mid-1960s (Rory Krupp)...... 114 Figure 49. Harvest House Recreation Center, formerly a South Asheville community grocery store (Rory Krupp)...... 115 Figure 50. South Asheville surveyed properties...... 116 Figure 51. Stumptown neighborhood in 1917...... 118 Figure 52. Undated Photograph of Welfare Baptist Church (Stumptown Reunion Collection, Pack Memorial Library, North Carolina Room)...... 120 Figure 53. Welfare Baptist Church converted into a home in Stumptown (Rory Krupp)...... 121 Figure 54. Surveyed properties in Stumptown...... 123 Figure 55. 1917 Sanborn Fire Insurance map of the Hill Street neighborhood with Hill Street Baptist in lower left corner. Campbell’s Woods is the blank area left corner...... 124 Figure 56. Hill Street Bapist Church (Rory Krupp)...... 125 Figure 57. Hillcrest Apartments under construction in 1958 (© Asheville Citizen-Times)...... 126 Figure 58. Sycamore Church of God in Christ (Rory Krupp)...... 127 Figure 59. Hillcrest Apartments with 1990 renovations (Rory Krupp)...... 129 Figure 60. Shirley Hemphill in her ABC series, “One in a Million” (Ebony Magazine, 1980). 130 Figure 61. Hillcrest neighborhood surveyed properties...... 131 Figure 62. 1917 Sanborn Fire Insurance map showing Magnolia Park neighborhood. Red houses mark African American occupancy. Magnolia Park is located at northeast corner of Magnolia and Flint...... 133 Figure 63. From left, Montford residents Tessie Woods, St. Ola Mapp and Fairfax Arnold, Montford Resource Center, working on Magnolia Park renovation in 1996 (Photo: Tula Andonaras, copyright Asheville Citizen-Times)...... 136 Figure 64. Magnolia surveyed properties...... 137 Figure 65. John Brooks Dendy won 52 golf tournaments, including three Negro National Opens in the 1930s...... 138 Figure 66. Tuskegee Airman 2nd Lt. Robert C. Robinson grew up on North Crescent St...... 140 Figure 67. Inventoried Chestnut Hill properties...... 142 Figure 68. Burton Street neighborhood in 1939 (Works Progress Administration)...... 143 Figure 69. 1916 Asheville Royal Giants (Pack Memorial Library, North Carolina Room Collection)...... 145 Figure 70. The former Dreamland Café at 173 Burton Street (Rory Krupp)...... 147 Figure 71. 212 Fayetteville Street in 2019 (Photo: Rory Krupp)...... 148 Figure 72. 212 Fayetteville Street in late 1950s (Photo: Isaiah Rice Collection, University of North Carolina Asheville)...... 149

Figure 73. Mrs. Iola Byers with prospective teenage patrons of the Burton Street Community Center in April 1963 (Photo: copyright Asheville Citizen-Times)...... 150 Figure 74. St. Paul Baptist Church, erected in 1975 (Rory Krupp)...... 151 Figure 75. Burton Street Inventoried Properties...... 152 Figure 76. Original Shiloh Church (Photo: Pack Library, North Carolina Room Collection). .. 153 Figure 77. Brooklyn Fire Baptized Holiness Church on Brooklyn Road (Rory Krupp)...... 154 Figure 78. Early Shiloh front gable house...... 156 Figure 79. 1926 Roosevelt Park Plat (Buncombe County Register of Deeds)...... 156 Figure 80. Shiloh Rosenwald School ...... 157 Figure 81. 1949 Lincoln Park Plat (Buncombe County Register of Deeds)...... 158 Figure 82. The Shiloh Community League operated a concession stand on this site to fund their activities (Rory Krupp)...... 159 Figure 83. 1952 Whitehurst Park Plat (Buncombe County Register of Deeds)...... 161 Figure 84. FHA small house design in the Whitehurst Park subdivision (Rory Krupp)...... 162 Figure 85. 30 Taft Avenue, constructed for Hill Street residents forced out by highway construction...... 163 Figure 86. Young’s Rest Home on Caribou Road (Rory Krupp)...... 164 Figure 87. High Meadows subdivision advertisement, 1971 (Copyright Asheville Citizen-Times)...... 165 Figure 88. Venus Lodge Masonic Lodge No. 62, F & A.M., Prince Hall Affiliated. (Rory Krupp)...... 167 Figure 89. Shiloh Inventoried Properties...... 168 Figure 90. Shiloh Inventoried Properties...... 169 Figure 91. Shiloh Inventoried Properties...... 170 Figure 92. Shiloh Inventoried Properties...... 171 Figure 93. Shiloh Inventoried Properties...... 171 Figure 94. Proposed Shiloh and Brooklyn future survey area (NC HPO WEB)...... 178 Figure 95. Proposed Burton Street survey area (orange dashed line) based on 1939 WPA Real Estate Index neighborhood boundaries...... 179 Figure 96. Southside neighborhood survey recommendations...... 180

Figure 1. 1939 WPA Race of Household Map and Asheville neighborhoods. (Works Progress Administration).

Introduction

The Asheville African American Heritage Survey was funded by a grant from the National Park Service Historic Preservation Fund. The grant and the project were administered by the City of Asheville, Department of Planning & Urban Design.

Research was conducted in order to discover the context of African American history in Asheville. Urban renewal activities in Stumptown, Southside and East End destroyed many of the traditional commercial property types. However, archival research, city directories, and interviews revealed a rich African American tradition of home-based businesses embedded in residential neighborhoods, including stores, barbershops, and beauty parlors. Urban renewal also removed a number of churches but many congregations returned. These post-urban renewal churches were inventoried. Urban renewal and highway construction forced many people from their neighborhoods in central Asheville. The survey documented this diaspora within Asheville; public housing projects developed for urban renewal; and new infill housing in cleared areas. The survey also inventoried African American mid-century modern suburbs and middle-class subdivisions within Asheville. The survey is meant to be a starting place to illustrate the wide variety of buildings associated with African American life in Asheville from 1900–75. It is also meant to illustrate the neighborhoods, new and old, that make for such a rich African American heritage in Asheville.

Methodology

The survey methodology adhered to the North Carolina Historic Preservation Office architectural survey manual Practical Advice for Recording Historic Resources. The survey historic narrative is a synthesis of previous research and new archival and secondary sources.

Owen & Eastlake, historic preservation consultants—Rory Krupp, historian and Roy Hampton, architectural historian—conducted the survey. Krupp and Hampton both meet the Secretary of the Interior’s Professional Standards for both history and architectural history.

The City of Asheville Department of Planning & Urban Design conducted two public meetings in order to engage the community in the survey project. Both staff and the consultant shared presentations which highlighted historic preservation efforts in Asheville, architectural survey methodology, the city’s vision for forming a more complex narrative of Asheville’s history, as well as the consultant’s qualifications and past work in documenting African American history.

As part of the scope of work for the project the city asked community members to participate in sharing their personal stories about African American history via oral interviews with the consultant. The consultant collected interviews from Cissy Dendy, resident of the Chestnut Hill neighborhood; Viola Spells Jones, a member of the African American Heritage Commission; and Anita White Carter, resident of the Shiloh neighborhood. These will be donated to the Pack Memorial Library North Carolina Room.

The survey project was managed by Historic Preservation Planner Alex Cole, with support from Long Range Planning Manager Stacy Merten and NC HPO Preservation Specialist Annie McDonald.

Their work was augmented by an advisory council: Brenda Mills, City of Asheville Neighborhood and Community Engagement Manager; Antanette Mosley, African American Heritage Resource Commission of Asheville and Buncombe County; Valeria Watson, Historic Resources Commission of Asheville and Buncombe County; Billie Buie, City of Asheville Neighborhood Advisory Committee; Jack Thomson, Director, Preservation Society of Asheville & Buncombe County; Annie McDonald, Preservation Specialist, North Carolina Preservation Office; and Josi Ward, Preservation Society of Asheville and Buncombe County.

Additionally the staff and consultants worked with a small focus group comprised of community members to prioritize historic resources for survey. The advisory group focused on extant commercial and institutional buildings in five Asheville neighborhoods: Burton Street, East End, Stumptown, Southside, Heart of Chestnut and Shiloh. Many, but not all, of these neighborhoods have experienced urban renewal or highway construction and the focus of the survey was to identify surviving historic properties.

Invaluable assistance was provided by Zoe Rhine and Katherine Calhoun Cutshall at the Pack Memorial Library North Carolina Room and by Gene Hyde, curator of Special Collections at University of North Carolina, Asheville. Lisa Withers, with the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission North Carolina Green Book project, shared information and support along with focus group members Rasheeda McDaniels, Catherine Mitchell, Roy Harris, Sekou Coleman, and Zoe Rhine. We would also like to thank the many people we met while conducting our survey. Your help and hospitality were greatly appreciated.

Asheville’s African American neighborhoods were identified in a number of ways including city directories, newspaper accounts, and government records. In two public meetings, community members helped to draw neighborhood boundaries on city maps.

Ultimately, seven historic African American neighborhoods were identified using these resources: Burton Street, Southside, Hill Street, Magnolia Street, Stumptown, East End/Valley Street, and Heart of Chestnut.1

One neighborhood, South Asheville, was identified only through maps and newspapers and confirmed by directories. Two neighborhoods were identified through maps and directories. These (Magnolia and Fairmont) were named after a neighborhood street and church, respectively. Their historic names are still unknown.

1 The consultants referred to the 1937 Residential Security Map created by the Home Owners Loan Corporation. The map, known for its red-outlined (“redlined”) areas that mark deteriorating neighborhoods that could not receive

Historic Overview

Asheville, 1800–1860

Irish immigrant James Patton settled Asheville in 1791. He operated a general store and hotel. Western North Carolina’s mountain roads hindered access for the affluent that required baggage trains and comfortable stopovers. The Buncombe Turnpike, constructed in 1824, opened the area. Drovers were Asheville’s earliest consistent visitors, driving cattle and hogs to markets in northern South Carolina and northern Georgia. These early visitors, both drovers and their livestock, required food and lodging. Hotels and livestock pens sprang up to fill this market. Patton and others prospered. Early planters fled to South Carolina’s mountains in the first part of the nineteenth century to avoid yellow fever and other diseases thought to thrive in hot, still, and low areas and climates. However, with the turnpike’s opening more common visitors could easily visit western North Carolina.

At the advent of the Civil War 16 percent of Buncombe County’s population of 12,654 residents were African American; 1,933 were slaves and 111 were free blacks. While the slave system was somewhat less restrictive than in the Deep South it still bore all the hallmarks of slavery: forced family separations, corporal punishment, and the threat of sale to plantations in the Deep South.2 African American slaves did have slightly more autonomy due to the economy. The absence of large agricultural plantations meant that many slaves worked for those in the professional or mercantile class.3 Robert Henry, a Revolutionary War veteran and slaveholder, farmed somewhat unsuccessfully before starting a sawmill in the 1830s. His slaves dug the mill race by hand.4 They also operated a boarding house, another activity for which slave labor was used.

The Civil War

Like many Appalachian areas, western North Carolina was contested during the Civil War. Although many citizens joined the Confederate cause others were staunch Unionists. Some avoided service altogether or soon deserted from the Confederate army.5 Unlike eastern Tennessee and other parts of Appalachia, Asheville veered towards the Confederacy; however,

2 Steven E. Nash, “Aiding the Southern Mountain Republicans: The Freedmen’s Bureau in Buncombe County,” The North Carolina Historical Review 83, no. 1 (2006): 6. 3 John S. Inscoe, Mountain Masters:Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 63 4 Cornelia Henry, Fear in North Carolina: The Civil War Journals and Letters of the Henry Family, ed. Karen Clinard and Richard Russell (Asheville, NC: Reminiscing Books, 2008), viii. 5 Gordon McKinney, “The Klan in the Southern Mountains: The Luck-Shotwell Controversy,” Appalachian Journal 8, no. 2 (1991): 90. 12 surrounding areas were Unionist. Asheville’s white residents were enthusiastic participants in the heady days of secession. Asheville ladies went to Camp Woodfin, the first Confederate training camp in Buncombe County, and sang “Dixie” to the new soldiers, many of whom had never heard the song.6

In 1862, a number of Asheville’s businessmen (Ephraim Clayton, Dr. George Whitson and Col. Robert Pulliam) established an armory in Asheville. Not only was such a project lucrative, it also exempted eighty-seven Asheville men from the Confederate draft.7 It’s uncertain whether the enterprise was embarked upon to provide a haven for workers from military service or as a financial venture. What is certain is that the amount of arms produced was negligible and those that were produced were useless.8 By 1863, slaves replaced white workers. They were used for skilled production techniques and, unlike white workers, they could not quit. Nonetheless, federal raids and Unionist activity in East Tennessee where raw materials were procured inhibited overall production.9

West Asheville resident Cornelia Henry and her family were slaveholders. Her diary gives glimpses of African American life in Asheville during the war. Most entries are day-to-day accounts; for example, they obtained turkeys and slaughtered hogs in the winter of 1863. Agricultural activities seem to be predominant.

Union troops from Tennessee, the 101st Ohio Volunteer Infantry, moved towards Asheville on April 6, 1865 from the north. Confederate Col. John Palmer gathered a small force of 100–150 Home Guard troops and men on leave to man the earthworks north of Asheville along the French Broad River. The Ohio Infantry, misinformed and thinking they were confronting a much larger force that was going to be reinforced shortly, made a cursory assault and withdrew from Asheville.10

The reprieve was short-lived. Asheville was in the path of Stoneman’s Raid later in the month. In an action similar to Sherman’s in Georgia, Stoneman’s troops were to ravage eastern Tennessee and western North and South Carolina. Confederate General James C. Martin moved to block Stoneman’s advance but was outflanked as the Union troops went through Rutherford. Martin had moved troops to block Stoneman at Howard’s Gap but his troops refused to fight when they heard that Confederate General Johnston had surrendered to Sherman. On April 24, 1865, the Confederate troops surrendered to the Union troops. General Martin offered enough forage and supplies to get the Union troops out of Western North Carolina. On April 26, 1865, while the troops waited to cross the French Broad they received word that Booth had assassinated Lincoln

6 John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 71. 7 Gordon McKinney, “Premature Industrialization in Asheville,” in The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays, ed. Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wilson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 229. 8 McKinney, “Premature Industrialization in Asheville”, 230. 9 Gordon McKinney, “Asheville Armory,” NCPedia (2006), https://www.ncpedia.org/asheville-armory. 10 John Inscoe, “Battle of Asheville,” NCPedia (2006), https://www.ncpedia.org/asheville-battle. 13 and the surrender between Sherman and Johnston failed. The Union troops returned and raided Asheville, stripping it of liquor, gold, silver and jewelry, and anything else of relative value.11

Asheville 1865–1898

After Emancipation and the Civil War ended, more African Americans moved to Asheville than left and Buncombe County’s African American population increased to 23,003 in 1870, compared to 2,044 in 1860. One hundred mustered-out United States Colored Troops may have been numbered among them.12

Cornelia Henry described the days in the immediate aftermath of the war. The Henry family were slaveholders. Some slaves stayed to work, while others went to neighboring farms. Henry was dismayed when they refused to work without pay. In May, 1865 she wrote to her husband, “You have no idea how big the they feel. Old Sam and Tena there is a difference in, but take care for the others, even Rose feels her freedom. I wish they had all went with the Yankees, all but Sam’s family.”13

The Reconstruction period in Asheville was violent and dangerous. While the federal government maintained control in the post-war period, interpersonal relations were tense. Cornelia Henry reported that people who she thought were her friends reported her behavior to the Union army.14 She noted that one neighbor raised a Union flag when the army occupied Asheville, stating, “We have found out our friends since the yanks came in,” and warmed people not to trust their former slaves.15

Reconstruction turned the previous power structure upside down. The federal government granted patronage positions. Many former white politicians were no longer in charge, although they tried to maintain control through raw violence. This increased the town’s racial tension. A race riot in 1868 started when a former slave attempted to vote for a Democratic candidate, resulting in the death of both whites and blacks when competing factions fought. In addition, the wartime divisions fostered in western North Carolina continued. Settling scores from the war years became common. Federal agencies such as the Freedmen’s Bureau and the occupying federal troops moderated the situation. The Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency charged with improving African Americans’ conditions, intervened in daily life. While the Freedmen’s Bureau’s mandate was, in theory, backed by a federal cavalry regiment in Morganton, in reality the troops did not interfere often. However, even the threat of military intervention generated results. It caused Judge Augustus Merriman to resign when the Bureau intervened in the trial of a black man who allegedly assaulted a white man.

11 John Barrett, The Civil War in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 363–64. 12 Nash, “Aiding the Southern Mountain Republicans,” 6. 13 Henry, Fear in North Carolina, 282. 14 Henry, Fear in North Carolina, 283. 15 Henry, Fear in North Carolina, 283–84. 14

Judges often reverted to state law, claiming states’ rights, when federal intervention was imminent. For example, judges refused to recognize black witnesses’ testimony against whites, citing state law.16 This allowed conservative whites to maintain some political control even during Reconstruction. In Merriman’s case, conservative whites were convinced the trial would undermine their authority and more blacks would resist white supremacy.17 Consequently, they fought federal intervention whenever possible.

African Americans were not the only group that sought assistance and protection at the Freedmen’s Bureau. In 1866, six Unionist white women from Henderson County came to the Asheville Freedmen’s Bureau requesting protection, stating their homes were burned because their relatives served in the Union army.18

The conflict between two competing white factions did little for African Americans. Anti- Confederates and conservatives (soon to be Democrats) agreed that white supremacy was something they all desired in spite of their other issues.19 Unionist whites belonged to the interracial Union League. Many conservative whites were ardently opposed. At the Asheville July 1867 Union League meeting members were pelted with rocks and shot at while leaving the meeting. One person was seriously injured with a rock.20

Asheville’s blacks united with the local Republican party in opposition to the anti-Confederates and conservatives. In the 1867 election they promoted the idea that if former slaves were defrauded of their wages, a common practice, they should report the employer to the Freedmen’s Bureau and vote Republican.21

The Ku Klux Klan established a presence in Asheville in 1868 when former Confederate General Nathaniel Bedford Forrest dispatched a group to live in Asheville and organize the Klan from their home on Haywood Street.22 This only served to exacerbate previous divisions in Asheville. African Americans armed themselves for mutual defense and did not appear in public without guns.23 Asheville’s Freedmen’s Bureau closed in 1869 and removed a moderating force.

Attorney Virgil Stuart Lusk pointed out in the spring of 1869, “Many of the survivors could not draw a distinction between acts of war and personal malice…. The necessities of war left much grudges to settle in the time of peace. Wrongs, real or imaginary, had not been forgotten or satisfactorally adjusted or the perpetrators punished. Law was not enforced, crime was common neither life or property was secure. Desperadoes and ruffians paraded the street day and night

16 Nash, “Aiding the Southern Mountain Republicans,” 21. 17 Nash, “Aiding the Southern Mountain Republicans,” 17. 18 Nash, “Aiding the Southern Mountain Republicans,” 13. 19 Nash, “Aiding the Southern Mountain Republicans,” 13. 20 “From Western North Carolina,” The Daily Standard, July 18, 1867, 2. 21 Nash, “Aiding the Southern Mountain Republicans,” 20. 22 McKinney, “The Klan in the Southern Mountains,” 93. 23 Nash, “Aiding the Southern Mountain Republicans,” 24. 15 with a Colt revolver in one pocket and a bottle of mean whiskey in the other.”24 Surrounding areas were completely lawless as the Klan terrorized those who opposed them with relative impunity. Tensions reached a pitch when the Asheville Citizen editor, Randolph Abbot Shotwell, attacked the federal solicitor Virgil Lusk in the northwest corner of Pack Square for his opposition to the Klan. Lusk fired on Shotwell twice in self-defense during the altercation, wounding him. Both survived the incident and Shotwell fled Asheville, although he later returned. In 1871, Shotwell was sentenced to prison for conspiracy for his role in spiraling Klan violence but was pardoned by President Grant in 1872.

In 1876, Zebulon Vance returned to office. A former Confederate officer, Vance had served two terms as governor, from 1862 to May 1865, when the Confederacy surrendered. Vance’s election ended federal Reconstruction efforts and the state began a slow return to the white supremacy that would be codified in the 1890s. Vance ran on a civil rights platform, although he was careful to distinguish civil rights from “social rights,” which would be tantamount to total integration. Vance was utterly opposed to putting African Americans on an even footing with whites.25 But he was already known during the Civil War for his civil rights stances, including opposing Confederate conscription and overreach from the Confederate government in Richmond.

Vance’s civil rights campaign was designed to attract poor whites who perceived their oppression coming from wealthy citizens, stock trusts and laws.26 Civil rights were for those who had already achieved social rights and this pointedly did not include African Americans. Instead Vance promoted the paternalistic view that blacks required whites to care for them through a society based on overt white supremacy.27

African Americans were not excluded from public office after the Civil War and Reconstruction. In 1882, Newton Shepard, born a slave in 1841, served on Asheville’s Board of Aldermen. It was an elected position and Shepard must have had support from both whites and blacks. He lived in the Hill Street area.28 Black entrepreneurs prospered. For example, Isaac Dickson founded a coal and wood business and gained some political influence by his appointment to the school board.

Noah Murrough operated the Woodlawn Café at 36 South Main Street at the turn of the century. It appears to have been a colorline restaurant, one operated by African Americans but serving whites. Murrrough attempted to open a saloon that catered to African Americans in 1897. At this time it appears that no establishments would serve blacks. Murrough was unsuccessful in his

24 McKinney, “The Klan in the Southern Mountains,” 92. 25 Paul Yandle, “Different Colored Currents of the Sea: Reconstruction North Carolina, Mutuality and the Political Roots of Jim Crow,” in North Carolinians in the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, ed. Paul D. Escott (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 229. 26 Steven E. Nash, “The Immortal Vance: The Political Commemoration of North Carolina’s War Governor,” in North Carolinians in the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, ed. Paul D. Escott (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 284. 27 Yandle, “Different Colored Currents of the Sea,” 229. 28 Darin Waters, “Life Beneath the Veneer: The Black Community in Asheville from 1793–1900” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012), 204–5. 16 application.29 Murrough was also involved with a grocery store on College Street and later became an undertaker in 1910.

In addition, black elites and the white establishment focused on race relations with an eye toward economic stability. Historian Darin Waters points out that the many opportunities for domestic labor in tourist Asheville brought an influx of people, but their power was severely limited by the lack of education that limited their economic mobility. In addition, poor whites refused the domestic roles that African Americans would assume since they thought this would place them on the same social level.30 Waters also points out the complicated state of race relations in Asheville. The early reliance on tourism hinged on at least the appearance of friendly race relations. White city leaders advertised and promoted an image of racial comity in Asheville.31 Unfortunately, this “Veneer of Racial Harmony,” as Waters terms it, was just that—a veneer that made whites and tourists comfortable. Asheville’s African American community was marginalized politically and economically in the tourist-based town.

The Railroad and the New South Economy

Tobacco provided a temporary boom after the Civil War but it was not an economic boost for African Americans. In 1869, Samuel Shelton planted three acres of tobacco in Chunn’s Cove.32 Other farmers followed his example and Asheville became a tobacco center. The Asheville Tobacco Warehouse was constructed downtown in 1879. The 1883 directory noted that ten African Americans worked as tobacco stemmers; however they did not appear to have reaped many benefits as farmers from the crop, since only roughly 10 percent of Buncombe County farmers hired African American workers, and those that did hired them for a shorter amount of time.33 Production in Buncombe and surrounding counties peaked in the early 1890 when the American Tobacco Company moved production to eastern North Carolina.34

After a number of failed attempts, beginning with a charter in 1855, the railroad came to Asheville in 1880. The Western North Carolina Railroad would greatly alter the economy. There was a long-standing regional question as to whether Asheville would rely on tourism or extractive industry such as timber. Immediately after the Civil War industrialists ignored Asheville because of poor market access and a lack of raw materials.35 The main economic drivers were tourism and extractive industries such as timber and mining. Lumber became the

29 “A Big Board Session” Asheville Daily Citizen, May 29, 1897, 1. 30 Waters, “Life Beneath the Veneer,” 74–75. 31 Waters, “Life Beneath the Veneer,” 229. 32 Steven E. Nash, Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 169. 33 Nash, Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge, 179. 34 Nash, Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge, 179. 35 Richard D. Starnes, Creating Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 67. 17 most visible industry and was immediately at odds with tourism. Hardwood forests in the upper Midwest were becoming rapidly depleted and lumber companies began to buy timber reserves in western North Carolina. However, many failed to replant trees and formerly scenic forest vistas became barren and eroded. Local doctors who were involved in health tourism, particularly treating tuberculosis, lobbied for national parks to be established around Asheville.36 Gifford Pinchot, George Vanderbilt’s forester, and state officials lobbied for a national forest in 1892. The process was slow and riven by internal dissension and competing goals when timber and mineral interests pushed back.37 In 1899, local doctors convinced the City of Asheville to form a Parks and Forestry Commission to lobby for a national park. The national Progressive movement also spurred the idea at the turn of the century. Earlier clear-cutting and Gilded Age industrial excesses resulted in a polluted landscape made clear to many that previous practices were not sustainable in the long term. Progressivism promoted preserving and fostering national resources in order to make them available to tourists and industry over the long run. Combined with Theodore Roosevelt’s park movement, Asheville’s tourist boosters’ desire to preserve and maintain the surrounding forest was realized in 1916 with the establishment of the Pisgah National Forest.

While there was a concerted push from many Asheville leaders for tourism, others pushed for more manufacturing. This contingent noted that tourism dollars were dependent on good weather and much of the profit left town.38 In the end, a mix of manufacturing, services, and tourism made Asheville’s economy attractive to newcomers of all races.

African Americans were employed in both tourism and industry by the turn of the century. The African American population swelled as jobs in tourism and hospitality increased and were much more attractive than farm labor. However, blacks were still restricted in their opportunities. The four major occupations at the beginning of the twentieth century were common labor, personal service, domestic service and agricultural workers.39

36 Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky, 57. 37 Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky, 58. 38 Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky, 82. 39 Pamela Mitchem, “Wonder Team of the Carolinas,” Black Ball: A Negro Leagues Journal 5, no. 1 (2012): n.p. 18

Creating African American Life in Asheville

Topography determined Asheville’s African American settlements. Geographer Charles Knight noted that a visitor to a new southern city with a topographical map could reasonably identify African American neighborhoods by circling ravines and steep hillsides.40 African American neighborhoods were also often located on the outskirts of cities, close enough to provide employment opportunities but far enough to be beyond white surveillance.41 Whites monopolized the most desirable land for their commercial and residential developments. White Asheville residents initially developed downtown while blacks lived in the hilly East End.

Churches were a central part of African American community and identity. In the 1870s African Americans began to expand into what is now the East End in the portion of downtown Asheville encompassed by Eagle Street, College Street, and Market Street. The area was close to the hotels and other tourist amenities that employed African Americans.42 In Asheville, St. Matthias Episcopal Church is thought to be the oldest black congregation, having been established as the Freedmen’s Chapel in 1865 by General and Mrs. James S. Martin.43 African American contractor and mason James Vester Miller constructed the church in 1896.

The Young Men’s Institute (YMI) complemented the African American schools as a community and cultural center. Designed by Richard Sharpe Smith, Biltmore House’s supervising architect, it was constructed in 1892. The work was done by African Americans who worked for Vanderbilt.44 The YMI offered office space for black professionals and meeting spaces for organizations, boxing and wrestling in the basement, and an auditorium.45 A well-stocked drug store filled out the building’s amenities. The Y.M.I. held a wide variety of events. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union held fundraising events in the 1890s.46 In 1895, an “Old Time Songs and Ways” concert featured some of the oldest people in Asheville.47 Edward J. Harding, the former Chicago Tribune literary editor, who had moved to Asheville, gave a reading of popular writers.48 “Local talent” performed the operetta “Zanle the Gypsy Queen” to benefit St. Matthias Church.49 Vanderbilt had always meant for the community to assume control and responsibility for the building and in 1906 a committee assumed the mortgage.

40 Andrew Weise, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 18. 41 Weise, Places of Their Own, 18. 42 Patrick Shane Parker, “Appalachian Activists: The Civil Rights Movement in Asheville, NC” Master’s thesis, Appalachian State University, 2016), 20. 43 Lenwood Davis, The Black Heritage of Western North Carolina (Asheville, NC: D.H. Ramsey Collection, 1983), 34. 44 Davis, The Black Heritage of Western North Carolina, 48. 45 Davis, The Black Heritage of Western North Carolina, 48. 46 “Carnival of the Holidays,” Asheville Daily Citizen, November 23, 1896, 1. 47 “Around Town,” Asheville Daily Citizen, June 12, 1895, 4. 48 “At The Y.M.I.,” The Asheville Daily Citizen, February 10, 1894, 4. 49 “Around Town,” The Asheville Daily Citizen, January 19, 1897, 4. 19

In 1890, Asheville’s black population had expanded to 3,567, or roughly a third of the population Attracted by jobs the African American community began to settle around Asheville. By 1900 enough African Americans had settled in Montford to warrant a park. George Pack donated the land that would become Magnolia Park that same year. The East End and Southside neighborhoods were also growing.

Jim Crow and Segregation

Segregation was sporadic in Asheville at the turn of the century. A private park and athletic field for African Americans was located between the freight depot and the French Broad River, but was sold by 1906.50 Magnolia Park appears to have been interracial before the 1920s. Pearson Park attracted all races to the Agricultural Fair in the teens.

In the civic sphere, Pack Square was still open to all races. However, even this would soon be regulated. In 1898, North Carolina Democrats ran on a white supremacy platform, stating that only white men were fit for political office.51 Once in office the Democrats quickly moved to codify Jim Crow laws. In 1900, North Carolina adopted an amendment to their state Constitution that required anyone registering to vote to able to read and write any section of the state constitution in English. There was a grandfather clause: if one was able to vote before January 1, 1867, or able to prove they were a lineal descendent of such a person, they could vote. The laws decimated black suffrage. White registrars held the key to the ballot box. African Americans were at the registrar’s mercy; the tests were inconsistently applied and were often arbitrary in their questions and difficulty.52 White threats, violence, and intimidation also affected the voting. In 1896, 1157 African Americans were registered to vote, a number that had dropped to 690 in the 1898 election.53

White supremacy extended beyond the law and the ballot box. It dictated memory. It entered the civic arena and public spaces. The Asheville Vance Memorial was dedicated in 1898. The State Daughters of the Confederacy featured the Vance Monument in their 1902 Confederate calendar, flanking the Raleigh monument along with the Confederate monument at New Bern.54 The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) worked vigorously to project their version of the antebellum past, which they hoped would guide their near future. They worked to uphold what they saw as “Confederate culture”—a hierarchical white patrician system.55 The system focused

50 “Southern and Howland Road,” Asheville Citizen-Times, December, 1906, 6. (This appears to be Riverside Park) 51 Nicholas Graham, “The Election of 1898 in North Carolina: An Introduction,” https://exhibits.lib.unc.edu/exhibits/show/1898/history. 52 Jerry Gershenhorn, Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 169. 53 Seth Edward David Epstein, “Tolerance, Governance and Surveillance in the Jim Crow South: Asheville, North Carolina, 1876–1946” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2013), 108. 54 “1902 Confederate Calendar,” Asheville Citizen-Times, December 16, 1901, 4. 55 Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003), 2. 20 on “Lost Cause” mythology, presented as fact in schools and civic life. According to this myth, the antebellum south was a place where slaves were happy in their lot, women served in traditional gender roles, and patrician planters knew best. The myth served to preserve the hierarchical social system based on white supremacy and deferent African Americans. Asheville’s white elite became quick adherents. Mrs. Cordelia Aston, wife of Edward Aston, namesake of Asheville’s Aston Park, was an ardent Lost Cause believer and appealed on the front page of the Asheville Citizen to the Daughters of the Confederacy that a stature be erected to the loyal slaves who stood by faithfully while the Confederacy surrendered.56 In 1905, Asheville’s schools removed textbooks deemed objectionable to the UDC.57 Asheville’s UDC chapter initially met at members’ homes, such as 30 Cumberland Avenue in Montford, at the turn of the century. By the 1920s their popularity increased and they were meeting at the YWCA on College Avenue. They also gathered at the Buncombe Courthouse hall.58 Confederate veterans met monthly on the second floor of the Buncombe County Courthouse.

Asheville’s black elite pushed back. In 1904, a group of African American men attended a meeting at the Y.M.I. called “Solve the Problem,” referring to the burgeoning laws concerning segregation. L.T. Jackson, Hill Street School principal, suggested that blacks create their own organizations.59 Another, Reverend Orner from First Baptist Church, suggested bringing their plight to whites’ attention. The year before Orner had written a column for the Asheville Citizen outlining his position. He did not want “social rights,” the opportunity to essentially integrate. He stated that “the intelligent negro has as much horror to amalgamation as the most refined white man.”60 What they wanted were civil rights—an equal footing in the legal, business, and political systems. Mentioning Booker T. Washington as an influence, Orner was happy to postpone integration if all else was equal.

The men at the meeting, joined by other Asheville black elites, prepared to confront the segregation issue. Being educated and financially well-off gave them the power to negotiate with the white establishment.61 Rev. Charles Dusenbury, pastor at Cavalry Presbyterian, became the de facto leader of the group.62

Although manufacturing and agriculture were always important, Asheville’s tourist industry grew. Health tourists crowded the sanitariums and other wealthy tourists came for the pleasant climate.63 Tourism was another way to increase the city’s population. Local businesses, real

56 “Want Monument to Old Slaves,” Asheville Citizen, July 24, 1904, 1. 57 Greg Huffman, “Twisted Sources: How Confederate propaganda ended up in the South’s schoolbooks,” https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/twisted-sources-how-confederate-propaganda-ended-souths-schoolbooks (accessed June 1, 2019). 58 “UDC Meeting,” Asheville Citizen, February 9, 1930, 9. 59 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 31. 60 Samuel Orner, “Among the Colored People,” Asheville Daily Citizen, October 18, 1903, 10. 61 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 33. 62 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 33. 63 Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky, 67. 21 estate agents, and newspapers all participated in the sales pitch.64 Public health concerns and the fact that disease deterred the average tourist moved Asheville’s elite to focus on the wealthy rather than the sick.65 In 1908, North Carolina enacted Prohibition. This would establish a bootlegging industry and provide another avenue for income for both whites and blacks.

By 1909, North Carolina had effectively disenfranchised black voters through a grandfather clause, a poll tax, a literacy test and a property requirement.66 In addition, races were legally separated in marriage, public schools, the state library, fire companies, fraternal organizations, hospitals, and prisons. This situation continued through the twentieth century, at times abetted by African American community leaders and at other times vigorously opposed. At some junctures it caused divisions and disruptions in the black community in how to address or how hard to fight segregation. Segregation also caused problems in the white business community. Asheville’s hope to join a new baseball league in 1911 was seriously hampered because it was not financially feasible. The difference between profit and loss hinged on two factors. The first was foul balls going into the river. This was a considerable expense. Banning African Americans from the park was the other factor. Their gate revenue, or lack of, scotched any possibility of getting a new team.67

Schools were always segregated. By 1910, African American students attended Catholic Hill, a Victoria Academy, Hill Street School in the Hill Street neighborhood and the Mountain School in the East End.68 African American students could also attend private schools. The Allen School, a girls’ boarding school, and Calvary Presbyterian Parochial School educated African Americans.

64 Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky, 65. 65 Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky, 69. 66 Raymond Gavins, “The NAACP in North Carolina during the Age of Segregation,” in New Directions in Civil Rights Studies, ed. Armstead L. Robinson and Patricia Sullivan (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 106. 67 “New Ball Ground is a Necessity” Asheville Gazette News, September 22, 1911, 2. 68 Davis, The Black Heritage of Western North Carolina, 41. 22

Figure 2. Model of Pack Square in 1924 showing 1915 racial restrictions. African Americans were restricted to the benches in the bottom square, whites to the top (Rory Krupp, model, Pack Memorial Library). In 1913 Asheville, like Atlanta, Baltimore, and a few other southern and border state cities, instituted a segregation ordinance. This law established municipal boundaries within cities for whites and blacks. In Asheville, however, the ordinance was aimed at boarding houses with tuberculosis patients and was not (according to the Asheville Gazette) racially motivated.69 The Supreme Court ruled this ordinance unconstitutional in 1917.

In June of 1915, city commissioners instituted racially separated seating in Pack Square. All benches were removed from the west of Vance monument except two at the streetcar stop on Charlotte Street. White people were assigned to the benches between the fountain and the monument. Blacks would be assigned to benches between the fountain and the east end. “Neat little signs will be placed on each bench designating which race will be allowed to use it,” the newspaper reported.70 In 1916, the city let contracts for segregated pools. The Aston Park pool was built for whites. The Mountain Street pool, at Clemmons Street, was constructed for African Americans in 1916. The pool was problematic. In 1923, the city commissioners curtailed the

69 “Segregation to be Considered,” Asheville Gazette-News, May 31, 1913, 3. 70 “Pack Square Benches Being Separated Today,” Asheville Gazette-News, June 19, 1915, 12. 23 crowds of people who threw pennies in the pool to see who could retrieve them the fastest after a twelve-year-old drowned.71

African Americans began to turn inward, forming their own institutions and creating their own sphere.72 At the same time, a class of African American leaders emerged to mediate race relations. Historian Patrick Shane Parker notes that this emergence of Asheville’s black elite caused a fair amount of tension between them and lower-class African Americans. Asheville’s black elite recognized the “Veneer of Racial Harmony” and its importance to the white and black power structure. Consequently, black leaders used continued racial harmony as a negotiating tool.73 Asheville’s black ministers, such as Rev. Charles Dusenbury, would expertly navigate these relations. Dusenbury illustrated that power in the white community was contingent on control over the black community.74 Over time they would extract gradual concessions for the black community. In 1916, Dusenbury formed the Colored Betterment League. As historian Richard Starnes points out, both whites and blacks had an interest in good race relations.75 Their livelihoods, based on tourism, depended on it. The Colored Betterment League encouraged “peace and prosperity” and fostered the “law and order of the colored community.”76

Dusenbury’s motivation stemmed from the fact that racial restrictions were becoming stricter and affected blacks’ movement in civic spaces. Dusenbury’s Colored Betterment League was a reaction to a new brand of racism. Termed a “progressive mystique” by historian Glenda Gilmore, it incorporated polite interracial forums, education, and an absence of overt violence.77 It required, and Dusenbury was gifted at this, navigating the political establishment and extracting concessions without provoking a white backlash. While interracial commissions reduced lynching in North Carolina, the police and the courts maintained the pressure on African Americans. Asheville’s courts meted out harsh sentences to blacks. Police located thirteen pints of whiskey and several hundred empty bottles at the Bull City Café (demolished) on Depot Street in 1919. The owner received a year on the county road crew. A fourteen-year-old who stole several items from a boarding house also received a year sentence on the county roads.78 The white Asheville newspapers, like many newspapers at the time, featured story after story of alleged African American criminal behavior but few stories about black accomplishments. The Asheville Enterprise, an African American newspaper doubtless provided a more sympathetic

71 “Drowning of Negro in Pool Is Probed,” Asheville Citizen, July 28, 1923, 10. (The whites-only Aston Park pool opened in 1914). 72 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 29. 73 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 30. 74 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 33. 75 Richard D. Starnes, “‘A Conspicuous Example of What is Termed the New South’: Tourism and Urban Development in Asheville, 1880-1925,” The North Carolina Historical Review 80, no.1 (2003): 76. 76 “Colored Betterment League is Organized,” Asheville Citizen, November 18, 1916, 3. 77 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and Politics of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), epilogue, passim. 78 “Long Sentences Are Dealt Out by Judge,” Asheville-Citizen Times, March 2, 1919, 2. 24 and realistic portrayal of black life but only one copy exists. The discovery of additional copies would open a new chapter in Asheville’s African American history.

The city instituted an Interracial Commission in 1917. It was part of a movement through the Southern Methodist Church in which hundreds of Interracial Commissions were started in southern towns. The commission’s role: “Put dangerous rumors to rest, disarm and defeat the Negro radical, meet crucial situations where violence is threatened and fit the Negro into the community.”79 They were designed to maintain a status quo without political violence. The object was to make economic but not social ties with the African American community.

The city’s Interracial Commission did not slow the advance of white supremacy in the public arena. In 1917, Confederate Memorial Day was celebrated by fifty Confederate veterans marching behind the bullet-ridden battle flag of the Cane’s Creek Rifles, circling Pack Square before laying a wreath at the Vance Monument. The parade was witnessed by the entire student body of Asheville High School.80 As historian Karen Cox points out, Confederate monuments are for children, a gift from one generation to the next as an example of values to maintain. Every civic occasion was an opportunity to promote white supremacy. When Asheville city exemption board member George Powell spoke to African American army recruits in 1917 he promoted the Lost Cause myth, saying that no one was more loyal during the Civil War and immediately afterwards than slaves; if given the proper white officers, they [new recruits] would make the city and state proud.81 In 1918, the Vance Monument was decorated with evergreen wreaths, Confederate flags, and life-sized portraits of Lee and Jackson for Confederate Memorial Day.82

79 “Mob Violence Condemned and Justice and Better Housing Urged for Negroes in South,” Asheville Citizen, August, 8, 1921, 8. 80 “Veterans Parade and Attend Big Meeting,” Asheville Citizen, June 8, 1917, 3. 81 “Public Exercises for Colored Men,” Asheville Times, October 10, 1917, 2. An exemption board is a local committee that exempts men from the draft, i.e. a draft board. 82 “Memorial Day was Fittingly Observed,” Asheville-Citizen Times, May 11, 1918, 5. 25

The African American Community Responds

The African American population in Asheville roughly doubled from 1890 to 1920, growing from 3,567 to 7,145 people. Asheville’s overall population also doubled in this period, to 28,505 residents, with African Americans making up approximately a quarter of the town.

The African American community mobilized in response to these developments. African American newspapers fought segregation. The Asheville Enterprise advertised NAACP events and promoted their material through their newspaper.83 Newly formed civil rights organizations organized resistance. The NAACP encouraged Asheville African Americans to register to vote in 1919 in response to a school bond issue for better buildings.84 The Asheville branch boasted 71 members in 1919. With the exception of Winston-Salem, which had 80 members, Asheville had nearly twice as many members as the every other city in North Carolina. 85 The 1918–19 NAACP voter drive dovetailed with the prevailing progressive theory that law and order would lead to increased rights for African Americans through continued and constant negotiation. This was rejected. The impetus for the voter drive was to fully exercise blacks’ rights as citizens. Voters made laws; they did not just follow them.86

In 1920, African American women held small get-togethers that culminated in a mass meeting that planned another voter registration drive.87 It marks the beginning of a new brand of black activism: black women organizing and attempting to harness their new political power. The movement brought out 600 African American women in Asheville to register. It appears the educational test that had to be passed in order to register to vote was not evenly applied; fewer than 75 women were ultimately registered. In one precinct more than 100 women applied and only two were registered.88 Because of the number of women newly eligible to vote registering African American women became a political hot button topic in Asheville. Each party accused the other of paying African American to register and vote for their party.89 Asheville’s African Americans did increase their power in the face of white supremacy. By the end the 1920s more black women could vote. They changed the dynamic, but as historian Glenda Gilmore pointed out it would be forty more years before Jim Crow would begin to fall. In the meantime, Asheville’s residents would continue to work to bring it down.

83 NAACP, Fifteenth Annual Report, 1924 (New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1925), 53. 84 NAACP, Tenth Annual Report, “Education” (New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1919), 72. 85 Asheville had a number of NAACP branches: the 1919 Ashevillle branch; a West Asheville branch started by E. W. Pearson in the 1930s; the Allen School had their own branch in the 1940s; West Asheville had a branch in the 1950s. 86 NAACP, Tenth Annual Report, 11. 87 Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 221. 88 Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 221. 89 “Deny Registrars Are Failing to Put Test,” Asheville Citizen, October 20, 1920, 14. 26

Segregation could be implemented at a moment’s notice. In June 1921, a former Asheville police chief and a policeman cleared Magnolia Park of all black children. A group of forty-five families who lived around Magnolia Park appealed to the Board of Commissioners, who referred the incident to the Commissioner of Public Safety. But it appears the park remained closed to African Americans after the incident.90

Asheville’s African Americans continued to organize themselves in the face of growing segregation. They continued to join national and international groups. Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association urged black empowerment and made great inroads in Asheville’s black community in the 1920s. The first meeting gained 111 members who gathered at the Y.M.I. Burton Street developer E. W. Pearson became a state director in the organization. He traveled through the state. He rented the Globe Theater in Wilson to show a film featuring the UNIA convention and the Black Star Line, the UNIA passenger ship line. The event was highly popular.91

90 Epstein, “Tolerance, Governance and Surveillance in the Jim Crow South,” 260. 91 Mary Rolinson, Grassroots Garveyism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 61. 27

Figure 3. Burton Street resident E. W. Pearson in his United Negro Improvement Association uniform, ca. 1922. However, Pearson’s popularity with North Carolinians turned out to be a liability with Garvey. Pearson and South Carolinian Rev. J. H. W. Eason appear to have run personally afoul of Garvey through no fault of their own. Each was charismatic and popular in North Carolina and gathered

28 large crowds to UNIA events. This appears to have been too much for Garvey. Garvey accused each of financial malfeasance and effectively expelled them from the organization in January, 1922.92

Figure 4. An advertisement from the United Negro Improvement Association newspaper Negro World accusing Pearson of corruption. Exacerbating Asheville’s delicate racial climate, the early 1920s also brought an influx of African Americans from South Carolina. Cotton harvests suffered from boll weevils in the early 1920s and many tenant farmers moved to Asheville. The land and construction boom, in addition to tourism and domestic positions, offered ready employment to many African Americans. White Asheville became alarmed at the new residents.93 They attempted to delineate the city by renaming streets to serve as color lines or racial boundaries, a common practice during this period. In 1922, white residents of Buffalo Street in West Asheville, rattled by African Americans’ expanding Park View neighborhood, successfully petitioned the city to change the name of their portion of Buffalo Street to Burton Street, after Asheville’s white founder.94

From 1920–25 Asheville boasted a large Ku Klux Klan chapter; racial violence increased. More African Americans abandoned tenant farming.95 Once again, Asheville’s blacks organized and fought the Klan. In North Carolina, the Klan and lynchings led to NAACP branch formations. Between 1900 and 1918 white mobs lynched twenty-five African Americans in North Carolina.96

92 “Warning to the Colored People of North Carolina,” Negro World, January 28, 1922, 8. 93 Kevin W. Young, “The Largest Manhunt in North Carolina’s History: The Story of Broadus Miller,” in Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia, ed. Bruce E. Stewart (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2012), 343. 94 “Desire Street to be Named in Honor of City’s Founder,” Asheville Citizen, April 10, 1922, 2. 95 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 41. 96 Raymond Gavins, “The NAACP in North Carolina during the Age of Segregation,” in New Directions in Civil Rights Studies, ed. Armstead L. Robinson and Patricia Sullivan (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 106. 29

The first Asheville branch was formed in 1919. As the 1921 Crisis, the NAACP national magazine, proclaimed: “We Protest Organized Terrorism—Ku Klux Klan.”97

Black youth culture began to seem like a threat; it was tackled by the city and some African American ministers. In 1921, Asheville banned public dance halls. The city required that private dance halls be licensed. Dance facilities in posh tourist hotels were classified as private, and therefore exempt from the law. Those that catered to African Americans were usually classified as public. The culprit was jazz music. After a year the city softened its stance and began to grant licenses again in 1922. However, musicians volunteered to regulate themselves and essentially ruled out jazz improvisation.98

In 1924, Asheville hosted a national Ku Klux Klan convention. The Asheville Klan was not unanswered in the black community. The NAACP national branch provided assistance in a series of racial incidents at Oteen Veteran’s Hospital in 1924. Asheville’s black veterans sought an investigation after a visit from the NAACP Assistant Secretary to the hospital. The investigation found that “Klan agitation” led to a petition to transfer 29 black veterans to Tuskegee. The wards were segregated and overcrowded. In addition, Dr. Archie McCallister charged patients for care and made it clear that he wanted to get rid of all of them. The NAACP forwarded their investigation to Washington and McCallister was fired.99 The veterans stayed at Oteen. In 1924, as immigration from South Carolina reached a new high, Asheville implemented Jim Crow laws. Separate drinking fountains were placed in Pack Square. African Americans largely ignored the prohibition and an informal patrol of “older white men” castigated blacks who dared to use the old water fountains.100 One black man merely told them he paid taxes too. and calmly walked away.101 Separate bathrooms for witnesses were delineated in the county courthouse. Rooms 702 and 705 were for white men and women, respectively, while rooms 714 and 715 were for black women and men, respectively.

The racial upheaval of the 1920s was problematic for the political elite. They had to maintain the veneer of good race relations while acknowledging and implementing a racist agenda that risked alienating some northern tourists.

In 1922, Asheville commissioned a city plan by planner John Nolen. He stated it was advantageous for races to be separated, provided there were suitable schools, homes, stores, and recreational facilities.102 Nolen also advocated working with black leaders to solve these shortages.103 Nolen’s plan was fairly anodyne and put the onus on the private market to solve any problems, which was in many respects was not much different than what the city had already

97 “Twelfth Annual Conference,” The Crisis 22, no. 4 (1921): 162. 98 Epstein, “Tolerance, Governance and Surveillance in the Jim Crow South,” 246. 99 NAACP, Fifteenth Annual Report, 1924, 192, 28. 100 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 42. 101 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 42. 102 John Nolen, The Asheville City Plan (1925), 43–44. 103 Nolen, The Asheville City Plan, 44. 30 done.104 Dusenbury’s Colored Betterment League still existed and the city had established an Interracial Commission in 1917. The focus remained on tightening social control and surveillance over African Americans. There was little overt opposition to Nolen’s plan. George Stephenson, the Asheville Citizen publisher, was a friend and enthusiastic Nolen supporter. Consequently, the press, including competitor the Asheville Times, was supportive of his plan.105

Separate library facilities were instituted, with an African American library located at the Young Men’s Institute. During this period of increasing segregation the African American community continued to form parallel organizations and institutions. The Benevolent Elks of the World established their Asheville chapter in the 1920s and were located in a house on the Southside at 380 S. French Broad Avenue.

Figure 5. Teenagers attend a reading at the Y.M.I. library. (Pack Memorial Library, North Carolina Room Collection).

Recreational facilities, such as parks, were segregated. Parks for African Americans were often private. E. W. Pearson included a four-acre private park in his Park View subdivision in West

104 Steven Michael Nickollof, “Urban Renewal in Asheville: A History of Racial Segregation and Black Activism” (Master’s thesis, Western Carolina University, 2015), 27. 105 Kevin D. Frazier, “Outsiders in the Land of the Sky: City Planning and the Transformation of Asheville, North Carolina, 1921–1929,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 4, no. 2 (1998): 306. 31

Asheville. He sold the park in 1920, but it continued to operate as a park. In 1922, the Interracial Committee advocated for park improvements, presumably at Magnolia Park. The Board of City Commissioners “decided to visit the site and determine what help, if any, the city can render the colored people.”106 It does not appear any improvements were made. In fact, instead of providing improvements for African Americans it appears the park was segregated.

The Boom Ends and the Great Depression

The tourism boom of the early 1920s collapsed in 1926 along with the Florida land boom. Both were the results of similar factors.107 Vacant land speculation and a plethora of municipal bonds saddled the private and public sectors with debt. The city had spent liberally during the boom years. In 1930, the bank that held the city funds failed. Former city officials and bank employees were indicted. The bank president and former mayor committed suicide. The debt essentially made the city a time capsule. Servicing the debt meant that few capital improvements were made. The city’s growing pains took decades to sort out. In 1958, the post office changed the names of city streets. Some streets names were duplicates, or triplicates in thirty-eight instances throughout the city. This caused mail service to be problematic. In response, the post office compiled street names from Charlotte, Greensboro, and Greenville, S.C., and let homeowners on the affected streets pick new names.108

Depression Era programs for African Americans were not numerous but some were available in Asheville. The Works Progress Administration operated a women’s sewing room. Women were employed to sew or patch clothing.

Asheville’s Negro Welfare Council also assisted the black community during the Depression. The council was supported by the Community Chest.109 The “Council” was actually one social worker, Leander G. Blackus. He organized a free clinic at the Odd Fellows Hall at Eagle and Biltmore streets. Six doctors, two dentists, and a pharmacist were expected to serve between three and five thousand African Americans in Asheville who had no other medical care.110 In 1934, Asheville had an African American population of approximately 14,000 people, or one quarter of the city’s population.111

Whites continued to use the city’s municipal parks, pool, and country clubs for recreation during the Depression. The Mountain Street Pool, at Mountain Street and Clemmons Street, remained open for blacks. In 1933, the previously segregated Magnolia Park was once again dedicated to

106 “Want Colored Park Improved By City,” Asheville Citizen-Times, July 6, 1922, 12. 107 Homer Vanderblue, “The Florida Land Boom,” The Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 3, no. 2 (1927): 118. 108 “9 Woodfin Street Names Changed,” Asheville-Citizen Times, June 20, 1958, 17. 109 Margaret Long Leonard, “Negro Social Worker is Improving Lot of Colored People Here,” Asheville Citizen- Times, February 18, 1934, 7 110 Leonard, “Negro Social Worker.” 111 “Negro Welfare Council Activity Far Reaching,” Asheville Citizen-Times, October 25, 1935, 17. 32

African Americans. African Americans also used a series of small playgrounds, usually less than a half-acre in size, located on Gudger Street in the Hill Street neighborhood, Madison Avenue in Chestnut Hill (Millard Playground), and on the Southside at the location of the former Oates Park.

In 1931, the Negro Welfare Council started the Negro Music Festival at the Carolina Tobacco Warehouse. The festival was wildly popular with everyone. In 1932 and 1933, the festival was held at McCormick Field.112 In 1934, eight hundred people, four hundred white and four hundred black, formed a standing-room-only crowd at the Carolina Tobacco Warehouse.113 Soloists included community leader Robert Hendrick, who sang “Chloe.” Other soloists were backed by choruses and choral groups. The Community Glee Club, a group of twenty men and women, sang “Swinging on the Golden Gates” which brought the house down and resulted in an encore of “Who Built the Ark.” Proceeds were used for playground equipment and other projects. The proceeds funded see-saws, sand pits, and horseshoe courts at Hill Street School. It also sponsored a playground at the Mountain School. A sand pit was constructed at Asheland Avenue school. The program sponsored a baseball league and teams from South Asheville, East End, Southside, and Shiloh; a vacant lot at the corner of Eagle and Biltmore Avenue was converted into a baseball field. A marble tournament at the field brought out a crowd of players and spectators. Harold Smith from Shiloh was the winner.114 Theater programs were a feature in 1934 as New York actor Charles Wells ran a theater workshop for young African Americans at the Y.M.I.115

At the 1937 fourth annual Negro Music Festival the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra accompanied local singers. An all male chorus and a mixed chorus ran through renditions of “I Can Tell the World,” “Walk Together Children,” and “Old Arks A’ Moverin.”116 Whites were invited but sat in a special section reserved for them.

Working in conjunction with the WPA and the National Youth Administration, the council worked with transient African American youth who were on court probation. Events for the youth included picnics, hikes, and other outdoor activities. They also planned the observance of national holidays. During the 1938 holiday season the council delivered four hundred baskets of food, 1,500 toys and a large quantity of fruits and nuts. The council also ran recreational facilities, operated ten clubs, and ran four musical organizations.117

Buncombe County government, the City of Asheville, and the federal government often enacted random and not-so-random incidents of repression. In some instances, Asheville’s black residents fought back and won against a system intent on removing their civil rights. The Asheville NAACP assisted in some instances and the national branch, with Thurgood Marshall

112 “Negro Music Festival is Well Received by Audience of 800 Here,” The Asheville Citizen, July 28, 1934, 14. 113 “Negro Music Festival is Well Received.” 114 “Many Activities Occupy Negroes,” Asheville Citizen, September 17, 1933, 22. 115 “Little Theater for Negroes is Organized Here,” Asheville Citizen, July 20, 1934, 6. 116 “Audience Thrilled By Negro Sprituals at Music Festival Here,” Asheville Citizen, September 24, 1937, 15. 117 “Welfare Council Has Fine Record,” Asheville Citizen, March 25, 1939, 24. 33 as special counsel, provided valuable advice and applied political pressure in Washington. In other cases, such as redlining, the effects were generational and long-lasting.

Federal intervention was not always benevolent. In 1937, the Homeowners Loan Corporation made a map of Asheville that would determine mortgage lending decisions. The map divided Asheville into four categories; Best (blue), Still Desirable (green), Definitely Declining (yellow) and Hazardous (red). Hazardous areas were marked in red eventually leading to the term, “redlining.” This designation made it difficult or impossible to get a loan and led to large-scale disinvestment in those neighborhoods. In Asheville, Burton Street, Southside, East End/Valley Street and Stumptown were all labeled hazardous. Shiloh and African American enclaves in Montford were labeled as declining.

Figure 6. Asheville 1937 Home Owners Loan Corporation residential security map.

The local court system also worked against African Americans. In 1939, the Buncombe County sheriff called Lawrence Sigmon on the telephone and summoned him to jury duty. When Sigmon arrived at the courthouse he was beaten by sheriff’s deputies. When he protested they explained that African Americans were not permitted to serve on juries and he was going to be an example to other blacks “who had the audacity to report when summoned for jury duty.”118 The deputies, thinking he would seek assault charges against them, charged Sigmon with assault and disorderly conduct. Tried in Asheville, he received a sentence of ninety days on the chain gang. The local NAACP branch alerted the national branch. Thurgood Marshall advised the Asheville branch in their legal strategy. The Department of Justice investigated the charges. The NAACP attorneys obtained a reversal of Sigmon’s sentence.

Asheville’s African American community fought for voter registration in 1940. When a group of three African American men went to register to vote at the Aycock School on Haywood Road in West Asheville the registrar, Arthur Patton, a fifty-three-year old real estate agent, confronted them. He stated that they would have to take the 1901 educational test. The test consisted of reading one paragraph of a an unfamiliar book or the North Carolina Constitution, closing the book, and then writing the passage verbatim, all within three to five minutes. The registrar determined the amount of time and the outcome of the test. None passed, and all were refused the right to register, barring them from voting in the presidential election. The next in line, a recently arrived white Asheville resident, did not have to take the test, incensing the group.

The Asheville NAACP redress committee chairman, W. R. Saxon, wrote to Thurgood Marshall with the incident’s details and invited him to Asheville. Although Marshall could not visit Asheville due to prior commitments, he did pass the information to the U.S. Justice Department.

The Justice department contacted the local U.S. Attorney, who claimed that the registrar was well within his rights to administer the educational test. Marshall would have none of it. He continued to pressure the Justice Department until in September 1941, almost one year later, they decided to reopen the case. In May 1942, Patton went to trial for depriving Asheville’s African Americans of their civil rights. The jury could not decide. The judge sent the jury back to deliberate four times before they acquitted Patton. The Asheville branch was disappointed. While they thought it would make registering to vote easier in Asheville, it would not in other North Carolina cities.

118 Memorandum for Secretary’s Report, February, 1940—Legal Department, NAACP. 36

World War II 1940-1945

The war years brought changes to churches in Asheville. In March 1941, six churches caught fire with varying degrees of damage. New Bethel Baptist on South French Broad was destroyed by fire. A fire heavily damaged Nazareth First Baptist on Pine Street. Four white congregations had fires.119 The fires were caused by an unseasonably cold winter when furnaces could keep pace.

World War II created a plethora of employment opportunities for African Americans. American Enka, a rayon factory, produced uniforms, bomber tires, and bandages, among other products. The federal government moved the General Accounting Office’s Postal Accounts Division and the U.S. Army Flight Control Command to Asheville.120 Asheville’s hotels served as demobilization and disbursement centers and operated at capacity during the war.121

New Deal activities continued through 1940. The National Youth Administration constructed a gym at Hill Street School. It was the first gym for African American children in Asheville.

The NAACP grew in influence and membership during the World War II. West Asheville residents started a branch in 1941. Presumably this was in addition to the 1919 Asheville branch. State branches formed the North Carolina State Conference in 1943. Officers included Secretary Mrs. Hattie H. Love of Asheville. Love was a teacher who lived at 56 Knob Circle (now Mardell Circle) in West Asheville.122 She attended the national NAACP convention in 1940. The Asheville branch was active and intrepid. In 1943 they investigated the case of Charlie Hopkins, accused of killing a postal worker in Rutherfordton, even though traveling the fifty-five miles was personally dangerous since the case incensed some Asheville whites. Thinking his case credible they contacted the national office for assistance. 123

Asheville’s Leila Michael, 81 Hill Street, was a teacher but also a NAACP state organizer.124 By the end of 1945, thanks to her labors, the NAACP reached fifty branches with a total membership of 9,799 members.125 Asheville boasted 409 members. A resurgent Klan and the resultant post-war violence drove membership throughout the state.

Over eighty Buncombe County African Americans volunteered for World War II. After graduating from Northwestern University in dentistry Asheville native Dr. Robert Hendrick Jr.

119 “Fire Hits Another Church,” Asheville Citizen, March 4, 1931, 1. 120 Mitchem, “Wonder Team of the Carolinas.” n.p. 121 Mitchem, “Wonder Team of the Carolinas.” n.p. 122 United States of America, Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940 (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration). Asheville, Buncombe, North Carolina; Roll: m-t0627-02878; Page: 13B; Enumeration District: 11-40. 123 Seth Kotch, Lethal State: A History of the Death Penalty in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 144–45. 124 Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Asheville, Buncombe, North Carolina; Roll: m-t0627-02877; Page: 6B; Enumeration District: 11-15. 125 Gavins, “The NAACP in North Carolina during the Age of Segregation,” 110. 37 joined as lieutenant and was mustered out a lieutenant-colonel in the war. Dr. Hendrick would be involved in community affairs and civil rights activities through the 1950s and 1960s.

John Latham Jr., 66 Walton in the Southside, served in New Guinea as a technical sergeant in army intelligence. Latham had earned a A. B. degree from Smith College in Charlotte and a master’s from the University of Chicago.126 Latham lived in Asheville in 1940. He was a librarian for the New Deal National Youth Administration.127

Figure 7. West Asheville resident Hattie Love (fifth from left) at NAACP national convention in late 1940s (Ramsey Library Special Collections UNC Asheville).

126 “Asheville Negro is Serving in New Guinea Area,” Asheville Citizen, January 9, 1943, 5. 127 Miller’s Asheville Directory (Raleigh: Hill Directory Company, 1940). 38

Post-War, 1945–1965

Figure 8. East End and Southside housing in 1946. Photos 1 and 4 were on Poplar Street, Photograph 2 was on Asheland Ave. Number 3 was on McDowell St. (© Asheville Citizen-Times) Returning African American veterans were faced with an immediate housing shortage. “Red tape” and a building supply shortage were blamed as factors when black veterans attempted to use the G. I. Bill to acquire housing.128 Segregation was the main unmentioned issue but other problems were also relevant. The 1920s real estate collapse caused some investors to abandon their properties and they stopped paying their taxes. Years of deferred maintenance meant that absentee landlords thought their holdings were not worth additional investment, and they stopped

128 James Rogers, “Negro Housing Problem Here Extremely Grave,” Asheville Citizen-Times, May 5, 1946, 1. 39 maintaining their properties. Returning veterans were forced to double-up or triple-up in segregated areas.

In 1946 the Asheville Citizen-Times, focusing especially on the East End and Southside, pointed out that these areas gave a grim view of Asheville to tourists, “a first impression that is far from favorable.”129 This was an early harbinger of tourist-prompted urban renewal.

In 1948, the city initiated a “clean-up drive” that immediately ran into opposition. Already in the midst of a postwar housing crisis with overcrowded conditions, the city workers were hampered by a pronounced lack of cooperation. Residents were hesitant to complain about housing conditions lest they be put out on the street. Real estate agents who owned many of the decrepit properties balked at the requests and refused to do any repairs or cleaning.130 Nonetheless, the vast majority of residents were enthusiastic about the effort. The program’s major failure, in retrospect, was using the pesticide DDT in the city’s street-fogging machine over two-thirds of the city. The health department felt that better results were obtained from this vs. hand-spraying the chemical.131

Asheville had five hospitals in 1939, but blacks were banned from all except Mission Hospital. Mission Hospital had eighteen segregated beds.132 The Asheville Colored Hospital opened in October 1943. Dr. Mary Francis Shuford, who was white, treated African American patients at her office downtown but was forced to move when white tenants at her office building complained about waiting African Americans.133 Healthcare in Asheville was far from equitable. In 1949, thirty-one hospital beds were available for a population of 14,000 Asheville African Americans.134 In order for an African American mother to be admitted to the white Mission Hospital she had to have at least two pre-existing conditions that threatened the pregnancy. The mother was then confined to the segregated ward. Consequently midwives were not uncommon.

In 1947, the City Negro Health Council was formed. Staffed by leading African American citizens, the group encouraged blacks to participate in various health drives. In 1947, they urged African Americans to participate in the mass x-ray survey sponsored by the U.S. Board of Public Health, in which everyone over the age of fifteen would receive a chest x-ray to screen for tuberculosis. They also supported the 1948 Asheville clean-up drive that aimed to mitigate poor and overcrowded housing conditions. While they helped, they did not address the causes: segregation and a lack of code enforcement.

129 Rogers, “Negro Housing Problem Here Extremely Grave,” 1. 130 “Workers In Clean-up Drive Hit Some Snags,” Asheville Ciitzen-Times, August 19, 1948, 15. 131 “City Clean-Up Drive is Gaining Momentum,” Asheville Citizen, August 15, 1948, 12. 132 Amy C. Manikowski, “Asheville Colored Hospital,” https://ashevillehistoricinns.wordpress.com/2018/04/26/asheville-colored-hospital (accessed September 8, 2019). 133 Thomas Calder, “Asheville Archives: Asheville Colored Hospital opens, 1943,” Mountain Xpress, September 11, 2018, https://mountainx.com/news/asheville-archives-asheville-colored-hospital-opens-1943 (accessed July 22, 2019). 134 “Negro Health Week Focuses Attention on Services Here,” Asheville Citizen-Times, April 3, 1949, 10. 40

While a great improvement, the Asheville Colored Hospital did not solve all problems. In 1949, Biltmore Hospital agreed to take in premature African American babies. As the Asheville Citizen-Times noted, it was expected to bring a “marked drop in the number of premature infants that die.”135 Other services were also nonexistent or in short supply. Beds for African American tuberculosis patients were lacking.

Figure 9. Asheville Colored Hospital, later the Jesse Ray Funeral Home (Photo: Amy Ridenour). Housing conditions continued to be difficult. Like medical care, housing was in short supply after the war. Federal housing in Asheville began in 1940 with the formation of the Asheville Housing Authority. However, due to the war and a lack of funding it was not operational till 1949. Public housing projects were constructed in the East End, beginning with Lee-Walker Heights in 1951. It was a barracks-style apartment building with 96 units. Hillcrest Apartments, which opened in 1958 in the Hill Street neighborhood, was larger with 264 units. Both were isolated from the community. Lee-Walker was located on top of a hill with one entrance. Hillcrest became isolated when interstate highways were constructed on three sides and the French Broad River on the fourth. It also had only one entrance and a footbridge that was

135 “Negro Health Week Focuses Attention on Services Here,” Asheville Citizen-Times, April 3, 1949, 34. 41 eventually gated off, forcing residents to cross the highways. Both public housing projects received seven foot fences in the 1960s while Pisgah View, a white public housing complex, received a four-foot fence.

Residents got little relief from the city against landlords who took advantage of African American segregation. Code enforcement was virtually nonexistent. In the 1950s, when local realtors recommended serial offenders be taken to court, the city building inspector replied that it was office policy to give “friendly cooperation first, then take them to court.”136 Even this low standard appears to have failed by the early 1960s when code enforcement actions were only taken in cases of serious emergency or after the completion of a citizen petition to the city. In 1963, the Housing and Home Finance Agency cut off federal funding for the city because of virtual non-enforcement of the housing code.137 This seriously hampered wealth creation in African American neighborhoods. While investors could charge exorbitant rents because of segregation, homeowners were unable to increase the value of their homes when the same investors refused to maintain their houses.

Political Issues

During the 1950s, the black community began to split, or at least show signs of splintering, under a national spotlight. In a scenario that was being repeated around the country, the level of opposition to the local political status quo was the question. How much would the black community push against the “veneer of racial harmony” in their quest for civil rights? While some church leaders were against shaking up the system, others were ready to push limits. Historian Patrick Shane Parker notes that Rev. E.W. Dixon from Hill Street Baptist Church called for African American suffrage to be added to Asheville’s civil rights platform.138 Yet, in the mid-1940s Brown Temple’s Rev. N.H. Humphries fully endorsed segregation if it was tempered by equal facilities.139 This conversation of how far to push the white establishment came to the surface, or at least to the notice of the northern press.

Voting in the 1953 municipal election also exposed fault lines in the support for the system of black elites representing their community to the white power structure. Indications of a problem surfaced in April, 1953, when Hugh Johnson, the Market Street YMCA secretary, was fired from his job. Johnson claimed he was fired because he opposed discrimination and segregation.140 Johnson had only been in Asheville and at his job since January 1952. Previously he was employed at Louisville, Kentucky’s Chestnut Street YMCA.141 The Chestnut Street YMCA was

136 “Housing Code Enforcement is Discussed,” Asheville-Citizen Times, August 24, 1954, 11. 137 “Stiffer Housing Code Proposed,” Asheville Citizen-Times, July 4, 1963, 21. 138 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 52. 139 “People’s Forum,” Asheville Citizen-Times, August 6, 1944, 4. 140 “Fire YMCA Secretary,” The Pittsburgh Courier, April 11, 1953, 1. 141 “Johnson Named Secretary of YMCA Branch,” Asheville Citizen, January 16, 1952, 10. 42 aligned with Louisville’s Quinn Chapel AME Church. Quinn’s congregation was historically outspoken and organized where civil rights were concerned. The congregation integrated Louisville’s streetcars in 1870 and supported and financed the NAACP’s Buchannon v. Warley segregation ordinance case in 1914–15. In this setting civil rights militancy was embraced and encouraged. Johnson’s short tenure and problems in Asheville are not surprising in context. Johnson stated his “’militant attitude’ towards discrimination offended certain whites.” who pressured the management board to fire Johnson.”142 Johnson’s infraction: “having outside activities that led to criticism of the ‘Y’ by people in the community that the branch serves.”143 This was an oblique reference to Johnson’s criticism of the wholesale dismissal of African American nurses at Victoria Hospital in the fall of 1952. In addition, Johnson had recently protested Mission Hospital’s refusal to treat Thomas W. Simpson, who was shot in the face by an ex-policeman.144 While a petition was started to reinstate the “outspoken” Johnson, it does not appear to have been successful.145

The community split about the desired level of civil rights militancy continued into the 1953 municipal election. Two African American candidates ran for city council. Barber Victor McDowell ran on the Republican ticket. Dentist Robert M. Hendrick ran as a Democrat on a platform of cleaning up city government. The Pittsburgh Courier covered the election and the candidates circled the wagons to protect Asheville’s honor. An article by Courier national political reporter John Clark stated that “Ministers, racketeers, and Negro disciples of ‘white supremacy’” ganged up on Dr. Hendrick to derail his campaign.146 Clark stated that three ministers delivered sermons urging congregants to vote against Hendrick because “A Negro on council can do us no good.”147 The article alleged that the “racket crowd was determined to protect the administration to protect their ‘outside-the-law operations’ and that muscle-men from the Fourteenth Precinct intimidated the timid and paid off teenagers with dollar bills and shots of whiskey.”148 Former YMCA secretary Hugh Johnson was accused of leading a campaign against Hendrick because he wasn’t militant enough.149

This proved too much for both Johnson and McDowell, who both dashed off letters to the Pittsburgh Courier demanding a retraction. The Courier noted Johnson was only “accused,” but stated it was unable to substantiate the claim. It also noted that opposing a candidate was not illegal or immoral, but apologized for being unclear. McDowell opted to protect Asheville’s veneer of racial harmony and harmony in general. He stated that only one church, New Mt. Olivet Baptist, was against the candidate and that people of all races resented the intrusion.

142 “Fire YMCA Secretary,” 4. 143 Fire YMCA Secretary,” 4. 144 “Fire YMCA Secretary,” 4. (The Asheville Citizen stated the policeman was off-duty). 145 “See Foster as Tuskegee’s Next President,” The Pittsburgh Courier, April 18, 1953, 13. 146 “Asheville,” The Pittsburgh Courier, October 17, 1953, 2. 147 “Asheville.” 148 “Asheville.” 149 “Report on Asheville, NC Questioned by McDowell, Disputed by Hugh Johnson,” The Pittsburgh Courier, November 21, 1953, 2. 43

McDowell blamed the entire kerfuffle on Eugene Smith, editor of the African American Southern News, who organized a mass meeting where Hendrick allies and civil rights attorneys Reuben Dailey and Harold Epps were threatened with violence—being tossed down the stairs. McDowell’s letter went on: “race relations in Asheville are ideal, praises all city and county officials and invites the Courier writer to visit Asheville, stay a while and know the city.”150 All parties seemed intent on portraying Asheville in the best light before getting it off the front pages of a national African American newspaper. Hendrick lost the election, referring to himself in the third person: “He didn’t get enough votes.”151

The loss at the ballot box and the apparent community split did not slow civil rights activities. Employment and access to recreation facilities became two major issues. Two civil rights campaigns were activated in 1953; both were concerned with shopping conditions at downtown stores. Attorney Harold Epps formed the Buncombe County Committee for Negroes in 1953. Concurrently the Tabernacle Baptist Church formed a committee to “wage an all out community campaign” to get restroom facilities for African Americans in the downtown shopping district.152

The Carolina Times, a black newspaper based in Durham, chastised the City of Asheville in 1953 because the city and local industry refused to hire African Americans. However, at the same time, city and county officials boasted of their excellent race relations.153

The veneer of racial harmony was threatened again in 1954 when integrating the city’s recreational facilities came to the fore. As an Asheville Citizen-Times editorial put it, “The people of Asheville are not faced with a possible loss of a major part of these facilities due to the question arising from the Supreme Court decision against segregation in public parks and playgrounds.”154 The city closed the pool and it remained closed the next year. The Asheville Citizen-Times editorial called for a new Interracial Committee, the 1917 iteration having ended in approximately 1947, noting, “Both races have too much to lose to let racial tensions and frictions destroy their heretofore good relations.”155

In 1954, the city proposed selling its golf course to a private operator—a common tactic that usually led to African Americans being banned from a “private club.” Local attorney Ruben Dailey insisted on knowing the future rules and regulations before the sale.156 In July, 1954, the sale was again protested by civil rights attorneys Dailey and Harold Epps, along with twenty-five residents.157 The Central Labor Union also protested the sale. The golf course was not sold and

150 “Report on Asheville, NC Questioned.” 151 “Asheville,” Pittsburgh Courier, October 17, 1953, 2. 152 “Protest Against City Stores is Organized,” Carolina Times, July 25, 1953, 1. 153 Gershenhorn, Louis Austin and the Carolina Times, 129. 154 “We Need the Municipal Golf Course,” Asheville Citizen-Times, May 18, 1956, 4. 155 “We Need the Municipal Golf Course.” 156 “New Protest Is Made to Golf Course Sale,” Asheville Citizen-Times, May 20, 2019, 1. 157 “Industry Water Rate Cut,” Asheville Citizen-Times, July 9, 1954, 16. 44 was accordingly integrated. However, the clubhouse was burned to the ground under questionable circumstances.

The Supreme Court decision also affected the all-white city pools. In response, the city closed the Recreation Park pool and prepared to sell it, claiming it was too expensive to refurbish. In 1957, Dailey and the Asheville and Buncombe County Citizen’s Organization protested the proposed sale of the city owned Recreation Park pool to the Jaycees. One suggestion was that the pool would be used as a skating rink to avoid blacks and whites swimming together.158 The sale was finalized in October, 1957. The city had built the pool for $107,600 in approximately 1937– 38. It was sold to the Jaycees for $8,500. The pool reopened in 1958 to “members only.”159 While the park was eventually integrated, the swimming pool was not. In 1970, the Buncombe County Health Department condemned the pool. The Jaycees donated the pool back to the city. A new pool was planned at Recreation Park.160

Immediately after Lee-Walker was constructed, it was evident that it would not meet the needs of the black community. The Asheville and Buncombe County Citizens’ Organization, an African American community group, asked the Asheville Housing Authority for more units in 1951 but realtors, who thought public housing was “socialistic,” opposed the effort.161 An Asheville Citizen letter to the editor mocked the Asheville realtors, stating, “I assume the realtors in Asheville in their courageous campaign for sponsoring privately owned house for Negroes anticipate providing respectable comfortable standard dwellings instead in lieu of the frequently over-priced jerry-built units which are being continuously provided.”162

New African American public housing units were proposed again in 1955 but once again ran into heavy opposition from the Asheville Board of Realtors. Instead of building additional units they urged strict code enforcement “to meet the slum problem.”163 The city did hire a code enforcement officer but the effort was not in earnest.

Black suburbs began to develop after World War II, accelerating through the 1950s and 1960s as black suburbanization took place in Asheville and throughout the South. Suburban subdivisions in Shiloh thrived in the early 1950s. There was also a large outmigration. As community historian Henry Robinson notes, returning veterans were met with the “stiff salute of racial segregation” on their return to Asheville and often went North for jobs and equality.164 Other veterans went to college elsewhere and did not return to Asheville. Some moved from Asheville’s urban neighborhoods to the suburbs. In 1952 the Whitehurst subdivision was

158 “Council Ratifies Park Pool’s Sale,” Asheville Citizen-Times, October 25, 1957, 1. 159 “Jaycees Get Title to Pool at Rec Park,” Asheville Citizen-Times, January 28, 1958, 1. 160 “Jaycees Present Mayor with Swimming Pool Deed,” Asheville Citizen-Times, January 23, 1970, 15. 161 “Housing Authority Urged to Construct More Negro Units,” Asheville Citizen, February 29, 1952, 17. 162 “Why Public Housing is Needed – Letter to the Editor,” Asheville Citizen, May 14, 1952, 4. 163 “Housing Unit Erection is Studied,” Asheville Citizen, December 30, 1955, 1. 164 Henry Robinson, “A Historical Perspective on the East End,” in Andrea Clark: East End Photographs Circa 1968 (Asheville: Buncombe County Library, 2009), 13. 45 advertised in Shiloh, followed by another Roosevelt Park advertising campaign. These developments fit the post-war African American suburban pattern of building in outlying black enclaves. This would continue into the 1970s and beyond.

While some Asheville African Americans were middle class, life could be exceedingly difficult for those in poverty. Segregation, which curtailed movement to white neighborhoods, meant that tenants had no option but to pay for substandard and often overcrowded living conditions. The lack of code enforcement led to subdivided house and extra dwelling units on parcels that increased residential density. Life was made more difficult by welfare lien laws. Homeowners were loath to apply for North Carolina welfare benefits because a lien was put against their property for the amount of the benefits received. This also discouraged people who had welfare liens from maintaining their property. Renters who received welfare payments, like many in other states at the time, endured every manner of humiliation at the hands of their caseworkers, who could drop by at any time. They were discouraged from having items such as telephones.165 While some northern welfare recipients who received similar treatment from their caseworkers marched and protested, Asheville remained relatively calm.

The Asheville Redevelopment Commission (ARC) was created in 1958. The ARC worked with the Department of Transportation (DOT) to construct the Crosstown Expressway through the Hill Street neighborhood. In 1958, black suburbanization in Shiloh jumped with Federal Housing Authority approval for Section 221 loans for people displaced by the Asheville crosstown expressway. The first house in North Carolina built under this program was located on West Chapel Road in Shiloh.166 Suburbanization, black and white, became a theme for the city. An Asheville Citizen editorial lamented the loss of “better citizens” to suburbs and stated that one aim of urban renewal was to draw new suburbanites back to the city.167 The editorial wasn’t completely enamored with urban renewal either. It pointed out that wherever the displaced went they would transfer blight with them.168

165 “Asheville Model Cities Application,” Asheville Model Cities Commission and Associated Papers, D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina Asheville. 166 “First House is Started for Displaced Families,” Asheville Citizen-Times, March 5, 1958, 9. 167 “Slums in Cities Continue to Expand,” Asheville Citizen-Times, August 5, 1958, 4. 168 “Slums in Cities Continue to Expand.” 46

Fighting for Public Accommodations and Jobs

Protests against segregation in public accommodations were starting around the country. Young African Americans began to protest against unequal service in restaurants. At Kress’ in downtown Asheville blacks could only get food to go from a counter downstairs. At many restaurants and drugstore lunch counters they were refused service altogether. However, in most other cities and especially lunch counter protests the protesters were predominately college students, often from historically black colleges and universities. In Asheville, there was no college to fill this role. Instead, Asheville’s high school students took the lead.

ASCORE started their civil rights actions in 1960.169 Meeting in jeweler William Roland’s store), the group planned non-violent actions in Asheville. Roland was instrumental in 1950s and 1960s civil rights actions in Asheville.

He started working with a student group in 1950 that was involved with local whites who wanted “oneness” in community.170 He served as president of the Asheville-Buncombe County Citizen’s Organization, a group that advocated for African American inclusion and civil rights.

The group also learned about nonviolent direct action tactics that they would use during protests and sit-ins. Students were required to get their parents’ permission to participate in civil rights actions. Some feared losing their jobs and did not allow their children to join.171

While Roland was a leading figure advising the group, others also helped including Rev. Nilous Avery from Hill Street Baptist Church and local African American civil rights attorneys Reuben Dailey and Harold Epps. Students also came from Warren Wilson College to help.172

Future civil rights attorney James Ferguson, who grew up on Blanton Street on the Southside, was the president and a founding member. Viola Jones Spells knew James Ferguson from the neighborhood and joined the group. Another Stephens-Lee student, Marvin Chambers, was also instrumental in founding ASCORE.173 Initially, Ferguson and Chambers dealt with school integration issues. Two wealthy white women established the Greater Asheville Intergroup Youth Council to bridge the gap between racial groups. The gap, however, was virtually unbridgeable. Lee-Edwards students blamed the structural inequality in Asheville’s schools on the fact that white parents organized and worked harder than blacks.174 This tack effectively

169 Dates vary and range from 1958 to 1961. 170 William Roland Autobiography, http://toto.lib.unca.edu/findingaids/mss/blackhigh/biography/roland_w.html (accessed July 6, 2019). 171 Viola Jones Spells interview, 2019. 172 Viola Spells Jones interview, 2019. 173 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 54. 174 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 55. 47 ended the conversation. Ferguson and the group advocated for a new school. French Broad was built as a result.175 Concurrently, Stephens-Lee became even more crowded when Yancey County sent their students rather than to the decrepit school there. Ferguson and other students, with their teacher’s permission, conducted a survey of Stephens-Lee and determined it did not meet state requirements. They took the report to a Board of Education meeting where Ferguson announced if they didn’t build a new school he would lead a march to Lee-Edwards School. Historian Patrick Shane Parker points out this threatened Asheville’s “veneer of racial harmony.” Months later the Board would agree to build South French Broad High School. The youth movement’s threat altered the power dynamic. Rather than engage in the polite negotiations that black leaders had engaged in since the advent of the Colored Betterment League and the Interracial Commission, the youth threatened to take it to the street. As Parker points out, Asheville’s early twentieth century black elite strove for equal facilities. ASCORE aimed to integrate them.176 The tactics also changed. They added civil disobedience to the mix. This set them at odds with Asheville’s black elite.177 It marks the continued split in tactics hinted at by Hugh Johnson’s firing from the Market Street YMCA in 1952 for opposing segregation and discrimination.

The first phase was to integrate places of public accommodation. On February 10, 1960, black students had a “sit-in” at the Woolworth’s store in Asheville. In response, white students painted a large Confederate flag on the sidewalk in front of the store.178

Ferguson added more members to the core group, including Al Whitesides from Stephens-Lee and Viola Jones Spells and Oralene Simmons from the Allen School.179 The push to integrate Kenilworth’s Lunch Counter on Tunnel Road did not go as well. The owner removed the stools and booths rather than integrate his counter. The group integrated Kress’s, Burger King, and J. J. Newberry. A meeting with city leaders opened most of the rest of the city. Integration turned out to be incremental. Viola Jones Spells remembers going to S. H. Kress and waiting hours to be served. She also notes that going to Kress was not at the top of the list for entertainment options for Asheville’s teenagers. While they wanted the right to go there and eat, waiting forever was not the idea.180

The white power structure hid the civil rights victory. Asheville’s papers devoted minimal coverage to the events. They did cover other events and an August 30, 1961 Asheville Citizen editorial illustrated the white establishment’s apprehension with the pace and extent of civil rights and integration in keeping the peace. The editorial examined Monroe, North Carolina, and activist Robert Williams. Williams was expelled from the NAACP when he advocated that

175 “Chambers: A Long and Successful Career,” Asheville Citizen-Times, January 16, 2011, 37. 176 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 61–62. 177 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 64. 178 Betty Jamerson Reed, School Segregation in Western North Carolina: A History, 1860s–1970s (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing, 2011), 45. 179 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 65. 180 Viola Jones Spells Interview, 2019. 48 blacks protect themselves, with force if necessary, from white violence. The newspaper resorted to the interracial commission’s trope of the danger of the radical black but at the same time allowed for white agency in the problem. The Asheville Citizen blamed Williams, “by nature and purpose, a trouble-maker.”181 But the newspaper also blamed the town of Monroe, “a white man’s town” noting there are no decent housing or recreational facilities for African Americans and “no desegregated activities—even on a token basis.”182 It recognized that integration was going to be essential for continued peace. Robert F. Williams would go on write Negroes with Guns, a seminal publication for the Black Power movement. He would also flee to Cuba to avoid charges in North Carolina. The Asheville Citizen would continue to refer to Williams throughout the 1960s in less than glowing terms but it also always blamed Monroe for permitting the Klan to roam the city with the police.183 Monroe had violated the separate but equal progressive- mystique type of racism that kept the peace in Asheville.

After their success in restaurants ASCORE focused on the library. Viola Jones Spells led the committee and approached the director, who was amenable. The board agreed and the library was integrated. Not all the staff was as welcoming but the students and the community felt they had to continue to go.184 The Y.M.I. branch remained open until 1966 when librarian Irene Hendrick retired.

ASCORE tackled discrimination in employment and protested at Winn-Dixie, Eckards, Ingles and A & P stores. The protests did not immediately work and black community members kept crossing the picket lines. Rev. Nilous Avery from Hill Street Baptist and the leaders from Hopkins Chapel lent their support and thereby gaining the approval of their congregations. The stores refused to yield. White protesters hassled and spit on Anita White Carter and Viola Jones Spells.185 Eventually, in early 1962 the stores acquiesced after nearly a year of picketing.

ASCORE became less active in the mid-1960s. The leadership and many members left Asheville when they went to college. Roland closed his jewelry store and school integration came to forefront. The interplay between the goals of Asheville’s black elite and rest of the community would come to the forefront with urban renewal and school integration. Many in the black community did not want school integration but it was spearheaded by Asheville’s black elite including ASCORE advisor Ruben Dailey. ASCORE wanted to integrate the social sphere not schools.186 Dailey had already assisted in integrating the municipal golf course and Yancy County Schools earlier in the decade.

181 “Racial Strife Stirs in a Likely Village,” Asheville Citizen, August 30, 1961, 4. 182 “Racial Strife Stirs in a Likely Village.” 183 “No Welcome for a Militant Fool,” Asheville Citizen, August 28, 1969, 4. 184 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 83. 185 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 89. 186 Parker, “Appalachian Activists,” 92. 49

Figure 10. Asheville jeweler and ASCORE advisor William Roland. (D. H. Ramsey Special Collections, UNCA).

Integrating public accommodations was also assumed to include changes in police behavior, such as stopping arbitrary arrests for trespassing and disturbing the peace.187 This doesn’t appear to have been the case. In the 1969 Asheville High School protest police brutality was a constant theme.188 There was a precedent. In 1960, the Asheville NAACP legal redress committee pursued three police brutality cases dating from between 1954 and 1959 that involved police beatings associated with resisting arrest.189 The city refused action in two cases. In the third the policemen were suspended for ten days.

The Asheville NAACP chapter also tackled employment in the early 1960s. Lloyd McCord explained to the national branch that only one industrial plant in Asheville hired African Americans in non-janitoral positions, and then only one person per shift. McCord stated that Asheville’s employment situation was causing high school students to drop out. He noted that there “was no employment in the city except the very lowest of work that can be had.”190

187 Model Cities Application, Asheville Model Cities Commission and Associated Papers, D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina Asheville. 188 “Unequal Treatment Caused Clash,” The Daily Tarheel, October 1, 1969, 6. 189 “NAACP Charges Police Brutality; Board Finds No Cause For Action,” The Asheville Citizen, February 6, 1960, 10. 190 Lloyd McCord to Herbert Hill, letter, March 15, 1962, NAACP Records, Library of Congress Collection. 50

McCord sent affidavits from people who had applied at Square “D” Electric Company but received no response. Each affidavit lists their education and previous experience in addition to the line, “I have never been arrested and have never belonged to a union.”191 Additional complaints were lodged against Ball Glass Company and C.P. Clare Company.192

Figure 11. Marvin Chambers became the first African American to work in American Enka’s engineering department in 1963 (© Asheville Citizen-Times). Perseverance and protest paid off, not always in equal measure and not always used together. Marvin Chambers, an ASCORE member, became the first African American in the engineering department at American Enka in 1963.

Employment and politics began to be integrated again sixty years after the Democratic takeover and institution of Jim Crow in North Carolina. Henry Robinson became the first African American reporter at the Asheville Citizen in 1967. Dr. John Holt was elected to the Board of Education in 1967. He would serve for twenty years. Holt was the second African American doctor in Asheville when he started his practice in 1960. He practiced first on Southside Avenue

191 General Office File, NAACP Administration 1956-1965, Labor Complaints – North Carolina. 192 General Office File, NAACP Administration 1956-1965, Labor Complaints – North Carolina. 51 then moved his practice to Congress Street. Attorney Ruben Dailey was elected to City Council in 1969 and was re-elected in 1971.

School Desegregation

In Asheville school desegregation started in 1961 but was accelerated by civil rights legislation. The earliest efforts allowed for school choice.193 However, the transfer process was particularly complicated and not widely used.

In North Carolina school integration was pushed by Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination based on race, color, and national origin when the entity received federal funding. Integration was mandated from the federal level and its pace would have been slower if locally controlled.194

School integration in Asheville was mixed at best for the black community. The loss of Stephens-Lee High School was immense. In some ways, integration was an opportunity gained and a world lost. School materials were better, but the push for excellence was not always present at integrated schools.

Once again, maintaining community peace was paramount. One major source of contention was how integration would take place. It quickly became apparent that merely achieving racial parity at all of Asheville’s schools was politically impossible. White students would not attend black schools. In order to avoid bussing white students to majority African American schools and neighborhoods black schools were closed. In Asheville, a new high school, French Broad, was constructed. Stephens-Lee was closed in 1965 and sold to the city parks and recreation department for $10. School board chairman John Schell noted that demolishing the building would cost $25,000 but the sale was like “unloading something that has been a liability to the board but which can be used by the city.”195 The school was later razed and the WPA-era gym was repurposed as a recreation center. Livingston and Shiloh Elementary, both previously African American schools, were also closed and sold to the city to use for community centers. Herring School, formerly Mountain Street, closed. Asheville’s school integration meant a suppression of black pride and achievement.

Schools in Asheville did not completely integrate until 1969 when French Broad and Lee- Edwards were consolidated While the first day, August 23, 1969, appears to have gone smoothly, the peace was deceiving. Tensions finally erupted on September 29, 1969. Conditions in the school after integration were much different than at Stephens-Lee and the students fought back.

193 Center for Diversity Education, “With All Deliberate Speed: School Desegregation in Buncombe County,” https://issuu.com/diversityeducation1/docs/with_all_deliberate_speed. 194 Betty Jamerson Reed, School Segregation in Western North Carolina: A History, 1860s–1970s, Jefferson: McFarland Publishing, 2011, 52. 195 Mary Cowles, “Newton School Decision Promised by March,” Asheville Citizen, February 4, 1975, 2. 52

Like ASCORE a decade before the students had adult advisors that helped them plan the rebellion and in the end most demands were met. However, the times had changed and the previous adherence to non-violence was not in vogue in all quarters. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination and the rise of the Black Power movement affected local civil rights protests.

Student Leo Gaines was expelled for not wearing socks on Friday. He returned with socks—and a gun, but was refused admittance.196 Gaines spoke to some other African American students and was then removed by a black policeman. He then spoke with their “group booster” Preston Dobbins, who confirmed that indeed he was mistreated. They formed a plan for action.

Figure 12. Asheville student leader Leo Gaines in 1972 (© Ashville Citizen-Times).

The Asheville students had at least three adult advisors for their action: Victor Chalk Jr., Preston Dobbins, and “another cat from Durham,” unnamed.197 James McDowell and Shirley Brown are also mentioned as advisors.198 Chalk, a navy veteran, worked at American Enka in Asheville and was well-known to city officials. He was civically active and had approached the city

196 Kip Reusing, “SGA Hears Black Side of Riot,” The Ridge Runner, October 10, 1969, 4. 197 “High Schools Simmer Across North Carolina,” Black Ink, November, 1969, 3. 198 Reed, School Segregation, 47. 53

“requesting attention to property matters, drainage complaints, water bills and such.”199 These were longstanding issues which urban renewal was supposed to solve.

Dobbins was a Chicago native who graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He had co-founded the UNC Chapel Hill Black Student Movement (BSM) in 1967. They campaigned for better conditions for black custodial and cafeteria workers. In April, 1968, after the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the BSM burned Confederate flags at a white fraternity. He also worked as a research analyst for Asheville-born, Charlotte-based civil rights attorney and former ASCORE member James Ferguson.

Figure 13. Asheville High School 1969 rebellion advisor Preston Dobbins (left) burns a Confederate flag at a UNC, Chapel Hill, white fraternity after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death (Daily Tarheel). The students organized a walkout for 9:15 A.M. ‘The group was organized with assigned marshalls and spokesmen,” according to Gaines.200 After the spokesmen read the demands Principal Clark Pennell agreed to grant some but not all. This prompted the crowd to sing, “Do right, white man, do right” as Pennell went back inside and then quickly returned to announce the police were on the way. The Asheville police arrived in riot gear and a melee ensued with

199 Jay Hensley, “City Police Arrest Two Militant Leaders,” Asheville Citizen, October 1, 1969, 2. 200 Reusing, “SGA Hears Black Side of Riot,” 4. 54 black and white students fighting the police.201 Windows were broken in the new vocational building.

Figure 14. Asheville high school students walk out while Principal Clark Pennell (foreground) watches (©rogerball).

The causes of the uprising were numerous and the students were allowed to speak at the newly formed Community Relation Council (CRC) meeting and later school board meetings. Students protested the absence of the any South French Broad or Stephens-Lee trophies in the display case. Students were also upset that a white history teacher taught the black history class.

Community activist and student advisor Victor Chalk Jr. noted that blacks were willing to do whatever they needed to do. “We bleed in Vietnam; we might as well bleed here.”202 The Community Relations Council made a series of recommendations, including an orientation class for teachers about forms of address to avoid (“boy, colored or Negro”). A black cosmetology teacher and black history teacher were requested. An end to corporal punishment and mandatory haircuts was also requested. There was an immediate backlash. A white minister at the CRC

201 “High Schools Simmer Across North Carolina,” 3. 202 “Curfew Remains in Effect,” Asheville Citizen, October 1, 1969, 2. 55 meeting warned members that whites were still a wide majority in Asheville and approaching the student’s demands “uncritically” would surely provoke a “white reaction response at the polls.”203

Asheville established a nighttime curfew. That night, after CRC and school board meetings, the Asheville police arrested two “black militants,” including Chalk, at a police checkpoint, along with Dobbins who was recognized by police from Raleigh..204 Chalk explained that he had received death threats from Klan members concerning his mother and was going to check on her. He also stated they had called the police in advance about the trip across town. As for the shotgun it was a matter of personal protection; it was always in the car, according to Chalk.205 Dobbin said the police planted the incendiary devices. Both were arrested for having materials for a fire bomb and a shotgun. Police also threatened the community at-large with federal charges under the 1969 anti-riot and disturbance laws enacted after urban uprisings in northern African American urban neighborhoods.

The school board quickly attempted to repair the community rift. Trophies from the closed schools went on display and the Lee Edwards insignia was removed from band uniforms and sports uniforms. A black cosmetology teacher was hired. Tardy students were treated more leniently until the transportation system could be fine-tuned. The demands to not wear socks and the issue of haircuts were deferred to a dress code committee.

The schools reopened the next Monday. When students returned to school Rev. Wesley Grant Sr. sat on Asheville High Schools steps as a reminder of the black community’s expectations for behavior.206 Chalk and Dobbins pled guilty, eventually received suspended sentences at a trial in nearby Statesville. The defense lawyer, James Ferguson, sought and received a change of venue claiming the defendants would not receive a fair trial in Asheville. In addition, Chalk was suspended from his job at American Enka. The uprising involved generations of Asheville civil rights leaders and methods. Grant’s presence on the steps marked an older generation where behavior was paramount to getting along and getting ahead. Ferguson, Dobbins and Chalks’ attorney was a former ASCORE member schooled in non-violent direct action. Gaines, Dobbins, and Chalk were all in the mold of Black Power movement. Together, they changed the school.

There were more protests in the spring. The board closed Livingston and Herring (Mountain Street School) as part of their desegregation plan to bus African American children to white schools.207 Demonstrators at the Board of Education meeting stuffed City Council members’

203 “Curfew Remains in Effect.” 204 Hensley, “City Police Arrest Two Militant Leaders,” 1. (Some sources say Dobbins was from Durham). 205 Reusing, “SGA Hears Black Side of Riot,” 4. 206 Reed, School Segregation, 48. 207 Center for Diversity Education, “With All Deliberate Speed.” 56 blazes into toilets and smashed windshields in the parking lot. Board of Education members hid in the Department of Public Works offices.208 School, however, continued uninterrupted.

Another uprising happened at Asheville High School on October 19, 1972 when a fight erupted over the National Honor Society selection process. Violence also flared at French Broad, now a junior high school.

Integrated schools were in many ways a setback for African Americans. Expectations for black students at these schools were low and consequently they were not pushed to do their best. Students could also be shy after being placed in a white environment. While instructional materials were better, the atmosphere could be worse. Once expected to excel and participate to the best of their abilities, black students were sometimes denigrated by teachers. It was in many ways the opposite of attending Stephens-Lee High School.

208 Reed, School Segregation, 48. 57

Highway Construction and Urban Renewal—An Overview

Highway construction and urban renewal are explored in depth in each neighborhood section.

Highway construction, urban renewal and integration were seismic events for Asheville’s black neighborhoods. Social relations were sundered as people were moved to public housing or moved to the suburbs. Economic relationships were destroyed as the neighborhoods that once fostered thriving informal economies were leveled. Urban renewal not only destroyed these relationships, it also ensured they would not return. Hills that children once raced down were graded. Streets were removed or widened for through traffic. Zoning requirements and code enforcement lowered the density and intensity of land use. Multiple buildings on parcels were outlawed.

Urban renewal and highway construction started in the late 1950s with the Crosstown Highway that went through the Hill Street neighborhood. Some displaced residents moved to Shiloh. Predatory real estate agents steered others to overpriced homes in the Southside and other segregated neighborhoods.

The East Riverside Urban Renewal Project began in 1964 when the Board of Commissioners filed the application. The previous urban renewal project, Civic Redevelopment Project N. C. R- 13, and the next project, the Model Cities End redevelopment, appear to have stemmed from long-term economic development studies and plans that posited that metropolitan Asheville’s economic success was linked to downtown development. Downtown development was linked to bringing tourists to Asheville at night for social and cultural activities, ceding daytime entertainment and outdoor recreation to the countryside.

An April 1966 presentation stated that if the downtown core is “modern, lively and pulsating it is likely the Metropolitan Asheville area will be too.”209 A May 1966, presentation by planning firm Barbour, Cooper and Associates noted the need for a “Fringe Area Plan,” stating that the surrounding neighborhood “has contributed to the decay around the fringe of the Central Business District, to the outmigration of higher income groups and the in-migration of lower income groups…this trend towards fringe area decay which further reduces its attractiveness as a business, social and cultural center. Without attention and correction these conditions will spread.”210

The East Riverside Urban Renewal Program altered the community and the very landscape itself. The project was approved in 1964 and funding was finally approved in 1967. Infill houses started to be built in 1975, although vast tracts of land remained vacant. The East Riverside Urban

209 Metropolitan Planning Board minutes, April 13, 1966. 210 Metropolitan Planning Board, May 15, 1966, “Commercial Area Study, Summary and Recommendations,” 2. 58

Renewal project started in 1968 but the actual start was overshadowed by a rent strike at the Hillcrest Apartments public housing complex.

In 1963 a bond referendum for downtown was approved after previously failing. Urban renewal was not popular in all quarters. Another Asheville Citizen editorial pointed out that opposition had scuttled projects in Kinston and radically slowed it in High Point. The opposition was labeled as a fringe element that linked urban renewal to such targets as fluoridation, long-range planning, the Supreme Court, civil rights, and communism.211

Stumptown was largely completely removed when the Riverside recreation center was constructed in Montford. The project displaced approximately two hundred families from the neighborhood.

Klondyke Homes (BN6459) was built in 1975. It was designed by Jan Weigman. Klondyke Home’s is significant because it marked the beginning of interracial protests against public housing in Montford. It also follows the previous dispersed design that started with Erskine- Walton in Asheville.

The East End was the last urban renewal project, starting in the 1970s. The East End project was guided by the East End-Valley Street Community Improvement Committee. The committee held public meetings during the first half of 1978 and pushed for the project’s approval.212

In two cases of urban renewal, the East Riverside project in the Southside neighborhood and the East End-Valley Street project Asheville’s prominent African American citizens were supportive. Leading educators and ministers used their positions to engender community support for the East Riverside bond issue in 1967 and the East End-Valley Street project in 1978. In both cases it is unclear whether the average resident fully comprehended final cost. It is not an uncommon story. In Greensboro, North Carolina, black professionals and their organizations also supported urban renewal in black working class neighborhoods.213 In many ways it was a continuation of the pattern of paternalism in the black community that goes back the 1917 Interracial Committee when groups of leading black citizens, mostly if not all men, worked with whites to determine the best course of civic action. Then, as in the 1960s, many choices were made with economic drivers in mind, i.e. tourism. Tourism also meant keeping the peace. It does not however mean that there was malevolent intent. Both white and black leadership, operating within their narrow social constraints, tried to get what they thought was the best possible outcome. In hindsight, the outcomes were not so optimal.

211 “Renewal Critic Only View Flaws of Effort,” Asheville Citizen, July 10, 1964, 4. 212 Dahlleen Glanton “Street, Sewer Improvements Promised for East End Area” Asheville Citizen, march 1, 1978, 25. 213 Sigmund G. Shipp “Winning Some Battles But Losing the War?: Blacks and Urban Renewal in Greensboro, 1953-1965” in Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows. Ed. June Manning Thomas and Marsha Ritzdorf, Thousand Oaks, CA.Sage, 1997. 59

Figure 15. New residents at Klondyke Homes in 1975 (Ramsey Library Special Collections, UNC Asheville).

Asheville since Urban Renewal

The African American population of Asheville continues to dwindle. During the first half of the twentieth century the black population hovered at approximately twenty-five percent of the city’s total population. In 1990 it had dropped to nineteen percent. Asheville, like many cities and towns experienced the crack epidemic of the early 1990s. Burton Street and Shiloh neighborhoods experienced social turmoil. Public housing complexes became battlegrounds and artifacts remain. The Hillcrest apartments guardhouse and the traffic barriers (BN6434) in the Erskine apartments are both relics from the period.

Figure 16. The Erskine barricade is a relic from the war on drugs of the 1990s. By 2019, only eight percent of the city of Asheville’s residents were black. This is partly due to an exodus based on limited opportunity. For many years African Americans had to leave to go to college. Most did not return. Historically, jobs for African Americans were low-paying service, domestic or industrial positions with little or no opportunity for advancement. Consequently, many African Americans focused on becoming educated and leaving Asheville. In addition,

61 police relations have been poor in the past. The implicit hope that integration and the civil right acts of the 1960s would be followed by equitable policing has not come to pass. Blacks have been far more likely to be stopped and searched than white counterparts.214

In addition, Asheville is experiencing rapid gentrification as new arrivals price out longstanding residents. Increases in property taxes push out long-term residents, some in family homes who cannot afford increases on fixed incomes.

School outcomes are worse for African American youths than whites. Black students are more subject to expulsions and suspensions by a wide margin.215 In 2012, black women were three times more likely to deliver a stillborn baby than whites.216

Asheville’s civic built environment is often openly hostile to African Americans. In 2015, the city rededicated Vance Memorial in Pack Square. This occasioned vigorous debate, which continues. While most African Americans see the monument as a symbol of white supremacy, many whites still adhere to the “heritage not hate” version of the Lost Cause, a recent manufacture from the 1970s. At this time, television mini-series such as “Roots” and movies such as “Glory” presented slavery in a light that could no longer be ignored or glossed over. As historian Kevin Levin points out, the Confederate Lost Cause myth serves to make sense of the present, not the past. The Sons of Confederate Veterans thus concocted a corollary to the Lost Cause myth, the “Black Confederate”—an answer to the quandary that post-civil-rights popular culture presented. This myth makes it appear the both blacks and whites together fought northern oppression and protected states rights. 217 Blacks and white supposedly worked together to protect a Southern way of life based on shared Confederate values. Its new meaning probably would have been an utter shock to the white high school students who painted a Confederate flag in front of Kress’s during the 1960s battle for civil rights in Asheville’s public accommodations.

Despite these tensions and challenges, in many ways Asheville’s black community continues to see incremental gains and progress. A new generation of civil rights activist groups such as Black Lives Matter and Showing Up for Racial Justice, in addition to dedicated individuals, have made gains in police reforms. Community members continue to highlight black history and cultural contributions to educate the larger public, a story to which this survey contributes.

214 Virginia Daffron, “Asheville Traffic stop data show racial inequities,” Mountain XPress, April 26, 2017, https://mountainx.com/news/asheville-traffic-stop-data-show-racial-inequities. 215 “Education,” The State of Black Asheville, n.d., http://www.stateofblackasheville.org/education, accessed September 9, 2019. 216 “Heathcare,” The State of Black Asheville, n.d., http://www.stateofblackasheville.org/health-care, accessed September 9, 2019. 217 Kevin Levin, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 152–57. 62

Neighborhood Histories and Descriptions

Figure 17. East End/Valley Street in 1939 (Works Progress Administration).

East End-Valley Street

The East End/Valley Street neighborhood, which includes a portion of downtown area, was the heart of Asheville’s African American community. It was originally centered on the “Block,” located on Eagle and Valley Street. The neighborhood grew organically from its early center around Eagle Street eastward across Valley Street to below Beaucatcher Mountain.

The East End/Valley Street area is thought to be the site of Patton family’s slave housing, and many worked at Patton’s Eagle Hotel located on South Main (Biltmore Avenue).218 In the aftermath of the Civil War wood-frame churches were constructed. These would gradually be replaced by the churches seen today.

The neighborhood appears on the 1891 Sanborn Fire Insurance map. The buildings are not delineated and the area northeast of Sycamore Street is merely marked “Negro Tenements.” By the turn the century the neighborhood was taking shape. Over the next 25 years major churches and schools in the neighborhood were constructed. Unlike the Southside area south of downtown the landscape was not radically altered before roads and buildings were constructed. The neighborhood largely mimicked the natural topography. Roads were steep and often unpaved. Cars parked where they could and houses were perched on hillsides. A 1922 Asheville Citizen article notes that many African American residents owned their homes through a building and loan program.219 The program may have been associated with Noah Murrough.

Schools and Churches

In 1881, Rev. Charles Dusenbury came to Asheville and in 1884 established the Calvary Parochial School. The school never numbered above 150 students.220 Dusenbury’s school focused largely on domestic sciences. Classrooms were furnished with child-sized furniture that helped students learned housework, including kitchen and garden work.221 While they also learned to read, the school was based on Booker T. Washington’s ideology of racial uplift through being a productive citizen.

218 Sarah Judson, “‘I am a Nasty Branch Kid’: A Woman’s Memories of Place in the Era of Asheville’s Urban Renewal,” The North Carolina Historical Review 91, no. 3 (2014): 333. 219 “Colored Race Prospers in Asheville as Result of White Citizens” Asheville Citizen, December 3, 1922, 3. 220 Walter Conser Jr. and Robert J. Cain, Presbyterians in North Carolina: Race, Politics, and Religious Identity in Historical Perspective (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012), 148. (While 150 may seem substantial, one may note that Magnolia Park, in a much smaller neighborhood, served 200 African American children. The East End was much larger.) 221 Rev. Samuel Orner, “Among the Colored Folks: Calvary Presbyterian School,” Asheville Daily Citizen, October 23, 1903, 2. 65

A school with space for 300 students was established on South Beaumont Street in 1888 for African American children with 800 children attempting to enroll on opening day.222 By 1892, the Asheville Daily Citizen lists 118 children at the Mountain Street School with an overall African American student body of 246 children.223

In 1915, the Hill Street School opened.224 By 1922, the Livingston Street School at Gaston Street was built at a cost of $26,000. The Burton Street School, a wood frame building, was also open.225

The Women’s Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church founded the Allen School in 1887. Missionaries from New York, Dr. and Mrs. L.M. Pease, converted a former livery stable into a school for African American children, recognizing the limited opportunities for education.226 It was renamed the Allen School in 1892 and was reorganized as a boarding school. Allen School superintendent Alsie Dole founded the Berry Temple United Methodist Church in 1887.

St. Mathias Church opened in its current location in 1898. James Vester Miller constructed the church. St. Mathias is thought to be the oldest African American congregation in Asheville.227 It was originally known as the Freedman’s Church. The church is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Hopkins Chapel African Episcopal Church (BN0433) was an offshoot of the white Central Methodist Church, formed when black congregants tired of their treatment and formed their own church.228 The “Hopkins Message”—“a commitment to cooperation, dignity and respect”— became a hallmark for the ministers.229 In 1907, the wood-frame Hopkins Chapel church that ex- slaves built burned.230 The congregation hired Richard Sharp Smith, the supervising architect at Biltmore, to design the new church. James Vester Miller started construction in 1907 and the church was finished in 1910.

The current Mt. Zion Church at 47 Eagle Street was built in 1919. James Vester Miller constructed the church. Nazareth First Baptist came from a split in First Baptist, located downtown.

By 1917 the neighborhood was taking shape. The YMI and the wood-framed Calvary Presbyterian Church center the neighborhood at Eagle and Market Street. An African American

222 “History of Education Pt. II” https://www.wresfm.com/files/history_education_2.pdf 223 “The City School Report” Asheville Daily Citizen, April 26, 1892,3. An 1890 report lists 231 students. 224 “Program Announced for Dedication” Asheville Daily Citizen, February 22, 1915, 10. 225 “Colored Race Prospers in Asheville as Result of White Citizens” Asheville Citizen, December 3, 1922, 3. 226 Nadine Cahodes, Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Regin of Nina Simone (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 42. 227 Johnnie N. Grant, “Historic African American Churches and Affiliates,” The Urban News, September 12, 2015, 1. 228 Davis, The Black Heritage of Western North Carolina, 36. 229 Davis, The Black Heritage of Western North Carolina, 36. 230 Grant, “Historic African American Churches and Affiliates.” 66 professional building is just south on Market Street. The neighborhood became much denser in the 1920s. St. James AME Church had relocated from Biltmore Street in 1889 to its location on Hildrebrand Street. A parsonage was constructed. In 1917, the congregation purchased an adjoining lot and moved the parsonage to the back of the lot and began construction on the current church. Built by African American mason and contractor James Vester Miller, it was completed in 1930.231

J.A. Wilson constructed his professional building in 1926. Calvary Presbyterian (BN6453) moved to Circle Street overlooking the city. The church was completed in 1922. After the death of Dusenbury in 1920, Rev. G.W. Hamilton became the pastor of the church and principal of the school. The school closed in 1927.

Stephens-Lee High School and the Allen School were both located in the East End. Stephens- Lee was founded in 1922 after the Catholic Hill School tragically caught fire in 1917, killing seven students and injuring more.

The importance of Stephens-Lee High School to the black community cannot be overemphasized. According to community leader Phyllis Sherrill, principal Walter Smith Lee “emphasized a curriculum built around Shakespeare, dignity, and self-help.232 Classes included “music, drama, carpentry, radio repair, cosmetology, home economics and English.”233 In 1952- 1953, the shop class built a house (BN6451) on Pine Street under the tutelage of shop teacher and developer Lacy Haith.

232 Phyllis Sherrill, “Growing Up in Stumptown,” in “Memories of Stumptown: Stumptown Reunion, August 25-26, 2001,” MSS 154, Pack Memorial Library North Carolina Room, 148. 233 Sherrill, “Growing Up in Stumptown.” 67

Figure 18. Stephens-Lee Annual 1952-1953 with shop class house under construction.

Figure 19. Pine Street house constructed by the 1952-53 Stephens-Lee shop class (Rory Krupp). Stephens-Lee teachers were highly qualified and most had graduate degrees. A Stephens-Lee teacher’s summers were often spent taking graduate courses out of state. While Asheville appreciated its teachers, the places they went to study over the summer welcomed them too. In 1949, Stephens-Lee teacher and marching band leader Madison Lennon took summer classes at the Ohio State University.234 The Columbus, Ohio, black weekly the Ohio State News pointed out Lennon’s Ohio connections; he had attended Wilberforce and played for three years in the Zack White band, a Cincinnati jazz outfit. The newspaper welcomed him to town for the summer and pointed out that while he might be busy with his studies, he still enjoyed baseball, reading, and bridge.235

234 Teacher Paul Dusenbury was also a band leader but did not go to summer graduate school with Lennon. 235 Chester Hampton, “Teachers Over the Nation Choose OSU for Grad Study,” Ohio State News, July 23, 1949, 4. 69

Figure 20. Stephens-Lee High School band and music teacher Madison Lennon. C. L. Moore was another notable teacher, baseball coach and community activist. Moore played professional baseball for the Asheville Black Tourists and later owned and managed the Asheville Blues.

Although the main building was constructed in 1922 the gymnasium was added in 1940 through a Works Progress Administration project. Some of the stone used in the building came from the dismantled Orange Street School. Building material reuse was common and encouraged in WPA projects. Spending less in building materials meant more of the budget could be spent on labor.

The Allen School also filled a valuable role. A boarding school for African American female students, the school attracted a wide audience. In 1924, the Allen School became the Allen High School, a girls’ school. Each year Allen School students chose a class motto. Singer Nina Simone’s class motto, “We launched, where shall we anchor?,” seemed appropriate for the myriad of activities and experiences offered at Allen. In the late 1940s the school had its own NAACP branch. They shared a presentation from poet Langston Hughes with other schools.236

236 Cahodes, Princesse Noire, 44. 70

Figure 21. 1953 Architect’s rendering of the Allen School Dormitory (© Asheville Citizen-Times).

In 1953, the dormitory was constructed. Designed by A. Eugene Cellar from Jacksonville, Florida, the building could house 82 students and 17 faculty members.237 The Allen school was a college preparatory school. By the 1950s fifty percent of its students went to college. The number had risen to seventy-five percent when it closed in 1974. Integration was the reason for the closure. Many parents felt that integration had solved the problems that had plagued education before and the school was no longer needed. Those that did need it from large urban districts could not afford it.238

237 “Allen High Will Build $175,000 Dormitory” Asheville Citizen, February 28, 1952. 238 “Allen High to Close as Private Black Girls School” Asheville Citizen, May 21, 1974, 32. 71

Figure 22. An Allen School advertisement from the late 1960s. The East End was the center of Asheville African American life. Centering on “The Block,” the neighborhood boasted a wide variety of African American businesses, churches and other institutions. The Young Men’s Institute and the Wilson Building (BN2157) provided space for professional African Americans. The Colored Library opened in the Young Men’s Institute in 1926.

In 1951, Lee-Walker Heights (BN6450) public housing project, the first in Asheville, was dedicated with flag raising and a rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner by the Stephens-Lee

High School Band.239 Consisting of 96 units for African American occupancy designed by Asheville architectural firm Six Associates, the project was greeted affirmatively by black and white community leaders. The project was slightly controversial in some quarters. Businessman Victor McDowell protested the name. In 1951, he led a delegation to Washington D.C., apparently without success, to change the name to Miller-Nelson after masonry contractor James Vester Miller and Rev. G. R. Nelson, who founded Mt. Zion Baptist Church. He noted that Lee already had the Lee-Stephens High School as a namesake and it was time to recognize others in the black community.240

Figure 23. Lee-Walker Heights public housing complex after its opening in 1951 (Pack Memorial Library, North Carolina Room Collection). The East End was a thriving community in the 1940s–1960s. It had a thriving business district on Eagle Street, Market Street, and Valley Street. Like other Asheville African American

239 “Lee-Walker Housing Units Dedicated,” Asheville Citizen, May 26, 1951, 9. 240 “Efforts Renewed to Change Lee-Walker Heights Name,” Asheville Citizen, September 13, 1954, 16. 73 neighborhoods it was close-knit. As historian Sarah Judson points out, an ethic of reciprocity ensured mutual assistance; everyone helped everyone out.241

There was a thriving commercial scene. The Savoy Hotel & Café, Club Del Cardo, Ritz Restaurant, Esquire Barbershop made a lively setting on Market Street. Eagle Street featured the James Mason Barbershop, Blue Moon Billiard Parlor that became the Mason & James Pool Room followed by the Slow Recreation Parlor. One could eat at Albert’s Steak and Chicken Shop or Mrs. Breeland’s Sandwich Shop on Eagle Street.

Until the 1960s life was relatively regular. Children played in or traveled to the Southside along Nasty Branch, a creek that connected both neighborhoods to the French Broad River. Like other segregated neighborhoods, everyone living in close proximity meant a wide variety of people and professions. Teachers and bootleggers shared a community. Like other neighborhoods there were places where children shouldn’t go. In the East End that was Eagle Street where the liquor houses were located. Of course, it was also where adults went out, so style and fashion was important.242

Urban Renewal

The first East End neighborhood urban renewal program was the Model Cities Program. In March 1968, the Asheville City Council approved the planning grant for the project. It appears that funding, fighting, and federal restrictions initially hampered large-scale destruction. Actual demolition wouldn’t happen until community development grants with looser restrictions appeared in the late 1970s. Consequently, Model Cities focused largely on social programs in the East End. They were still contentious. However, they were part of fabric of the East End. The teen center is remembered.243

Unlike earlier urban renewal projects, the Model Cities program was supposed to be community driven or at least have increased community input. Asheville was divided into four precincts and there were four elected commission seats. The first Model Cities commissioner was J. W. Byers. Black members complained they were overlooked in the planning process. Neighborhood residents deeply distrusted the “Establishment,” meaning city government and the County Department of Social Services.244 Most commissioners were not unfamiliar with city or civic conflict. Lloyd McCord was a Stumptown resident, and Leo Gaines, the student leader at the 1969 Lee-Edwards student rebellion, was a commissioner, having filled a vacancy. Mrs. Dicey Jackson, Wayne Jackson, and Nola Knuckels rounded out the members.

241 Judson, “‘I am a Nasty Branch Kid,’” 335. 242 Judson, “‘I am a Nasty Branch Kid,’” 336–37. 243 Judson, “‘I am a Nasty Branch Kid,’” 340. 244 “Model Cities Brings Help for Asheville’s Poor,” Asheville Citizen-Times, October 31, 1971, 6. 74

The commission was almost immediately beset with problems.245 Gaines would resign after four months, saying “I can’t work with Model Cities if it’s going to play the political game with city council.”246 Many thought the process too complicated. The Model Cities neighborhood, made up of the East End, Southside, and Stumptown neighborhoods, was divided into four precincts. Each precinct had an area council comprised of each neighborhood resident of which there were 10,000, essentially the entire neighborhood Each precinct elected two commissioners to represent them on five task forces. The task forces made the recommendations.247 It didn’t work. Residents felt completely left out. The city started a Community Participation Program going door-to-door trying to explain the program but meeting attendance was low. Meeting attendance was highest where resistance to apartment-type public housing was high.248 Most people still had little idea what the program was about even after program workers went door-to-door.

Model Cities programs also encompassed a myriad of outreach and social programs. Each program seemed contentious to one party. A karate self-defense program drew City Council’s ire in 1971. Council fought the program, saying that for white Asheville residents the karate program was comparable to telling ethnic jokes, playing Dixie, and flying the Confederate flag for African Americans.249 Black commission members pointed out the consistent paternalistic attitude of the City Council towards poor African Americans. The crowd applauded when it was pointed out that self-defense training was good for well-to-do white children but bad for poor black children.250 City Council briefly funded the project during 1971, then canceled it.251

Social programs and events were held at the Urban Youth Center, 31 Eagle Street and the Psychedelic Shack, 24 South Market Street in the East End. A record store, Grassroots Records, offered employment opportunities for youth as well as discounted records. A class called “Awareness” covered “voter registration, black history, integration, black experiences, black literature, religion and gods, city government, poverty agencies and poverty programs, decision making, training and skills.”252

The city started planning the East End/Valley Street urban renewal project in the late 1960s. The city reduced the project size to 53 acres from 80 acres. This reduction meant the city would not have to have an election to issue a bond.253 Not all city council members were enamored of the project because of the cost and wondered if more vigorous code enforcement might be better. The city manager noted that no amount of code enforcement could create salable sections of land for redevelopment. The city manager was also aware of the personal costs associated with the

245 “Model Cities Brings Help for Asheville’s Poor.” 246 “Commissioner Resigns Post,” Asheville Citizen, November 11, 1970, 15. 247 Philip Clark, “Participation is Key to Success for Model Cities,” Asheville Citizen, November 6, 1971, 1–2. 248 Clark, “Participation is Key to Success.” 249 Clark, “Participation is Key to Success.” 250 Clark, “Participation is Key to Success.” 251 Mary Cowles, “Public Invited to Observe Progress,” Asheville Citizen-Times, January 13, 1972, 25. 252 Cowles “Public Invited to Observe Programs.” 253 “Council Oks Project Survey Funds” Asheville Citizen,April 2. 1971, 2 75 project, “It would be ‘folly and misleading’ to even suggest that some people in the proposed Urban Renewal area wouldn’t be hurt by the project, noting some families wouldn’t want to sell their property or move from the neighborhood.”254

In 1974 the city took over the Model Cities and urban renewal programs. In addition, the city took over planning from the Metropolitan Planning Board. Other duties assumed by the city, specifically the assistant city manager, were inspections, housing urban renewal and intergovernmental coordination.255 This switch is part of a wider historic trend. The Nixon administration largely dismantled the Model Cities program. Instead, the private market would determine urban renewal goals, funded through community block grants.

In 1978, Asheville received a community block grant to redevelop the East End. The Asheville Housing Authority oversaw the East End/Valley Street Improvement Project. There was a major problem, outlined by an Asheville Citizen-Times editorial. There wouldn’t be enough money to finish the project if federal funding was insufficient for the entire project. They surmised that there would not be enough money for redevelopment.256 In any case, putting homes back was not part of the program. One hundred of the houses would never be replaced, as “the overcrowded conditions constitute one of the major reasons for blight in the area” according to Larry Holt, deputy director of the housing authority.257

The first year funding was earmarked for land acquisition and housing demolition; however by 1981 federal funding was becoming harder to obtain for such projects and its completion was in doubt. However, planners had prioritized the funding from the beginning, starting with the neighborhood’s demolition. There were 430 houses in the neighborhood and 93 percent were declared substandard. Fifty percent were owner-occupied.258

The project was tied to the state-funded East End/Valley Street Community Improvement Project. It encompassed an overhaul of Grail Street, Carroll Avenue, Ridge Street, and a portion of Mountain Street.259

The project started in 1979. “The project began under the assumption that there were no water or sewer lines, no storm drainage system or street pavement worth saving,” according AHA director Larry Holt.260 The AHA planned for a complete overhaul, including moving streets and widening streets. Pine Street was planned to be an “all weather street.” It was widened and straightened.

254 “Council Oks Project Survey Funds,” 2. 255 Warren Nye, “Government of Asheville Streamlined,” Asheville Citizen-Times, February 15, 1974, 1. 256 “Acceptable Risk on Valley Street,” Asheville Citizen-Times, January 13, 1978, 4. 257 “East End-Valley Street Project Recieves Approval,” Asheville Citizen-Times, April 6, 1978, 9. 258 John Campbell Jr., “East End’s Renovation Progressing,” Asheville Citizen-Times, December 13, 1981, 63. 259 “Valley Street Area Ready for An Upgrade,” Asheville Citizen-Times, August 29, 1982, 45. 260 Campbell, “East End’s Renovation Progressing.” 76

By 1981, the AHA had demolished forty-one homes, and relocated twenty-one families, twenty- three individuals, and one business.261 “Citizen response was as enthusiastic as city officials had hoped,” read a measured statement from the Asheville Citizen-Times. 262 This meant bitter, distrustful, and very angry. As the black press reported years earlier, East End homeowners were “roundly castigating” city employees in a 1977 public meeting. Resident Bob Smith wanted to know what the city’s plan was for black people. He said he had information “that the city was going to tear down all the black people’s homes in the East End, widen and pave the streets and put expensive condominiums.”263 He continued that “we want to make sure we find out what the city’s plans are as far as black people are concerned. We don’t want to wake one day and find that all of us are gone.”264 The city employees appeared stunned by the remarks.265 Smith reminded them. “You saw what they did in the Southside. They cleaned it out and put us in projects and still haven’t built anything back.”266 However, other African American community members were in complete agreement with urban renewal. A committee of community members formed in 1978 supported the proposal. “’We are enthusiastic and positive about this plan…a committee member said. “First of all, we are glad it is finally taking place and second of all we have a unique opportunity to take part in the planning.”267

Valley Street was destroyed by 1985. Many of the houses were so stoutly constructed they had to be burned down rather than demolished with heavy machinery.268 The North Carolina Department of Transportation funded the project. It was part of a thoroughfare plan that would allow motorists to bypass inner-city traffic. This motorist convenience resulted in the demolition of “rows of old houses and stores, some traditional, some notorious” according to the Asheville Citizen-Journal.269 North Charlotte Street was extended south to Biltmore Avenue. The new road was advertised as free of much of the old scenery that was Valley Street.270

In addition to worries about blight affecting downtown interests and tourism, Asheville’s vibrant and historic African American enclave was demolished so people could easily get around downtown when traffic was busy. However, most residents did not support the blanket

261 Campbell, “East End’s Renovation Progressing.” 262 Campbell, “East End’s Renovation Progressing.” 263 “Citizens Place Urban Renewal on the Spot,” Carolina Times, June 25, 1977, 1. 264 “Citizens Place Urban Renewal on the Spot,” 10. 265 “Citizens Place Urban Renewal on the Spot,” 10. 266 “Citizens Place Urban Renewal on the Spot,” 10. 267 John Robinson “East End-Valley Street Project Receives Approval” Asheville Citizen, April 6, 1978, 9. 268 Rob Neufeld, “How Will I-26 Impact Asheville, Ask East End Residents,” Asheville Citizen-Times, January 21, 2009, 20. 269 John Campbell Jr., “Valley Street Ready for Upgrade,” Asheville Citizen-Times, August 29, 1982, 45. 270 John Campbell Jr., “Old Valley Street Project Running Ahead of Plans,” Asheville Citizen-Times, August 14, 1983, 51. 77 destruction of their community but whether they understood the project’s full ramifications is another matter.271

Figure 24. Downtown and East End-Valley Street Surveyed properties.

271 Dahleen Glanton “Street, Sewer Improvements Promised for East End Area” Asheville Citizen, March 1, 1978, 25. 78

Figure 25. East End-Valley Street neighborhood surveyed properties.

Figure 26. East End-Valley Street neighborhood surveyed properties.

Surveyed East End/Valley Street Properties and Neighborhoods

Surveyed Survey Address Date Type/Association Site number East End BN6461 neighborhood Wilson BN2157 13 Eagle 1926 1920s Professional Building St. building St. James AME BN6449 44 1975- Church Haith Hildebrand 1983 Education St. Building Lee-Walker BN6450 50 Wilbur 1952 Public housing (see Heights Ave. Southside map) Stephens_Lee BN6451 Pine St. 1952 house Shop Class Nazareth First BN6352 Pine St. 1961 church Baptist Church Calvary BN6453 44 Circle 1926 church Presbyterian St. Boarding BN6454 30 Ridge 1915 Home/Business House St. Allen School BN6455 College 1950s Dormitory/Education Dormitory Place

Figure 27. Southside neighborhood map in 1939 (Works Progress Administration).

Southside/French Broad

The Southside neighborhood is bounded by Patton to the north, Biltmore Avenue to the east, the French Broad River to the west and Oakland Road and the Swannanoa River to the south.

Some portions of the Southside neighborhood have been included in past surveys. Commercial and residential structures on Coxe Avenue, South French Broad Avenue, Ora Street, Adams Street, Blanton Street, and Swindale Street in the Southside were included in the Downtown Historic District Boundary Increase survey completed by the city in 2011. Major buildings in the industrial area just south of downtown are surveyed.. There are three historic districts. Riverside Industrial Historic District, Clingman Avenue Historic District and the locally designated West End Historic District.

The area around Depot Street harbored restaurants and cafes that often operated on the edge of legality, selling bootleg liquor However, the demand for bootleg liquor and somewhat seedy cafes was blamed on Pullman porters and other railroad men passing through town. This was at great odds with northern Pullman porters’ reputations at home. A black Cincinnati suburb’s consistently very conservative voting pattern was dubbed the “Pullman Porter polls.”272

Lodging was also a popular business. The Foster tourist home, 88 Clingman Avenue (BN3814), was advertised in the Negro Motorist Green Book.

The Southside neighborhood has industrial components just south of downtown and along the river and railroad corridor to the west along the French Broad River. Originally white working class residents settled the northern part. African Americans had lived farther south near the railroads and industrial areas. This changed during the war.

By 1920, African Americans lived throughout the neighborhood and not just confined to the areas closest to industry or the railroad.273 The construction boom of the 1920s fueled the neighborhood’s growth.

The Southside building boom also rearranged the landscape. E. W. Grove developed Coxe Avenue by cutting hills and filling ravines. Advertised as “The Automobile Concourse of Asheville,” the new Coxe Avenue was “the widest, smoothest and easiest grade most direct street” between the depot and downtown.274 Prospective buyers must have had serious reservations about Grove’s plan. The advertisement notes “considerable apprehension” at the thought of building on Coxe Avenue but assures prospective customers it was indeed safe under

272 “Political Portents Haywire in Cincinnati, Dean Finds,” Cincinnati Enquirer, October 27, 1940, 20. 273 National Register of Historic Places , Clingman Avenue Historic District, Asheville, Buncombe County, North Carolina, #04000583, 2004. 274 “Coxe Avenue,” Asheville Citizen, August 25, 1925, 20. 83 the height limits of the time. However, it does point out that those wanting a building of more than five stories should buy a lot on the west side of the street.275

The Southside’s industrial area, just south of downtown, was developed in the 1920s. In 1926, what was previously Buxton Hill was leveled and turned into Millard, Buxton Avenue, and Banks Avenue.276

The Great Migration linked Asheville’s residents with relatives that moved to the north. Some Asheville residents featured prominently in national publications.

Figure 28. Asheville resident Julia Ray, nee Greenlee (far right) in the January 16, 1932 Pittsburgh Courier. Gus Greenlee, originally from Marion, North Carolina, had moved to Pittsburgh in the early 1920s. Greenlee was quickly successful in business in Pittsburgh and branched into other fields including Negro League baseball with his team the Pittsburgh Crawfords. He became president of the National Negro League in the 1930s. A larger-than-life figure, Greenlee was most noted for his gregarious ways and his philanthropy in Pittsburgh’s African American community. Greenlee and his business partner, William “Woogie” Harris lived in a rarified world of sports and music where Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, Satchell Paige, and Duke Ellington were the other guests at the party.277

275 “Coxe Avenue.” 276 Ione Whitlock, “South Slope: The Demolition, 1926,” in Hidden History of Asheville, ed. Zoe Rhine (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2019), 139. 277 Patrick Sisson “The Preservation of Mystery Manor: An Oasis of Black Culture in Pittsburgh, https://www.curbed.com/2016/5/3/11578880/pittsburgh-mystery-manor-historic-preservation-african-american- history Accessed September 8, 2019. 84

His niece, Julia Greenlee, daughter of his brother George, was a close second in Pittsburgh press coverage and a visit from her was a front page affair. A Greenlee family reunion in Asheville also received a Pittsburgh Courier cover, with Miss Greenlee receiving special mention. Asheville resident Jesse Ray learned of Miss Greenlee when his mother showed him the Pittsburgh Courier front page. He wrote to Miss Greenlee. They got married and after the World War II the couple purchased the Asheville Colored Hospital and started the Jesse Ray Funeral Home. Jesse Ray passed in 1994. Julia Ray is active in the community. She served as the first African American on the Mission Hospital Board and was a trustee for UNC Asheville.278

In 1936, the Franciscan Sisters of Allegheny opened the St. Anthony of Padua School on Walton Street. The school served African American students in first through eighth grade. The sisters withdrew and the school closed in 1969. The Livingston Street School would continue to serve the neighborhood.

Municipal recreational facilities remained rare for African Americans in Asheville. Private parks and playgrounds filled some of the needs, but were small. The Community Recreation and Social Service League operated five private playgrounds for African Americans. They operated the Magnolia Park playground at Magnolia and Flint and the Gudger Street playground in the Hill Street neighborhood. The Otis Playground was located in the Southside on the site of the Otis baseball park. The Millard Playground was located on or near Madison Avenue in Chestnut Hill. The Hopkins Chapel Playground was located on Poplar Street. With the exception of the Otis playground, which was an acre in size, most were a half acre or less.279

School playgrounds also met some of the need. The Negro Welfare Council established playgrounds at Hill Street School and Mountain Street School in 1933. The WPA provided supervisors for playgrounds at the Hill Street, Mountain Street, Livingston, and Burton Street playgrounds later in the mid-1930s.280 In addition to the recreational opportunities, the WPA playground centers thus provided jobs for African Americans, supervising games and play activities.

Constructing a park or recreation center was of paramount importance for the city, but for mercenary reasons. City leaders, doubtless influenced by popular thought at the time, felt that increased recreational activities would lower what they generally termed juvenile delinquency. However, building a park involved overcoming two nearly insurmountable obstacles: money and ardent white opposition. During the 1930s federal funding through New Deal programs solved the financial problem for the city. The location would be the next battle.

In 1937 the city, in conjunction with the WPA, began to plan for a municipal African American park. While some parks had previously admitted blacks, these were all private parks operated by

278 Julia Ray, https://ywcaofasheville.wordpress.com/tag/julia-ray/ Accessed Sept. 8, 2019. 279 Wayland Towner, Welfare Portrait of Asheville, North Carolina, 1938 (New York: Community Chests and Councils Inc., 1940), 48. 280 “Young and Old Learn to Play at Recreation Centers In Asheville,” Asheville Citizen-Times, January 9, 1938, 28. 85

African Americans, such as Pearson Park in West Asheville. This new park would be the first provided by the city. The city initially made plans to build a twenty-two acre park near the Hill Street neighborhood in Campbell Woods a wooded area to the north. The city had attempted to buy the tract for years but the objections of white residents on lower Houston Street scuttled the project.281 The proposed purchase brought 50 people who “protested vigorously” to the proposed park at the December 9, 1937 City Council meeting.282 Composed of realtors and lawyers representing nearby residents, they complained the park would lower their property values and suggested locating the park in the Catholic Hill section near Beaucatcher Mountain.283 Interracial committee members supported the creation of the park but did not advocate for any particular location. The argument was also made that the Campbell Woods location would not serve the majority of Asheville’s black population. Seeing the opposition, the mayor, city manager, and council agreed—no park would be built in the Hill Street neighborhood.

Still looking for a park location, the municipal government acted. In the spring of 1938, the city purchased five acres on Walton Street. The city, in conjunction with the federal Works Progress Administration, transferred the planned amenities from the previously proposed Campbell Woods site near Hill Street to the Southside.284 Like many Depression-era public works plans, they changed rapidly. The initial plan called for a park, wading pool, pavilion, office building, outdoor fireplaces, tennis courts, and general landscaping.285 The actual pool was slated to be built later.286 This would become an almost decade-long procees.

281 “City to Buy 22 Acre Tract for Negro Park,” Asheville Citizen-Times, December 2, 1937, 11. 282 “Council Seeks New Location of Negro Park,” Asheville Citizen, December 10, 1937, 1. 283 “Council Seeks New Location of Negro Park.” Catholic Hill would eventually be the site of Stephens-Lee High School. 284 “13,439 to Be Spent by WPA on Negro Park,” Asheville Citizen-Times, June 19, 1938, 22. 285 “Negro Park Here,” Asheville Citizen, January 9, 1938, 5. 286 “Negro Park Here.” 86

Figure 29. Walton Pool in the 1950s (Courtesy of the Isaiah Rice Photograph Collection, Special Collections, Ramsey Library, UNC Asheville. )

Figure 30. Walton Street Pool in the 1950s (Courtesy of the Isaiah Rice Photograph Collection, Special Collections, Ramsey Library, UNC Asheville).

The city instead elected to purchase five acres on Walton Street (BN5664) in the spring of 1938 in the Southside neighborhood as the site of the new African American wading pool, recreation center, and tennis courts. The city ground-breaking celebration for the new recreation center was held in July, 1938.287 The park’s construction began by September, 1938, and employed African Americans. The project was not without incident. The foreman, Decatur Dover, turned in a work report that was less than complimentary about one of the workers. If it resulted in the worker’s termination the results would be devastating for him and his family. It would have been nearly impossible to find a comparable job in the midst of the Depression. It must have been out of incredible frustration that the worker took a shot at Dover with his shotgun, but missed.288 A park

287 “150 Persons Are At Ground-Breaking For Negro Park,” Asheville Citizen, July 23, 1938, 3. 288 “Negro Shoots at WPA Foreman But Misses His Mark,” Asheville Citizen-Times, September 10, 1938, 10. 88 pavilion was also constructed, but burned down in 1945 and was not replaced. A bath house for the wading pool was built, but also burned down during the war. In 1939, the Orange Street School was chosen for demolition; the “suitable parts” would be reused in the Walton Park recreation center and pool.289

The decision to build the full-sized pool stalled in 1939. The city appears to have balked at providing matching funds for the project. Community Recreation Council member W. Norman Watts and Dr. L. O. Miller urged to the city to make a WPA application for the pool, promising to help privately fund the city’s cost. The City Council promised to look into it immediately.290 By September the city had explored a plan to use building materials from the Orange Street School to build the school and baththouse. A community subscription would fund the project.291

Planning for post-war federal funding pushed the pool plans to the forefront again. In 1944, Brown Temple CME pastor Reverend N. M. Humphries stated that while he firmly believed in segregation, he also believed in the separate but equal doctrine in the quality of recreational facilities. He pointed out that Riverview was comparatively undeveloped.292

The war’s end pushed the pool back into the public conversation. In June 1946 the the Director of Public Works announced that plans for the Walton Pool were completed and $8,500 in funding remained from before the war. The project would be started as soon as materials could be obtained.293 Weir’s building supply caveat was important. The country was in the midst of a shortage of lumber, brick, cement, and every other type of building supply due to a post-war construction boom.294 This gave each neighborhood time to go to the City Council and lobby for the pool. By February representatives from the Hill Street neighborhood had presented the council with a petition signed by hundreds asking for the pool to be placed there. A competing group from the East End wanted the pool to be built around the vicinity of Mountain and Valley Streets. 295 The East End group stated they had the best case because the area had the highest African American population. The city quickly rejected Campbell’s Woods in the Hill Street neighborhood. Unlike the late 1930s, when white opposition scuttled the site, now engineering concerns knocked it off the list. The amount of earth that had to moved was too expensive. By June 1947, the council again picked the Walton Street location for the pool. They noted that some places were not considered suitable and others were not available at any cost.296 The pool was built in 1947. Work on the bathhouse began in March 1948.297 The pool opened in July

289 “Board To Decide On Disposition of Old School,” Asheville Citizen, September 6, 1939, 8. 290 “Ice Cream Ordinance is Passed on Final Reading,” Asheville Citizen-Times, July 14, 1939, 5. 291 “Board To Decide On Disposition of Old School.” 292 “People’s Forum” Asheville Citizen-Times, August 6, 1944, 4. 293 “City Recreation Park Will Open on Thursday,” Asheville Citozen-Times, June 2, 1946, 17. 294 National Housing Agency, Veterans Emergency Housing Program (Washington, DC: United States Printing Office, June, 1946), 17. 295 “Swimming Pool Sites Urged by Negro Groups,” Asheville Citizen-Times, February 14, 1947, 5. 296 “Site on Walton Street Chosen For Negro Pool” Asheville Citizen-Times, June 20, 1947, 1. 297 “Work is Begun on Bathhouse for Park Pool,” Asheville Citizen-Times, March 9, 1948, 8. 89

1948. A wading pool for toddlers also opened, although it is unclear whether this was new or a re-opening of the wading pool from the WPA period.298 Returning black veterans made the playground equipment as a part of a job’s training program.

The park and pool became a hot-button issue again in 1953. An Asheville Citizen editorial noted that “racial conditions are exemplary in this community,” but making park improvements could make it a model city for race relations.299 However, the city budgeted only $5,000, instead of the original $25,000 and few, if any, improvements were made to the park at the time.300 In 1954, part of the play area was enlarged.301

The southern portion of the Southside neighborhood was largely residential, with some commercial and fraternal establishments interspersed. In addition, many houses were also gathering places, continuing a tradition from a generation before. Students attended the Asheland Avenue School before attending Stephens-Lee High School. Segregation and transportation hindered African American gathering so often visiting and parties occurred at each other’s houses. In addition, some places were simply off-limits. Viola Jones Spells was explicitly forbidden from going near the James-Keys Hotel, whose reputation was somewhat seedy in some quarters, although she wondered why she would want to go anyway.302

In 1948, Rabbit’s Motel (BN6437) opened. Rabbit’s is an automobile-oriented hotel and restaurant. Rabbit’s was a resting place in the 1960s for baseball players in the Class A South Atlantic League, also known as the Sally League.303 Rabbit’s was also a locus for bootlegging, often an interracial affair in North Carolina. The owner, Fred Simpson, who got his nickname for being fast, was charged with liquor violations as early as 1932.304 Through the 1940s Simpson was repeatedly arrested for bootlegging from his house at 37 Delaware Street. In 1951, Simpson was tried for conspiracy in avoiding taxes related to bootlegging. In 1959, he was arrested again for the sale, transportation, and delivery of liquor.305 At the same time, Rabbit’s was known for making soul food favorites and as a community gathering spot. Rabbit’s is an excellent example of a time when African American entrepreneurship sometimes straddled the fence of legality. It was part of an informal economy that sprouted in response to segregation.

The James-Keys Motel was another gathering spot in the neighborhood. The hotel, like some other businesses, operated on the edge of legality. Rumored to engage in renting room by the hour the motel also offered bootleg liquor. The hotel offered bands and singers and a place to

298 “Riverview Park Swimming Poool To Open Monday,” Asheville Citizen-Times, July 1, 1948, 2. 299 “Riverview: A Community Challenge,” Asheville Citizen, May 28, 1953, 16. 300 “Hill Street Recreation Area For Negroes is Recommended,” Asheville Citizen-Times, July 15, 1953. 301 “Walton Street Park Area Being Enlarged,” Asheville Citizen-Times, February 25, 1954, 17. 302 Spells interview. 303 C. Brandon Chapman, “Asheville Celebrates Connections with Negro Baseball League,” https://theurbannews.com/our-town/2008/asheville-celebrates-connections-with-negro-baseball-league (accessed July 20, 2019). 304 “Criminal Court Convenes Today,” Asheville Citizen-Times, April 18, 1932, 7. 305 “Woman Charged with Stabbing Man in Leg,” Asheville Citizen-Times, January 26, 1959, 10. 90 gather. The James-Keys Motel was also listed in the Negro Traveler’s Green Book. The travel guide was to guide African American travelers to businesses that would discriminate taking the guesswork and discomfort out of travel. S. Foster’s Tourist Home at 88 Clingman (BN3814) was also listed in the 1957 Green Book until 1967.

They provided gathering and meeting spots as well as providing services and entertainment for adults. Patton Avenue contained small commercial businesses such as bakeries, auto shops, and drugstores.

The Southside also boasted the Six Points Drive-In at Southside and Coxe Avenues. The drive-in was also a starting point for drag races in the 1960s as drivers raced each other to Rabbit’s Restaurant at McDowell Street.306 E.W. Grove’s 1925 plan for a automobile concourse was realized but perhaps not in the manner he planned.

Figure 31. Rabbit’s Motel at 110 McDowell Street (Rory Krupp).

306 Rob Neufeld, “Stories from the Southside Before Urban Renewal,” The Read on WNC, http://thereadonwnc.ning.com/forum/topics/stories-from-southside-from-before-urban-renewal (accessed July 14, 2019). Rabbit’s Restaurant and Rabbit’s Motel seem to be interchangeable. 91

Music was an important part of the neighborhood. Asheville provided a valuable stop before integration and community support was strong for those passing through and those playing in the community.307 The Jade Club, (BN5181, 101 Biltmore Ave.) now the Orange Peel, was originally a segregated roller skating rink. It became a nightclub and concert venue in the mid- 1960s. It featured soul singers like Chuck Jackson from the Del Vikings, Percy Sledge and Garnett Mims and the Enchanters. The club was operated by Jake Rusher who also owned the Royal Pines Casino and Swimming Pool that featured bands such as the Supremes, The Coasters, and Bo Diddley.308

Figure 32. 1966 Jade Club advertisements. (Copyright: Asheville Citizen-Times). The Owl’s Lounge on Southside Avenue and the Cage on Depot Street also featured live music.309 The Owl’s Lounge, located in a converted bowling alley, was owned by George Hemphill, father of Shirley Hemphill, the star of the television show, “What’s Happening.”

Social lives also revolved around fraternal organizations. The Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World Lodge (BN3766) is located at 382 South French Broad in a Victorian house converted to a clubhouse. They purchased the house, built in 1920, in 1958. According to members the lodge was involved in civil liberties (that is, civil rights activities) in the 1960s at

307 Rob Neufeld, “Visiting Our Past: African American Music in Asheville was a rich node,” Asheville Citizen- Times, November 26, 2018, https://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2017/11/26/visiting-our-past-african- american-music-asheville-rich-node/894684001/ Accessed September 7, 2019. 308 Tula Andonares, “Royal Pines Pool Open for 49th Season,” Asheville Citizen-Times, June 22, 1996, 28. 309 Rob Neufeld, “Street scene defined local community,” Asheville Citizen-Times, January 21, 2019, A3. 92 the district level.310 While this may not have had a strong local effect, in aggregate it was powerful. Black Elks in 1950s North Carolina engaged in voter registration drives and with more members than the NAACP their efforts had broad effect.311 Recently membership in the organization has dwindled and the lodge is currently for sale.312

As in many African American neighborhoods, good-paying jobs were scarce; service job predominated and many factories still discriminated, so home businesses were important. But they also served as rallying points for change. Mae McCorkle, 87 Blanton Street (BN5888), operated a beauty salon. McCorkle moved to Asheville in 1922 from Rutherford County, where she was born in 1904. She got a job at the Biltmore Estate when she arrived. She grew interested in hair design when Cornelia Vanderbilt asked her to style her hair for her twenty-first birthday party.313 Beauty parlors and barbershops were also important social and political hubs. McCorkle was an active member and recruiter in the Asheville NAACP branch.

310 Personal communication. 311 Theda Skocpol, Ariane Liazos, and Marshall Ganz, What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 17–18. 312 Personal communication. 313 Johnnie Grant, “A Living Legend in Asheville,” Urban News, https://theurbannews.com/our-town/2008/a-living- legend-of-asheville/, accessed September 8, 2019. 93

Figure 33. Cornelia Vanderbilt, seated on left pillow, at her twenty-first birthday masquerade party. Hair styled by Mae McCorkle, 87 Blanton Street.

The Congress Street Grocery, located in a house, was not only a grocery store but also promoted NAACP membership in 1950.314 It was not only a commercial enterprise but a gathering spot too.

Other businesses were shorter-lived, and according to the police, detrimental to community spirit. In 1949, Lewis’ Place at 60 Clingman Avenue was shuttered by the state because the back porch was not a suitable place to sell beer.315 The process for obtaining and keeping a beer license seemed somewhat opaque. Licenses could be arbitrarily revoked for being a “trouble to officers, untidy, neighbors give place a bad reputation or simply not a suitable place.”316 However, some places operated with relative impunity, selling both legal beer and illegal hard liquor, making it possible if not probable that some arrangement was made with the authorities.

314 NAACP Advertisement, Asheville Citizen, April 15, 2019, 3. 315 “Buncombe 6th In Beer Licenses; WNV Revocations,” Asheville Citizen July 12, 1949, 9. 316 “Buncombe 6th In Beer Licenses.” 94

Patton Avenue’s widening and the extension of Hilliard Avenue caused more demolitions on the northern end of Clingman Avenue. It removed more commercial ventures from the neighborhood in the late 1950s.

While the motels, clubs and bootlegging were popular with some Sunday still came once a week. New churches were constructed in the Southside. Smaller than the older, traditional AME and mainline Protestant churches in the East End 1950s Southside churches veered towards the Pentecostal or dynamic Baptist churches. Dr. Wesley Grant Sr. constructed the World Wide Baptist Tabernacle (BN6428) in the late 1950s. The Gaston Street Church of God (BN6467) was constructed in the same period. The Sycamore Church of God in Christ (BN6448) on North Ann Street was also built during this period.

Figure 34. Rev. Wesley Grant Sr.’s Worldwide Missionary Baptist Tabernacle on Choctaw Street. As writer and historian Henry Robinson described the Southside neighborhood, there were no pockets of poverty; segregation mixed everyone together. Unable to move to another neighborhood because a real estate agents wouldn’t show places in white neighborhoods and banks wouldn’t lend, the middle class and the poor lived side-by-side. Robinson remembered black-owned businesses: stores that would provide credit and black-owned dry cleaners. He 95 remembered Rev. Wesley Grant Sr., who used to stand on a wooden crate on Southside Avenue, “a few feet from the place church folk called the devil’s den and preach drunks sober with his fiery sermons.”317 The late 1950s marked the end of an era for the Southside neighborhood. Soon, integration, urban renewal, and Black Power influenced protests would change the neighborhood.

The East Riverside Plan

Urban renewal, although the programs and the perceived problems were in the background since the late 1940s in Asheville came suddenly for many. The city pointed out that the private market and city code enforcement had failed. The backers also pointed out the 1963 urban renewal project north of the civic plaza which they deemed a great success.318 Urban renewal money should be vigorously pursued lest Atlanta and other large cities took Asheville’s share.319

Although federal financing paid for a large portion a bond issue was still necessary by law. The Asheville Chamber of Commerce and the League of Women Voters were firmly behind the project. The Asheville Citizen couched the project as giving Southside residents a new lease on life, reciting an almost biblical litany of crime and disease that affected the area. It also noted that tax revenue would triple.320 The first bond issue was voted down in March 1967. It was not surprising. Urban renewal in other North Carolina cities had already decimated black neighborhoods. Durham-based black newspaper The Carolina Times had already harshly critiqued urban renewal in its Hayti neighborhood. It called urban renewal “the biggest farce ever concocted in the mind of mortal man. Such an attitude has been brought about by the swiftness and efficiency with which Urban Renewal acts in tearing down houses and the lack of speed which it has exhibited in replacing them.” The Carolina Times concluded, “Urban renewal is not only a farce but just another scheme to relieve Negroes of property they own too close to the downtown business section of the city.”321

The city moved quickly. Another vote was scheduled for December 1967. The Asheville Redevelopment Commission turned to black community leaders and black churches for support. Thirty-five churches participated, including Hopkins Chapel AME and Berry Temple Methodist Church. Influential community members like attorney Ruben Dailey and Livingston School principal Arthur Edington promoted the project to the black community. Although Dailey initially backed the bond issue and the project, he had reservations. Citing the Hill Street neighborhood and the Crosstown Expressway, Dailey stated that real estate agents steered displaced residents to new and expensive homes rather than promote public housing. He also thought that when the new lots were able to be redeveloped few Southside residents would be

317 Henry Robinson, “Looking for answers in memories of a Southside boyhood,” Asheville Citizen-Times, May 25, 1992, 7. 318 Laurens Irby, “Bond Issue Would be Big Defeat,” Asheville Citizen-Times, February 26, 1967, 41. 319 Laurens Irby, “Bond Issue Would be Big Defeat,” Asheville Citizen-Times, February 26, 1967, 41. 320 Laurens Irby, “Bond Issue Would be Big Defeat,” Asheville Citizen-Times, February 26, 1967, 41. 321 “Urban Renewal: A Farce or Reality,” The Carolina Times, September 25, 1965, 2A. 96 able to afford them. Redevelopment was planned to be limited. Out of approximately 1,300 homes in the redevelopment area 712 were slated for demolition.322 One-third of the acquired property would be available for redevelopment, one-third would be used for streets and parks, and the remaining third would be dedicated to public housing.323 In December, pushed over the line by Asheville’s black elite and churches, the bond issue passed and the project commenced.

The 408-acre project area was bounded by Hilliard Avenue, Clingman Avenue and Depot Street to the west, Walton Street Park and Oakland Road to the south and Cove and Southside to the east.324 The East Riverside area was chosen largely because the city could receive matching credit for the cost of South French Broad School. Consequently, the city received three million in federal dollars without having to use city funds for actual renewal activities.325 The city advertised the project as an improvement for current residents, which numbered approximately 5,000 in 1,300 structures.326 Residents recalled the project as mainly benefit for the city. The project also offered a rehabilitation option but only for those who were able to afford it. For those unable to afford or obtain a loan for rehabilitation the city would acquire their property and demolish it. At the time 58 percent of East Riverside residents owned their homes.327 Relocation, if one could afford it, was complicated by the fact it was difficult to get a loan. If one did get a loan it was difficult to find a real estate agent that would sell a house outside a segregated area.

322 The number of houses acquired, demolished and rehabbed vary over time. According to the AHA files houses were moved from list to list for varying reasons including financing, repairs that were made, and changes to the overall plan. 323 Laurens Irby, “Dailey Fears Exodus Will Harm Purpose of Riverside Project,” Asheville Citizen-Times, February 21, 1967. 324 Henry Robinson, “Giant Earth Movers Giving East Riverside Terrain a New Look,” Asheville Citizen-Times, August 24, 1975, 51. 325 Nickollof, “Urban Renewal in Asheville,” 66–67. 326 Nickollof, “Urban Renewal in Asheville,” 67. 327 Nickollof, “Urban Renewal in Asheville,” 87. Reported homeownership percentages vary widely. The February 26, 1967, Asheville Citizen reported a 35 percent homeownership rate in the East Riverside Area. 97

Figure 35. A 1966 Southside block map showing houses to be demolished or rehabbed (Housing Authority of City of Asheville, Ramsey Library Special Collections). Arson made residents’ problems worse. Five properties in the Southside burned in three days in June of 1970. The houses had not been transferred to the housing authority yet but their insurance was cancelled. This left a number of elderly residents destitute, having lost everything.328

The federal program rehabilitated some homes in the Southside. Community members also worked on rehabilitation efforts. Former jeweler and ASCORE advisor William Roland worked

328 “Hanks Urges Halt to Urban Renewal Fires,” Asheville Citizen-Times, June 27, 1970, 11. 98 with homeowners and formulated plans for rehabbing their homes. He thought it was a good way to continue to help people. 329 He later became director of the Opportunity Corporation’s Neighborhood Centers.

Southside public housing occupies a unique niche. The design reflects an attempt to remake the community and at the same time assuage white fears about blight. The housing authority attempted to integrate public housing into the neighborhood. The Walton-Erskine and Livingston public housing complexes were placed on large lots with much-reduced density compared to previous public housing projects and the previous neighborhood. One amenity was that space was also made for tenants’ gardens.

Figure 36. Livingston Apartments in the Southside (Rory Krupp). Asheville’s black elite helped in the Southside urban renewal and in the public housing effort. The Crosstown project must have gone well enough to not provoke a rebellion amongst professional blacks in Asheville. But there were some complaints. When displaced Hill Street residents sought houses in the Southside, predatory real estate agents steered blacks toward overpriced housing in an already segregated neighborhood. Attorney Ruben Dailey was concerned this would happen again to displaced Southside residents. Dailey also shared the opinion that if displaced people moved to other neighborhoods such as Montford and not public housing, many of the problems of overcrowding and deferred maintenance would follow.330 Consequently, the Southside public housing design was concocted with tenants’ requests that the project not resemble a barracks. It also conveyed the middle-class sensibility promoted by planners in the 1960s.

The project also marked another milestone: the end of the perception that black community spoke with one voice. White city officials and black community leaders worked together to get the East Riverside project started. However, in hind sight, many residents felt they were

329 William Roland Autobiography, http://toto.lib.unca.edu/findingaids/mss/blackhigh/biography/roland_w.html 330 Laurens Irby, “Dailey Fears Exodus Will Harm Purpose of Riverside Project,” Asheville Citizen, February 25, 1967, 25. 99 misinformed or did not understand the total ramifications of the project when they voted for the bond issue. Many complained that they were unaware of a plan until the bulldozers arrived.331 In some quarters this led to a stark sense of betrayal. Journalist Henry Robinson wrote of loss, not only due to urban renewal, but also from gains. He noted that integration was the death knell of local stores that used to provide credit to local blacks and instead, “We scurried to spend our money at stores that, a few years earlier, had refused our money unless we went to the back door.”332 He lamented the loss of community and the solace it provided: “Steeped in the rich tradition of the family, the Southside was our place of shelter from the harsh realities of racist society, bent on keeping us in our place.”333

Urban renewal combined with integration in schools and public accommodation turned nearly every sphere in African American life upside down. It was as if every stable institution and place of refuge in African American Asheville life disappeared in a decade. Only churches remained and even some those were removed by urban renewal. Some churches held services at the Y.M.I. while they rebuilt.

Urban renewal resulted in large scale changes to the landscape itself. Livingston and Depot Streets were graded and steep hills removed. Livingston Street was extended to Depot Street. Herrman, Beech, Black, Tiernan, and Nelson Streets were eliminated. Nasty Branch was dredged and scoured. It was also now referred to as Town Branch a name used by the white community for the waterway.

331 J. Rosie Tighe and Timothy Opelt, “Collective Memory and Planning: The Continuing Legacy of Urban Renewal in Asheville, NC,” Journal of Planning History 1, no. 22 (2014): 11. 332 Henry Robinson, “Looking for Answers in the Memory of a Southside Boyhood,” Asheville Citizen-Times, May 25, 1992, 7. 333 Robinson, “Looking for Answers.” 100

Figure 37. Aerial photographs of the Southside in 1963 (left) and 1975 (right) showing areas with removed houses and landscape changes in the Livingston Street area (City of Asheville).

Figure 38. Livingston and Depot Streets in 1975 (Housing Authority of City of Asheville, Ramsey Library Special Collections, UNC Asheville).

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Figure 39. Intersection of South French Broad and Livingston Street in 1975 (Housing Authority of City of Asheville, Ramsey Library Special Collections). Development projects continued in the neighborhood concurrent with urban renewal and afterwards, but the scale could not match the loss. In 1968, former Stephens-Lee shop teacher Lacy Haith developed Oakland Forest (BN6432), a suburban-style subdivision in the southern end of the Southside neighborhood. The houses are Colonial Revival ranch and split level homes on large lots. Haith graduated from North Carolina A & T State in 1937 and earned a master’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1943. Haith was a shop teacher for thirty-five years, until his retirement in 1972. His class constructed a home on Pine Street in the 1950s (BN6451) He also constructed the Haith Education Center (BN6449) next to St. James AME Church.334

334 Rob Neufeld, “The Reverend Lacy Thomas Haith is Given Award,” Asheville Citizen-Times, January 16, 1994, 25. 102

Figure 40. Lacy Haith developed Oakland Forest in the late 1960s.

The Asheville Housing Authority branded the project a success. The East Riverside project removed 757 structures out of 1,275 that were there when it started.335 The project relocated 483 families, 241, individuals and 66 businesses. It was “a brand new subdivision” according to AHA director Larry Holt.336 The AHA relocated families to Montford and Kenilworth.

The major change, in addition to the rearranging of the streets and landscape itself, was combining parcels. The plan from the beginning was to reduce the area’s density. The AHA further reduced density by allowing homeowners to purchase adjacent lots. The East Riverside planners gave the city a binary choice at the beginning of the project. They could choose safety or density. Density was equated with a host of social problems and safety was associated with a more suburban zoning plan. By 1978, the Southside was “safer.” It included fifty acres of park space and wider roads with gentle grades. The landscape and built environment was completely

335 Rodney Brooks, “East Riverside,” Asheville Citizen-Times, July 2, 1978, 47. 336 Brooks, “East Riverside.” 103 altered from the early twentieth-century African American neighborhood of steep hills and curvy streets to a innocuous suburban landscape.

The 1970s infill houses are Minimal Traditional designs, often set into a hillside with a garage underneath the home. Side gabled examples are the most common. On occasion bay windows were installed. Rehabilitated Southside houses often have the entire or a portion of the porch removed. If the porch is present, rehabilitated examples usually include metal supports and railings. Chimneys were often removed in rehabbed houses. In some examples one chimney may remain.

Stephens-Lee shop teacher Lacy Haith built at least two infill houses at 85 and 87 Ora Street in 1975 BN6435, BN6436). Commercial lots were resold. The AHA viewed the commercial strips on major streets as adverse neighborhood divisions.

Figure 41. An urban renewal infill house on Ora Street built by Lacy Haith in 1975 (Rory Krupp).

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In 1978, Rev. Wesley Grant tallied the cost to the neighborhood for the city council. It included 1,100 homes, six beauty parlors, five barbershops, five filling stations, fourteen grocery stores, three laundromats, eight apartments, seven churches, three shoe shops, two cabinet shops, two auto body shops, one hotel, five funeral homes, one hospital, and three doctors offices.337

Livingston School was saved. The school served as the Asheville and Buncombe County Opportunity Corporation after the school closed. Former Asheville student advisor Victor Chalk Jr. opened a student tutoring center in the mid-1990s in the school, already a recreation center. Reopening the school was problematic. In order to achieve a racial balance white students would have to be bused to Livingston School.338 This was against board policy. Like Shiloh Elementary, and later Stephens-Lee High School, the building was sold to the city to use as a recreation center.

Unlike other public housing development associated with urban renewal, the Livingston and Erskine-Walton public housing apartments were constructed in the neighborhood where the inhabitants originated. Championed by Dr. John Holt, there was some attempt to recreate the former neighborhood and to avoid the barracks style design previously used in Asheville.339 Garden plots were planned for residents.

There were successes in the 1960s urban plans and programs. In 1969, Matthew Bacoate helped establish Afram, a company that manufactured lab coats. Afram was part of the black capitalist movement in the late 1960s. The concept was to encourage and promote African American small businesses, which in turn would uplift the community. The Small Business Administration (SBA) started the SB 502 loan program to encourage minority business enterprises. Based on President Nixon’s campaign promise to “encourage black capitalism,” the program got off to a rocky start when the idea was disparaged as exploitative.340 The program began in July 1968. Peter Matheison, chairman of the Asheville Chamber of Commerce socio-economic committee, introduced the idea locally in August 1968. The black community sold shares, far oversubscribing their $5,000 goal with a $13,000 total stock sale.341 Asheville native Matthew Bacoate Jr. managed the company. He immediately guided it through a difficult time when it lost its contract to manufacture lab coats for Kimberly-Clarke. The firm bounced back with a contract with Johnson & Johnson to manufacture nurse’s caps.342

People who returned to Asheville also made valuable contributions. Southside resident James Green, who was raised on Clingman Avenue, had difficulty finding a job on his return from the

337 Rob Neufeld, “Stories from the South Side from Before Urban Renewal,” The Read on WNC, August 2, 2013, http://thereadonwnc.ning.com/forum/topics/stories-from-southside-from-before-urban-renewal, accessed July 1, 2019. 338 Reed, School Segregation, 92. 339 “Racial Pioneer Holt Dies at 85,” Asheville Citizen-Times, October 7, 2007, 2. 340 “Three Letters that May Put You in Business,” Black Enterprise, August, 1970, 45. 341 “Afram Puts Blacks in the Driver’s Seat,” Asheville Citizen-Times, March 10, 1970, 15. 342 “Afram Gets Contract for Nurse’s Caps,” Asheville Citizen-Times, March 6, 1971, 10. 105

Korean War. He moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he made five times what he would have received in Asheville. However, he did return to Asheville in 1983 and opened Green’s Mini- Mart on Depot Street.343 He saw a need for a neighborhood store in the area that urban renewal had cleared. Famous for its chicken, Green’s also employed people from the neighborhood.344 Mr. Green died in 2011 but the business continues to serve soul food favorites to the community.

Figure 42. James Green, founder of Greens Mini Mart & Deli on Depot Street (2010 Youtube video still [Ray Mapp]).

343 Rob Neufeld, “Book details heroic struggles of prominent Black Asheville men,” Asheville Citizen Times, April 9, 2001, 10. James Green also helped build the Stephens-Lee shop class house in 1952. 344 “Black History Month,” Asheville Citzen Gazette, February 7, 2005, 19. 106

Figure 43. Southside neighborhood surveyed properties.

Figure 44. Southside neighborhood surveyed properties.

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Figure 45. Surveyed Southside properties.

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Inventoried Properties

Inventoried SSN Address Date Type/Association Neighborhood Property Southside BN6431 Neighborhood Southside

Walton Park BN5664 570 1938 & Pool/Works Southside & Pool Oakland 1948 Progress Rd. Administration

Oakland BN6432 Haith Dr. 1968 Subdivision built Southside Forest off by Lacy Haith Oakland Rd. Arthur R. BN5662 133 1955 Recreation Southside Edington Livingston center/school Career and Street integration/urban Education renewal Center

S. Foster BN3814 88 1920s Tourist Southside Tourist Home Clingman home/Green Ave. Book

Livingston BN6433 133 1968- Public Southside Apts.. Livingston 1978 housing/urban Street, renewal located at Oakland and Depot Erskine BN6434 Located at c. 1975- Defensible space Southside barricade Erskine 1990 artifact Ave. and Erskine St. Orange BN5181 101 1960s Commercial/ Southside Peel/Jade Biltmore Entertainment Club Ave.

Ellsworth BN6435 85 Ora St. 1975 House/Urban Southside House renewal infill

Moore House BN6436 87 Ora St. 1975 House/Urban Southside renewal infill Rabbit’s BN6437 107 1948 Hotel/restaurant Southside Motel McDowell St.

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Inventoried SSN Address Date Type/Association Neighborhood Property New Bethel BN6438 580 S. 1942 church Southside Baptist French Church Broad Ave. Mae BN5888 87 1960s House/business Southside McCorkle Blanton Beauty Shop St. Benevolent BN3766 382 S. 1920/ Fraternal/urban Southside Protective French 1958 renewal Order of Elks Broad Ave. of the World, Fawndale Lodge #363

Beulah BN4339 102 S. 1970s church Southside Chapel Fire French Baptized Broad Ave. Holiness Church

Pine Grove BN6440 11 Pine 1965 church Southside Missionary St. Church

Gaston Street BN6467 30 Gaston 1957 church Southside Church of St. Christ Worldwide BN6428 85 1959 church Southside Baptist Choctaw Tabernacle St.

Buxton Hall BN5927 32 Banks 1920s Commercial Southside Ave.

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Figure 46. South Asheville neighborhood in 1939 (Works Progress Administration).

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Clayton Hill/South Asheville/St. John ‘A’ Baptist

The Asheville Citizen refers to this neighborhood as Clayton Hill beginning in the late 1890s. The 1955 Miller’s City Directory refers to South Asheville as a residential section north from Wyoming Road and west to Kenilworth.345

It was still referred to as Clayton Hill in 1910 when the residents approached county school Superintendent A. C. Reynolds about building a new school. The possibility of a vote for a special tax was mentioned.346 It also appears the area was not yet annexed into the city. During the late teens and 1920s it became South Asheville. During this period South Asheville A.M.E. appears to have been constructed, most likely around 1914. The area supported at least two other churches. St John ‘A’ Baptist was founded in 1914. It was associated with the Asheville “Colored Cemetery” that started in the 1790s, served as a slave cemetery, and was later taken over by the church. It closed in 1948. St. Marks’s AME was located at 40 Wyoming Road and not only the building but the congregation appears to have closed. Later, Solid Rock Baptist was located on Wyoming Road in the South Asheville AME building. Former funk musician Reverend Otis Ware started Solid Rock Baptist in 1999. A portion of the congregation was people recovering from substance abuse. Ware stated, “we take a lot of people other churches don’t want.”347

345 Miller’s Asheville Directory (Raleigh: Hill Directory Company, 1955), 152. 346 “County School Matters,” The Asheville Citizen-Times, May 1, 1910, 7. 347 Steve Dixon “Solid Rock of Jesus” Asheville Citizen-Times, March 30, 2008, 11. 112

Figure 47. St. John ‘A’ Baptist Church in South Asheville (Rory Krupp).

Not being included in Kenilworth indicated a color line, and a newspaper article does indicate that Kenilworth was for whites while South Asheville was the African American neighborhood.348 An article about a 1915 house fire provides a better description. Wade Kinch’s eight room home caught fire. When two firemen arrived on a motorcycle, the house was already collapsing. The Asheville Citizen reported that hundreds of residents who lived in the twenty houses surrounding Kinch’s only stopped the fire from spreading through a bucket brigade.349

In 1922, South Asheville residents petitioned the city for sewers, water, and street lights.350 The petition appears to have worked. In 1927, real estate advertisements appeared for lots with city services for African American occupancy.351 The neighborhood also received a new school,

348 “Lifetimes of Service,” Asheville Times, August 8, 2008, 11. 349 “House on Clayton Hill is Destroyed,” Asheville Citizen, February16, 1915, 6. 350 “Colored Residents Ask for Improvements,” Asheville Citizen, April 4, 1922, 3. 351 “For Sale in South Asheville,” Asheville Citizen, June 19, 1927, 39. 113

South Asheville Elementary in 1922, which was located behind St. John ‘A’ Baptist Church (closed in 1948).352

The 1937 Residential Security map area description, a “very cheap Negro section all but the North end being in the valley,” is typical for the time.353 It also states that it is surrounded by whites on the mountains on the east, south, and west. Like many of Asheville’s African American neighborhoods, the description states that the streets were unpaved and transportation was inadequate.

Sherman Withers Grocery (BN6457) was at 86 Wyoming Rd. in the basement of the house from the early 1920s to the 1960s..

Figure 48. The Withers family operated a grocery store at 86 Wyoming Road from 1929 to the mid-1960s (Rory Krupp).

352 “To Let Contract for New School Within Days,” Asheville Citizen, April 9, 1922, 22. 353 “Mapping Inequality, Ashevillle,” https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=12/35.5159/- 82.5702&opacity=0.8&city=asheville-nc&area=D2 (accessed July 12, 2019). 114

Entertainment, according the 1943 Miller’s City Directory, was provided at Kanuga’s Beer Garden located on the site of the current AHA California Contemporary design public housing at 11 Wyoming Rd., although the license was revoked in

1949 for being “not a suitable place.”354 A grocery store was also located in the current Harvest House building (BN1379) at 205 Wyoming Road.

Figure 49. Harvest House Recreation Center, formerly a South Asheville community grocery store (Rory Krupp). The schools closing in 1948 and the name change to Kenilworth is interesting and suggests early gentrification. After the 1940s, local newspapers use South Asheville to refer to the Shiloh area.

Affordable housing was added to the neighborhood in the mid-1970s when Klondyke Apartments was built in Montford and scattered-site apartments were built in South Asheville.

354 “Buncombe 6th in Beer Licenses; WNC Revocations Listed,” Asheville Citizen, July 12, 1949, 1. 115

Figure 50. South Asheville surveyed properties.

116

Inventoried Properties

Inventoried SSN Address Date Type/Association Neighborhood Property South BN6456 c. 1890 neighborhood South Asheville Asheville

Sherman BN6457 87 1929– House/store South Withers Wyoming Asheville Grocery Rd. 1960s

Solid Rock BN1342 104 c. 1920 church South Missionary Wyoming Asheville Baptist Rd.

Kenilworth BN1379 205 1920 Commercial South Commercial Kenilworth building Asheville Rd. Grocery

117

Figure 51. Stumptown neighborhood in 1917.

118

Stumptown

Stumptown and Hillcrest neighborhoods are combined in this study. Stumptown was located in a jog on the boundary of Riverside Cemetery.355 The boundaries were Pearson Drive, the Montford neighborhood colorline, to the east, Courtland Drive to the South, Birch Street to the north, and Riverside Cemetery to the west, all in all roughly 30 acres with approximately 200–250 families.356. The Stumptown neighborhood was never formally surveyed. Stumptown was named for the stumps people found when they moved to the area at the beginning of the century.357 Other sources suggest the area was settled by African Americans around 1880.358

Community life centered on Welfare Baptist Church. Founded in 1931, the church initially “fared so well” in the neighborhood the name was changed to Welfare Baptist.359 The community was tight-knit and children were watched over by everyone360

355 Pat Fitzpatrick, “Growing Up in Stumptown,” in “Memories of Stumptown: Stumptown Reunion, August 25-26, 2001,” MSS 154, Pack Memorial Library North Carolina Room. 356 Fitzpatrick, “Growing Up in Stumptown,” 142 357 “Stumptown to hold reunion,” Asheville Citizen-Times, August 22, 1997, 17. 358 “Tempe Alley Folks Fight For a Way Out,” The Asheville Citizen, November 2, 1909, 5. 359 “New Vision Church,” http://newvisioninfo.org/content/view/2/3/, accessed September 8, 2019. 360 “Memories of Stumptown,” Asheville Citizen-Times, August 24, 1997, 13. 119

Figure 52. Undated Photograph of Welfare Baptist Church (Stumptown Reunion Collection, Pack Memorial Library, North Carolina Room).

120

Figure 53. Welfare Baptist Church converted into a home in Stumptown (Rory Krupp).

As with many segregated communities a variety of occupations were represented. Business owners and black professionals lived on Gary Street. Women worked in the service industry as domestics and cooks; many women worked as domestics in Montford. Men were employed in a wide variety of occupations: “the railroad, newspaper, elevator operator, janitor, grocer, barber, and carpenter.”361

Residents operated businesses in the neighborhood. Mr. Howard’s Snack Shop (or Sweet Shop) operated at 86 Gay Street (where the Recreation Center parking lot is currently located). The Alonzo and Blondie coal yard was located next door.362

Stumptown was not rich but most residents did feel blessed by community.363 The city was not as helpful. In 1969, Phyllis Sherrill asked the City Council to remove cars that people had

361 Fitzpatrick, “Growing Up in Stumptown,” MSS 154, Pack Memorial Library North Carolina Room 144. 362 Sherrill, “Growing Up in Stumptown,” 148. 363 “Stumptown,” Asheville Citizen-Times, August 24, 1997, 1–2. 121 brought to Stumptown and abandoned on the street. They were dangerous for children, unsightly, and blocked the street. City Council was less than sympathetic. While they did note that the city was supposed to clear the streets, the streets in Stumptown were not official city streets so there was nothing they could do. One resident did note they could tear down perfectly good houses for urban renewal.364

Sherrill and the Stumptown delegation returned the next month even more incensed. The city had removed the car in front of Sherrill’s house but no one else’s house. Sherrill wanted to know why? A City Council member merely said, “The squeaking wheel gets the oil.”365 Madder yet, elderly resident Lloyd McCord told the Council that “Asheville enjoyed good race relations because, ‘the Negro here takes what is handed to him without complaint. One day it will end.’”366 A Council member suggested coming back next month when the new City Council was sworn in. With continued pressure from Stumptown residents through the fall of 1969 the campaign worked. By January, 1970 the city had removed the abandoned cars from the neighborhood.367

In 1970 and 1971 the Model Cities program planned a park between Montford and Riverside Cemetery. During the late 1960s the planned recreational complex was advertised as being for the residents of Stumptown. An Asheville Citizen editorial notes that people in the Stumptown neighborhood had been trying to get a park for 15 years. An editorial that straddles condescending and peevish, with the headline “Riverside Park Approval is Happy Decision,” also suggested changing the name of their neighborhood.368 In 1975, the Montford Recreation Center was funded through the Model Cities program in addition to money from a community development grant. It was one of the last of the Model Cities program.

Urban renewal and eminent domain scattered the residents. Dorothy Wallace Ware remembers a few months’ warning before their house was taken to build a recreation area. The entire neighborhood was scattered. Some moved away from Asheville, some bought other houses, most went to public housing.369

364 Wally Avett, “Stumptown Delegation Requests Removal of Junk Cars and Litter,” Asheville Citizen-Times, April 18, 1969, 15. 365 Lewis W. Green, “Stumptown Group Presses Cleanup Issue with Movie,” Asheville Citizen, May 2, 1969, 17. 366 Green, “Stumptown Group Presses Cleanup.” 367 “170 Cars Removed from Streets,” Asheville Citizen, January 16, 1970, 13. 368 “Riverside Park Approval Is A Happy Decision” December 9, 1972, 4. 369 “Stumptown,” Asheville Citizen-Times, August 24, 1997, 1-2. 122

Figure 54. Surveyed properties in Stumptown.

Inventoried Properties

Building Site Address Date Building Survey Type/Association Number Welfare BN6458 27 Madison c. 1931 Church Baptist Street Church

123

Hill Street

Figure 55. 1917 Sanborn Fire Insurance map of the Hill Street neighborhood with Hill Street Baptist in lower left corner. Campbell’s Woods is the blank area left corner.

Hill Street was centered on Hill Street with Campbell’s Woods to the north. The Residential Security map area descriptions notes that the north end of the western side, Hill Street, “is almost a mountain.” 370Campbell’s Woods had the reputation of being an African American bootleggers’ paradise in the 1920s.371 Like all stories about African Americans and crime gleaned from the 1920s Asheville Citizen, a healthy dose of skepticism and historiographical unraveling is required.

370 “Mapping Inequality–Asheville,” https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=12/35.5159/- 82.5702&opacity=0.8&city=asheville-nc&area=D1 (accessed July 12, 2019.) 371 M’Guire Death Now Blamed on Rum Runners,” Asheville Citizen, December 30, 1926, 1. 124

Starting in the 1930s the city tried to develop the area. In 1937 Campbell’s Woods was explored as a potential African American park site. Stiff neighborhood resistance scotched the idea. The Walton Street Park was constructed instead. In the 1950s, Campbell’s Woods was purchased by the Board of Education to provide a recreational area for the Hill Street School.

Hill Street Baptist (BN6446) started in a home in Stumptown in 1915. In the 1930s and 1940s Hill Street Baptist Church was pastored by E. W. Dixon. Dixon was also the publisher of the black weekly Church Advocate established in 1932, later the Southland Advocate. Hill Street Baptist pastors such as Dixon and Rev. Nilous Avery were active in civil rights. Dixon supported voter registration drives while Avery was an early supporter of ASCORE, the high school student group who integrated restaurants, parks, libraries, and stores in Asheville from 1960- 1965.

Figure 56. Hill Street Bapist Church (Rory Krupp).

Hill Street was deeply affected by the Crosstown Expressway that cut through the neighborhood. The work was “expedited.” The city engineer John C. Walker said the land “would be

125 condemned as soon as this map is posted in the Courthouse,” noting that settlements could be completed later.372 The 1916 Phyllis Wheatley YWCA on College Street was moved to Asheland Street in the Southside neighborhood.

Hill Street’s destruction by the Crosstown Expressway prompted the Hillcrest public housing project, built in 1959. Hill Street residents were the first in North Carolina to be eligible for Federal Housing Administration Part 221 home loans. These enabled residents displaced by highway construction to purchase replacement homes. In Asheville, the Roosevelt Park subdivision in Shiloh was used to house families beginning in 1958 along Taft Avenue.

Figure 57. Hillcrest Apartments under construction in 1958 (© Asheville Citizen-Times).

372 “Expressway Plans Completed; Work to be ‘Expedited,’” Asheville Citizen-Times, Decemeber 23, 1955, 1. 126

New churches were constructed during this period. The Sycamore Temple Church of God in Christ (BN6448) at 11 Ann Street was built in approximately 1960. In 2005, the church featured jazz gospel services.373

Figure 58. Sycamore Church of God in Christ (Rory Krupp). The Hillcrest Apartments initiated a rent strike in 1967. Tenants complained that utility bills were exorbitant and that maintenance employees ordered materials for repairs, and then sold them.374 Hillcrest residents and community leader, Carl Johnson, formed the Hillcrest Community Organization in 1966 to work with the housing authority. They wanted to resolve undocumented utility bills, a lease where they had few rights, and to remove the housing authority director, Carl Vaughn.375 Once again the conflict threatened the tourist industry and

373 Rob Neufeld, “African American gospel music in Asheville something to hear, feel,” Asheville Citizen-Times, December 3, 2005, 26. 374 “David Brunk Interview, Ramsey Libraru Oral Histories, UNC Asheville. 375 Nickollof , 101. 127 city officials and the housing authority moved to a resolution that included a new housing director.376

The Hillcrest apartments were renovated in 1988–90. The interiors were completely renovated. Major exterior changes were made to soften the “barracks” appearance.377 The apartments were given a “townhouse” look by raising the roof pitch.378 This also eliminated the continuous attic in each building that was a fire hazard.379 Hillcrest renovation architect Jane Gianvito Matthews was struck by its appearance. “When I first moved to Asheville I thought they were Army barracks, or maybe a military base, the way they were laid out.”380 In addition to new roofs the renovations included porches and patios with gabled roofs, private outdoor storage spaces, and new landscaping.381 In 1992, the front gatehouse was constructed to keep out non-residents.382

376 Nickollf, 117-118. 377 Barbara Blake, “Architect Named for Renovation at Hillcrest,” Asheville Citizen-Times, December 30, 1988, 15. 378 Blake, “Architect Named,” 19. 379 John Boyle, “Public Housing,” Asheville Citizen-Times, October 5, 2005, 2. 380 Boyle, “Public Housing,” 95. 381 Blake, “Architect Named,” 19. 382 Paul Clark, “Councilman Battles Project Dealers,” Asheville Citizen-Times, January 17, 1992. 128

Figure 59. Hillcrest Apartments with 1990 renovations (Rory Krupp).

Shirley Hemphill, comedian and television star, attended Hill Street School before attending Stephens-Lee High School. Hemphill attended Morristown College in Tennessee for two years then returned to Asheville. While working at a nylons factory and sharing comedy sketches with family and friends she sent a cassette tape of her act to comedian Flip Wilson. Wilson sent back a dozen roses and a tape recorder. She moved to Los Angeles and began to do comedy routines and appeared in the television series, “What’s Happening!!” Hemphill died in 1999.

129

Figure 60. Shirley Hemphill in her ABC series, “One in a Million” (Ebony Magazine, 1980).

130

Figure 61. Hillcrest neighborhood surveyed properties.

131

Inventoried Hill Street Properties

Building Site Address Date Building Survey Type/Association Number Hill Street BN6445 135 Hill Street 1958 church Baptist Church

Hillcrest Apt. BN6446 100 Atkinson 1958 Public housing

Fruit of the BN6447 1 Roosevelt 1920s church Spirit of God Street Church of God In Christ

Sycamore BN6448 11 Ann St. c. 1955 Church Temple of God Church (See southside of God in map) Christ

132

Asheville Loan & Construction Company/Magnolia Park

Figure 62. 1917 Sanborn Fire Insurance map showing Magnolia Park neighborhood. Red houses mark African American occupancy. Magnolia Park is located at northeast corner of Magnolia and Flint.

133

Magnolia Street, Flint Street, and Short Street are part of the Asheville Construction and Loan subdivision that is now historic Montford. Acme Preservation Services surveyed the neighborhood as part of the Asheville Survey Update 2007–2012.

Magnolia Park is a small neighborhood centered around Flint Street and Magnolia Street. In 1917 it was already an African American neighborhood. The area appears to have been middle class. While it is labeled as declining, as is Montford, on the Asheville Home Owners Loan Corporation map, it is not “redlined’ or labeled as financially hazardous due to its African American presence. In fact, the neighborhood was “in decline” due to the large number of boarding houses used for tourists.

Magnolia Park was established in 1900. George Pack donated the park for black children in North Asheville.383 He also picked the name.384 The 1901 Maloney’s Directory indicates that in 1901 the area was integrated.385 African Americans used Magnolia Park from the beginning. In 1901, African American entertainer Charles W.H. Jordan was going to perform his snake handling show based on his trips to India when he was thwarted by a poisonous snake bite and a streetcar strike.386 The area had some rural attributes. In 1912, a complaint was made to the city that the park was being used as “a cow pasture and hitching lot.”387

In 1921, the city restricted the park’s use by African Americans, using the police to clear the park of black children. The black residents’ attorney, Henry Austin, noted that since the park was established there had been no rules regarding what portions of the park could be used by white or black children. City officials, however, stated that this might be done.388 In May 1922, 185 white residents petitioned the Board of Commissioners, “in a lively dispute,” to make the park white- only.389 A committee representing black residents noted that African Americans owned property around half the park. In addition, two hundred black children depended on the park. They wanted the city to construct tennis courts and a bath house.390 Since Walton Park was advertised as the first municipal park for African Americans when it opened in 1938, it appears that whites were successful in restricting use at least temporarily.391 The city listed the park as private in 1933 and proposed improvements, noting it was constructed for African American use. It is interesting that Magnolia Park is both “private” and owned by the city. Whether the park was listed as private to avoid using city resources or to avoid desegregating is an open question.

The neighborhood’s residents often were in the gray zone of being educated but, because of segregation, unable to work in a professional capacity. Ernest McKissick moved to Asheville in

383 “Proper Land Use and the Public Park,” The Asheville Citizen, June 24, 1948, 4. 384 “Dr. Fletcher Sends In His Resignation,” The Asheville Daily Citizen, May 19, 1900, 6. 385 Maloney’s Asheville City Directory (Atlanta: Maloney Directory Company, 1901), 72. 386 “Trials of a Snake Charmer,” The Asheville Citizen, August 21, 1901, 3. 387 “Ordinance Forbids Driving Near Trucks,” Asheville Citizen, May 25, 1912, 7. 388 “Colored Children Ejected From Park,” Asheville Citizen, June 4, 1921, 7. 389 “Dispute Results Over Use of Park,” Asheville Citizen, June 29, 1922, 2. 390 Epstein, “Tolerance, Governance and Surveillance in the Jim Crow South,” 260. 391 Epstein, “Tolerance, Governance and Surveillance in the Jim Crow South,” 260. 134

1902. Asheville’s African American doctor, J. W. Walker, helped McKissick attend Livingston College. After serving in World War II he was an agent for the fledgling North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company. He also worked at hotels and for the postal service. His wife, Magnolia McKissick, was a cashier-clerk for North Carolina Mutual Life. Based in Durham, the North Carolina Mutual was not only an insurance company; it was also intensely involved in civil rights and racial uplift through black economic independence. The company supported a raft of organizations, including the early NAACP.

McKissick, 42 Magnolia, gave a contemporary account of his difficulties paying his mortgage during the Great Depression and his dealings with the man who held his mortgage. He allowed him to pay even more gradually than the installment plan required. McKissick’s dilemma illustrates the difficulty in getting home loans. He had seller financing instead.

Earnest McKissick’s son Floyd McKissick described his childhood on Magnolia Street as some very, very happy years with his family and his church. But he also mentioned when racism suddenly intruded: “I think the struggles parts of my life were the fact that I was black, which oft time interfered with so much of the happiness that I might be enjoying when there’s some abrupt change would come and tell you I was black and not wanted.”392 The McKissicks would move to Madison Street in the early 1930s.

The state of the neighborhood changed overtime. The park fell into disrepair. By 1948 the Asheville Citizen laments its condition: “an overgrown lot.”393 It also notes that some parks were well equipped and well operated and others, like Magnolia Park, suffered from neglect.394 Neglect and lack of equipment usually signals racial motivation. In 1948, the park became a community park.395 African American leaders pushed for more recreational areas and activities in the late 1940s and this designation is a likely result of that campaign.

The park was extensively renovated in 1996–99. Landscape architect Mary Webber designed the renovation with community feedback. The park was rededicated after longtime residents Walter and St. Ola Mapp.396

392 Oral History Interview with Floyd B. McKissick Sr., May 31, 1989. Interview L-0040. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007): .https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/L-0040/L-0040.html 393 “Proper Land Use and the Public Park.” 394 “Proper Land Use and the Public Park.” 395 Tula Andonaras, “Magnolia Park is Montford’s Focus,” Asheville Citizen Times, October 29, 1996, 17–18. 396 Andonaras, “Magnolia Park is Montford’s Focus.” 135

Figure 63. From left, Montford residents Tessie Woods, St. Ola Mapp and Fairfax Arnold, Montford Resource Center, working on Magnolia Park renovation in 1996 (Photo: Tula Andonaras, copyright Asheville Citizen-Times).

136

Figure 64. Magnolia surveyed properties.

Inventoried Properties

Name SSN Address Date Type/Association Neighborhood McKissick 1 BN2797 42 1930 House/civil rights Montford Magnolia Ave. Magnolia BN6462 Magnolia c. 1900 Neighborhood Montford Ave & Flint St.

137

Chestnut Hill/Heart of Chestnut

The 2016 Heart of Chestnut Hill Plan in a Page describes the neighborhood boundaries as Charlotte Street to the east, Washington Road to the west, East Chestnut to the south, and Hillside Street to the north.397 Acme Preservation Services surveyed the neighborhood as part of the Asheville Survey Update, 2007–2012.

The Heart of Chestnut Hill neighborhood is a historic middle class African American neighborhood, originally known as the Hillside Development and constructed approximately 1900–23.398 The HOLC notes indicate that African American occupancy began in the late 1920s and note that there was “a good Negro section on Madison and Lee.”399 The HOLC area description also notes African American occupancy on Flint and Short Street, but of a lower class than those on Madison.400 The immediate danger to real estate values in both neighborhoods was tourist homes, boarding and rooming houses founded as homeowners and investors tried to profit from the tourist trade.

Figure 65. John Brooks Dendy won 52 golf tournaments, including three Negro National Opens in the 1930s.

397 Cissy Dendy, “Heart of Chestnut Hill,” http://ashevillencprod.civica.granicusops.com/departments/comm_public/neighborhood/plans.htm (accessed June 19, 2019), 1. 398 Dendy, “Heart of Chestnut Hill.” 399 “Mapping Inequality, Asheville.” 400 “Mapping Inequality, Asheville.” 138

The Heart of Chestnut neighborhood was solidly African American middle class. Residents included professional golfer John Brooks Dendy. Born in 1913, Dendy won his first tournament, the Southern Open, at age 18. Buoyed by his success, he was encouraged to compete in the 1932 Negro National Open, the championship for African Americans. He easily won. Dendy won the tournament again in 1936 at Cobbs Creek in Philadelphia and again in 1937. Overall, Dendy won fifty-two tournaments. In 1940, Dendy took a job as a locker room attendant at the Asheville Country Club, and later at the Biltmore Forest Country Club. Even after his retirement from the circuit, newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier lauded “veteran stylist” Dendy in the 1945 Detroit Joe Louis tournament.401 Dendy continued to play informally in scratch matches with Louis.402

The Professional Golfers Association (PGA) would not admit African Americans until 1961. A 1969 reunion of the United Golfers Association remarked that it was a shame that the former UGA president was not alive for the get-together. “He was sure we would make it, someday— and was convinced that men like John Dendy and [Sidney] Wheeler could match the best if ever the opportunity admitted.”403

Tuskegee airman Robert C. Robinson grew up at 9 North Crescent Street. Robinson attended Hopkins Chapel A.M.E. Zion Church and graduated from Stephens-Lee High School. He graduated from the Tuskeegee Institute in 1944. 2nd Lieutenant Robinson was reported missing during the March 1945 “Raid on Berlin” and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.404

The neighborhood was home to many influential Asheville African Americans. It is important to remember that in historic Asheville one’s position in the black community did not entirely depend on one’s occupation. While many jobs, such as being a teacher or minister, did confer immediate status, others depended on access or knowing influential white counterparts. While John Brooks Dendy was listed as a locker room attendant, his golfing past and links with whites at the country club allowed him access that others did not have. His children were allowed to go to Ivey’s department store after hours to try on clothing, an activity that segregation banned for other African American youth. The police allowed a certain domestic in Montford to speed regularly in her employer’s car rather detain her and risk his ire.405 Often this would allow people to forget about segregation, although when it did intrude it could be particularly jarring.

401 “Ranking Golfers in Joe Louis Tournament,” The Pittsburgh Courier, July 14, 1945, 12. 402 Michael Dean, “The Legend of John Brooks Dendy,” February 7, 2013, http://lawattstimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=902:the-legend-of-john-brooks- dendy&catid=12&Itemid=110 (accessed July 6, 2019). 403 “UGA Pioneers Toast ‘Kids,’” The Pittsburgh Courier, January 25, 1969, 14. 404 “Robert C. Robinson Jr.,” https://www.redtail.org/robert-c-robinson-jr/ (accessed July 6, 2019.) 405 Cissy Dendy interview. 139

Home businesses were as important in Chestnut Hill as they were in other African American neighborhoods. Frances McNeil was a dressmaker at 54 Madison Avenue in 1931. Ann Patterson made dresses at 51 Madison Avenue in 1951.406

Figure 66. Tuskegee Airman 2nd Lt. Robert C. Robinson grew up on North Crescent St. Civil rights leader Floyd McKissick lived across the street from the Dendy family on Madison Avenue. In 1966, McKissick took over the leadership of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE).

McKissick had two formative experiences when he lived on Madison Avenue. As a thirteen year old Boy Scout McKissick was watching an intersection on South French Broad while younger Scouts skated down the hill. The police soon arrived and roughed up McKissick while he tried to explain. He hit a policeman with a skate prompting a trip to the police station. Unable to find an

406 Strong, 43. 140 attorney McKissick was accompanied by his father and community leaders to court. The judge released him. The next day McKissick joined the NAACP.407

Asheville’s first black policeman, Lehman Williams, lived on Madison, along with the second black policeman, Harold Fields. Octasia Vance operated a boarding house for black professional baseball players at 20 Madison Avenue.408 However, it is not advertised in the Negro Motorist Green Book or the Asheville City Directory. This indicates the importance of local information in locating commercial enterprises in residential neighborhoods.

Urban renewal affected the neighborhood. Displaced people from urban renewal areas moved to the neighborhood and always didn’t have the same values. They were more conservative.409 The neighbors changed: older residents died young people, who were usually white, began to move into the neighborhood and the overall demographic changed again.410

The neighborhood is located on the edge (Broadway is a boundary) of the Montford local and National Register Historic Districts.

407 Oral History Interview with Floyd B. McKissick Sr., December 6, 1973. Interview A-0134. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program 408 Cissy Dendy, “Heart of Chestnut Hill.” 409 Cissy Dendy interview, 2019. 410 Cissy Dendy interview, 2019. 141

Figure 67. Inventoried Chestnut Hill properties.

Inventoried Properties

Inventoried SSN Address Date Type/Association Neighborhood Property Chestnut BN6460 1920s neighborhood Chestnut Hill Hill/Heart of Chestnut McKissick 2 BN4296 48 1910 House/civil rights Chestnut Hill Madison Ave. John Brooks BN4304 45 1920 House/sports Chestnut Hill Dendy House Madison Ave.

142

Figure 68. Burton Street neighborhood in 1939 (Works Progress Administration).

143

Park View/Burton Street

Previous Historic and Architectural Surveys

The Park View/Burton Street neighborhood is located in West Asheville north of Haywood Road and immediately west of I-24 which cut through the neighborhood. The neighborhood was previously surveyed as part of I-24 expansion three time from 1999-2006. Mattson, Alexander & Associates surveyed 26 properties in the neighborhood. Acme Preservation Services surveyed the neighborhood as part of the I-24 expansion and determined that the Burton Street Neighborhood (BN6282) was not eligible for the National Register of Historic Places because of the loss of key buildings associated with E. W. Pearson such as his home, store and Pearson Park. Recent infill and alteration of the historic housing stock has also diminished the historic integrity.411

Neighborhood History

The West Asheville Bridge connected both sides of Asheville in 1910. Park View was an early African American subdivision in West Asheville. E.W. Pearson developed the neighborhood in 1912. He was born in Burke County, North Carolina in 1872. He left North Carolina to work in a coal mine in Jellico, Tennessee. In 1893, he joined the 9th Cavalry, Troop B at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. His troop went to Utah in 1895. Pearson left the army in 1898 and moved to Chicago. There he took correspondence courses. Moving to Asheville, Pearson began to work in real estate with Rutherford Plat Hayes, son of President Hayes, who owned a large farm in Asheville.

In 1912, Pearson developed Park View, a subdivision marketed to African Americans. It was successful. Asheville’s elite blacks, such as Dr. William Torrence, lived there. In 1920, Pearson sold the park to H.T. Toles who had moved from Atlanta. He planned to make baseball diamonds, tennis courts, and a playground but it is unclear whether this plan came to fruition.412

In 1914, Pearson started the Buncombe County District Agricultural Fair at his park, an immediate success with whites and African Americans. The fair outgrew Pearson Park and was moved to the Logan showgrounds in the 1930s and 1940s. The New Belgium Brewery now occupies the site. In 1947, the last year it was held, in addition to agricultural products the six- day event featured the Stephens-Lee band, a baby contest and an old persons contest.413

Pearson continued his business ventures. He operated a grocery store and confectionary on Buffalo Street. In 1916 he started the Asheville Royal Giants baseball team, which played in

411 Acme Preservation Services, Historic Structures Survey/Eligibility Evaluation of the Burton Street Neighborhood, I-26 Connector, Asheville, I-2513, Buncombe County, CH 96-0472, NCDNCR. 412 “Colored Park Sold in West Asheville,” Asheville Citizen-Times, March 26, 1920, 10. 413 “Negro District Fair to Open Tomorrow,” Asheville Citizen, September 14, 1947, 10. 144

Pearson Park and later in Oates Park in the Southside neighborhood. When not playing baseball, the players held jobs on the railroad and at local hotels such as the Vanderbilt, Grove Park Inn, and Battery Park.414 Unlike Asheville’s white baseball team, Pearson’s survived World War I.415

Figure 69. 1916 Asheville Royal Giants (Pack Memorial Library, North Carolina Room Collection).

In February, 1921, Pearson became the president of the Asheville chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Marcus Garvey’s popular organization for racial uplift. . An advertisement in the January 28, 1922 issue of the Negro World warned that “A man by the name of E.W. Pearson is operating in the State of North Carolina, claiming to be president of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. The public is now informed he is not authorized by the Universal Negro Improvement Association to represent its interests.”416 Pearson was the

414 Bijan C. Bayne, “Black Professional Baseball in North Carolina from World War I to the Depression,” in Baseball in the Carolinas: 25 Essays on the State’s Hardball Heritage, ed. Chris Holaday (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Pusblishng, 2002), 51. 415 Bayne, “Black Professional Baseball,” 51. 416 “Warning to the Colored People of North Carolina,” Negro World, January 28, 1922, 8. 145 second person that Garvey attacked in North Carolina. In both cases he seemed threatened by more charismatic leaders and lashed out, expelling them from the organization.

In 1921, Pearson was president of the Blue Ridge Colored League, a African American league that featured teams from Charlotte, Gastonia, Concord, and Winston-Salem, along with South Carolina teams from Spartanburg, Anderson, and Rock Hill.417 Pearson’s baseball legacy is clearly strong but unfortunately poorly recorded. Historians are aware of Pearson’s Blue Ridge Colored League through a single Charlotte Observer article.418 Almost nothing survives from the Asheville Royals.

In 1921 white property owners successfully petitioned the city commissioners to change Buffalo Street’s name to Burton Street. Although it was a common tactic to attempt to racially delineate neighborhoods it was not always successful. In this case it was not. Black occupancy moved southward to Haywood Road by the 1930s as more African Americans moved to the neighborhood. However, white investors constructed homes in the area. The 1937 Residential Security map area description describes homes “of a uniform construction built by white owners for investment purposes” but it is unclear where these houses were located.419 It appears that this was another major building episode after Pearson’s initial development. This white investment pattern is also common and usually exploitative in segregated neighborhoods as houses could be rented or sold well above their price in a white neighborhood. As with other African American neighborhoods in Asheville, the map points out inadequate transportation and unpaved streets. Neighborhood calls for increased city services were usually ignored.

The neighborhood consisted of “116 houses, five churches, two grocery stores, a grammar school, two night clubs, a coal and ice company, and several beauty shops and barber shops.”420 Home businesses were popular, as in other black neighborhoods. Consequently, the outward appearance of a building as completely residential could in fact contain many commercial establishments. The inventoried house at 173 Burton Street, for example, is the former Dreamland Café from the early 1950s.

417 “Renaissance Man: Edward W. Pearson,” The Urban News, February 13, 2014, https://theurbannews.com/lifestyles/2014/renaissance-man-edward-w-pearson/ (accessed September 5, 2019). 418 Gary Ashwill, “Blue Ridge Colored Baseball League,” Agate Type, March 11, 2011, https://agatetype.typepad.com/agate_type/2011/03/blue-ridge-colored-baseball-league-1921.html (accessed September 5, 2019). 419 “Mapping Inequality—Asheville.” 420 Darin J. Waters, Gene Hyde, and Kenneth Betsalel, “In-Between the Color Lines: The Appalachian Urban Folk Photography of Isaiah Rice,” Southern Cultures 23, no. 1 (2017): 92–113. 146

Figure 70. The former Dreamland Café at 173 Burton Street (Rory Krupp). Its liquor license revocation indicates it may have been a nightclub or gathering spot. It was probably also a speakeasy. The owner lost his beer license in 1949 because he possessed illegal liquor. He was caught with illegal liquor a number of times throughout the 1950s. Previously the B & M Grocery Store in 1942, the house at 212 Fayetteville Street (BN6441) was Herbert Friday’s barbershop during the mid-1950s. African American barbershops are important community gathering spots. Friday was also actively involved in the Asheville NAACP branch in the 1950s.

In the 1960s, I-240 construction cut the neighborhood in half. Residents protested but the city was little help. The city’s habit of providing few services to African American areas aided highway construction. When residents protested the closing of Georgia and New York Avenues off Burton Street, the City Council decided to do nothing. They noted that the city had never formally accepted the streets. They were not city property. Consequently, the council decided the best course of action was not to do anything about the residents’ complaints.421

421 Jay Hensley, “Buffered Zone Row Bounced Back to Planning Group,” Asheville Citizen, August 9, 1968, 17. 147

Figure 71. 212 Fayetteville Street in 2019 (Photo: Rory Krupp).

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Figure 72. 212 Fayetteville Street in late 1950s (Photo: Isaiah Rice Collection, University of North Carolina Asheville). Neighborhood Institutions

The first Burton Street School was constructed in 1928 and replaced an earlier wood-frame structure. Approximately 120 children attended the school in the 1920s.The school went to the sixth grade.

The Burton Street School started to host recreation programs in 1950. Supervised by Isaiah Rice and Mrs. C. W. James, the program offered group singing, dramatics, games and table games for neighborhood youth.422

422 “Burton Street Center Opens,” Asheville Citizen-Times, April 21, 1950, 23. 149

Figure 73. Mrs. Iola Byers with prospective teenage patrons of the Burton Street Community Center in April 1963 (Photo: copyright Asheville Citizen-Times).

Instead, like other Asheville city schools, it was leased to the Opportunity Corporation and then became a community center.

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Figure 74. St. Paul Baptist Church, erected in 1975 (Rory Krupp). The Burton Street neighborhood has three churches. Mt. Carmel Baptist (BN6444) is located at 26 Mardell Circle. St. Paul Missionary Baptist was established in 1914. The congregation sold dinners to the workers at the Hans Rees tannery to buy building materials for the church. A second building was made in 1923 when E. W. Dixon was the pastor. Dixon went to Hill Street Baptist Church in 1932.423 The current building was constructed in 1975. The Community Baptist Church is located on Burton Street.

Burton Street still reflects the sphere constructed to thrive economically and socially during segregation. It is a good example of these social and historical forces manifested in the built environment. The street pattern, many original houses, and topography remain. However, the Burton Street neighborhood is often evaluated without context and has been deemed not eligible for the National Register. It should be evaluated in context with other comparable African American neighborhoods. The neighborhood is also under pressure from infill development.

423 “History of St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church,” September 1975, personal communication. 151

Recent demolition over time has removed some important structures such as E.W. Pearson’s grocery store, which is now a parking lot.

Figure 75. Burton Street Inventoried Properties. Inventoried Properties

Inventoried SSN Address Date Type/Association Neighborhood Property Burton Street BN6282 1912 neighborhood Burton Street

Herbert BN6441 212 1920s- House Burton Street Friday Fayetteville 1950s /barbershop/civil St Barbershop rights

St. Paul’s BN6442 170 1970s church Burton Street Missionary Fayetteville St. Baptist

Dreamland BN6443 173 1950 House/business Burton Street Cafe Burton St.

Mt. Carmel BN6444 26 c. 1955 church Burton St. Baptist Mardell Church Circle

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Brooklyn/Shiloh

Figure 76. Original Shiloh Church (Photo: Pack Library, North Carolina Room Collection).

In the 1955 Miller’s Asheville Directory Shiloh is described as below West Chapel Road and east of Hendersonville Road.424 Brooklyn and Brooklyn Road are described as South Biltmore.425 Rock Hill and Petersburg were also considered neighborhoods in the Shiloh area.426 Brooklyn was initially north of West Chapel and extended north to where Brooklyn Road turns west to London Road. This historic portion of Brooklyn was cut off from the southern part during Interstate 40 construction in the late 1960s.

424 Miller’s Asheville Directory 1955, 150. 425 Miller’s Asheville Directory 1955, 792. 426 Carroll Means Interview, MS 362_002F, C. Means Pack Memorial Library North Carolina Room. 153

Figure 77. Brooklyn Fire Baptized Holiness Church on Brooklyn Road (Rory Krupp). While Shiloh was insulated from urban renewal by distance, it was deeply changed by it. Of all the African American communities in Asheville, Shiloh represents a wide spectrum of change in housing due to highway construction, urban renewal and African American suburbanization.

The Shiloh community was founded after the Civil War by freed slaves. In 1888, George Vanderbilt bought the community members’ property and church. Vanderbilt moved their church and their cemetery. Shiloh’s boundaries have changed over time. Asheville city directories from the 1940s state that Shiloh is below West Chapel Road and the Brooklyn community is above West Chapel. Rock Hill is sometimes mentioned as a separate community but is most often lumped with Shiloh.

New Shiloh is centered on Brooklyn Road and West Chapel Road with the assemblage of the Shiloh Church, Shiloh School, and the Shiloh Community League site.

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New Shiloh has always been inextricably linked with the Biltmore Estate. George Vanderbilt supported the school. He also employed some residents on the estate.427 Vanderbilt moved their church and cemetery when he purchased Old Shiloh.

Early Shiloh residents benefited from their close ties to Biltmore. In addition to helping support the church and school, George Biltmore also supplied a doctor. Dr. Algernon Sidney Whitaker treated Biltmore’s injured workers for a fee of $100 per year.428 Injuries in Shiloh seemed to culminate in getting Dr. Whitaker to treat the widely varied injuries ranging from gunshots to burns. Bill Alexander notes that Whitaker’s care often involved an amputation.429

Surviving early Shiloh homes usually have pyramidal roofs and were placed on brick piers. Over time the spaces between the piers were filled with brick or concrete block. These survive on White Avenue and West Chapel Road. Later examples from 1910–25 are one-story front gable designs.

427 Waters, “Life Beneath the Veneer,” 125–26. 428 Bill Alexander, Around Biltmore Village (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Press, 2008), 23. 429 Alexander, Around Biltmore Village, 23. 155

Figure 78. Early Shiloh front gable house.

Figure 79. 1926 Roosevelt Park Plat (Buncombe County Register of Deeds).

In 1927, a Rosenwald elementary school was erected in Shiloh. Sears and Roebuck president, Julius Rosenwald, subsidized approximately 4,500 schools in the South. In 1950, a brick addition was added to the school. It is now the Linwood Crump Shiloh Recreation Complex. Crump coached Shiloh youth in football, baseball and basketball.430 He was also a strong community advocate

430 “Linwood Crump” Asheville Citizen-Times, February 8, 2005, 9. 156

Figure 80. Shiloh Rosenwald School

Shiloh was suburbanized from the 1920s onward. In 1926, Asheville jeweler Maxwell Polansky platted a subdivision, Roosevelt Park, located below Shiloh Road. Jeffress, Taft, and Grant Avenues are constituent parts. The subdivision was dense, with 40 ft. x 112 ft. lots Polansky suffered from bad timing and a tone-deaf marketing campaign that was wildly racist even for the 1920s. While the real estate market in Asheville collapsed, Polansky offered free BBQ and watermelon dinners to anyone who would come out to see his lots. He used an endorsement from Asheville’s Interracial Committee.431 Another advertisement touted segregated neighborhoods as the best way to live.432 Buncombe County Recorders records indicate two lots were sold.

431 Roosevelt Park advertisement, Asheville Citizen, November 5, 1926, 13. 432 “To Live? Roosevelt Park,” Asheville Citizen, August 11, 1926, 14. 157

Figure 81. 1949 Lincoln Park Plat (Buncombe County Register of Deeds).

Segregation, and the concomitant lack of city and state services, meant the community was essentially on its own. They reacted, as did other African American communities, by making their own services and institutions.

The Shiloh and Brooklyn communities were similar in their social relations. Both were tight-knit communities consistent with generations of families living in one place. Both were tied to land. Memories of large gardens and fresh produce come to the forefront in conversations. Chickens and perhaps a hog were not uncommon. It is a glimpse of a lifestyle that was doubtless carried from Old Shiloh. It is also a glimpse of a lifestyle that would be carried north in the Great Migration and into urban neighborhoods in the south.

Shiloh residents reacted to segregation by making their own private park. In July 1932 Burton street resident E. W. Pearson announced that Shiloh resident L. W. Williams had donated seven acres for a park.433 Land was cleared for a baseball diamond and a pavilion. A tennis court and small golf course were planned for the future. The African American private park was not new in Asheville or the South. Pearson had already made one for his Park View development. They were also springing up in other cities. In September 1932, Shiloh Park opened with a baseball

433 “Recreation Park for Negroes is Planned,” Asheville Citizen, July 17, 1932, 6. 158 tournament. The Pullman Porter band entertained the hundreds that attended the opening. The local Elks Lodge held a picnic.434 The 1930s also brought a grocery store to 940 W. Chapel Road (BN1302). It was operated by a series of owners over the years.

The community united and advocated for city services as well as looking out for each other. In 1936, Rev. Elijah N. Manning formed the Shiloh Community League. The League had a wide range of activities. It advocated for better city services, road paving, and sidewalks. It also cared for the community. In 1943, the Community League sponsored a war bond drive.435 In 1946, it solicited funds and household goods for a local family whose house burned down.436 The Community League raised funds by selling concessions from a lot they owned on Hampton Road, across from Shiloh Park, that is now a community garden.

Figure 82. The Shiloh Community League operated a concession stand on this site to fund their activities (Rory Krupp).

434 “New Negro Recreation Park Attracts Crowds,” Asheville Citizen-Times, August, 6, 1932, 6. 435 “Shiloh Section Holding Bond Drive,” Asheville Citizen, October 8, 1943, 10. 436 “Negro Community League to Meet,” Asheville Citizen-Times, May 1, 1946, 2. 159

The postwar period brought suburbanization to the area. Increased access to financing meant people could move from overcrowded areas to less crowded but still segregated neighborhoods.

In 1949, Lincoln Park, another African American oriented subdivision, was platted. While some of the streets were laid out, the lot density was ignored. Most houses occupy a number of combined lots.

In 1950, the State Highway Department, as part of a program to eliminate red clay roads, placed gravel on Roosevelt Park’s streets. The Asheville Citizen-Times noted that there were few houses.437 Polansky, who still owed the unsold subdivision from the 1920s, established a new company to sell homes in the subdivision.438 Polansky started a more conventional, although still aimed at African Americans, advertising campaign. This time it worked and the subdivision began to fill. Polansky advertised the close proximity of Shiloh school, park, and church. However, what was truly attractive was that FHA financing was available. Polansky had a real estate office at 35 Jeffress to handle sales and inquiries.

Developer Eddie Feld started another development, Whitehurst Park, in 1952. Located on White Chapel Road and including Brad Street and West Chapel Circle, it too boasted FHA financing. A model home was constructed at 980 West Chapel Road (BN6421).

437 “Engineers Must Follow Two Rules In Handling Rural Roads Program,” Asheville Citizen-Times, January 15, 1950, 1. 438 “Firms Get Charters in City,” Asheville Citizen-Times, January 5, 1950, 13. 160

Figure 83. 1952 Whitehurst Park Plat (Buncombe County Register of Deeds).

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Figure 84. FHA small house design in the Whitehurst Park subdivision (Rory Krupp). In 1958, Shiloh received another burst of suburbanization, when Roosevelt Park became eligible for FHA 221 home loans. These were loans designed to house people displaced by highway construction. Hill Street neighborhood residents became the first in North Carolina to participate in the program in 1958, when they were eligible to move to Roosevelt Park Homes continued to be built in Roosevelt Park through the 1960s. The subdivision contains an excellent collection of FHA small house designs and ranch styles.

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Figure 85. 30 Taft Avenue, constructed for Hill Street residents forced out by highway construction.

State events encouraged Bernice and John Young to move to Shiloh in 1956. They moved to avoid to having to send their children to school in Asheville from Yancey County. A scandal that received national attention the Yancey County school was so bad that parents sent their children on a forty mile bus ride to get a better education. The Young’s opened a nursing home in Shiloh shortly after moving. It was the first African American owned and operated nursing home in the area.439

The close-knit nature of the communities provided a buffer against an often racist outside world. However, at times that world did suddenly intrude. Anita White Carter remembers taking the bus to the Christmas parade with her brothers as a child. Cheerful and excited at going to the parade, she sat down on the bus beside a white man who kicked her into the aisle. Her brothers and other teenage boys came to her aid and the bus driver set them off on the side of the road. They had to

439 “Black History Month: John and Bernice Young” Asheville Citizen-Times, Februrary 25, 2005, 9. 163 walk home, although they were fairly close. That night the Asheville police department drove around Shiloh looking for the youth and her brothers, who had not stood for her being shoved around.440

Figure 86. Young’s Rest Home on Caribou Road (Rory Krupp).

In 1970 white developer Peter Feistman, president of Dwelling, Ltd., constructed High Meadows. The development was marketed to moderate income buyers who used the Federal Housing Administration Part 235 loan program. No down payment was required and the FHA guaranteed 100% of the mortgage.

440 Anita White Carter interview, 2019. 164

Figure 87. High Meadows subdivision advertisement, 1971 (Copyright Asheville Citizen-Times).

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Shiloh had a wide range in both age and architectural styles. In many aspects, Shiloh is the architectural history of displacement in Asheville. Early homes are associated with the move from Old Shiloh on Biltmore Estate to later homes associated with displaced highway construction residents.

Early twentieth-century Pyramidal and hipped roof one-story frame bungalows on brick piers are the earliest extant house forms. The gaps between the brick piers were often eventually filled in with brick or concrete blocks.

The early 1950s are represented by one- or one-and-a-half-story FHA small house designs. On occasion there are Colonial Revival door surrounds on the front façade. Many now have vinyl or aluminum siding and replacement windows, although in many cases the shape and form are original.

Shiloh has a full range of ranch houses ranging from the 1960s to the mid-1970s. Early, quite simple Ranch homes are present in Roosevelt Park from the late 1950s when the Federal Housing Program Part 221 loan program was used by displaced Hill Street residents. These are located on Taft Avenue. Later iterations, including split levels and split levels with incorporated garages, are located in the Roosevelt Park and High Meadows subdivisions.

One fraternal organization was inventoried. It, too, is associated with urban renewal. The Prince Hall Mason Lodge at 35 Booker Street was originally located in the East End but was lost to the Model Cities project in the 1970s. It is housed in a two-story front to gable concrete block building (BN6419).

Shiloh has been under development pressure since the 1990s. Residents were concerned at the same time that the city was not maintaining their streets. Resident and activist Linwood Crump led efforts for better streets in the mid-1990s.441 Commercial and industrial development is concentrated on Hendersonville Road and is moving into the residential Shiloh.

441 “Shiloh Residents All To Literally Feel A Rocky Road” Asheville Citizen-Times, 166

Figure 88. Venus Lodge Masonic Lodge No. 62, F & A.M., Prince Hall Affiliated. (Rory Krupp).

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Figure 89. Shiloh Inventoried Properties.

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Figure 90. Shiloh Inventoried Properties.

169

Figure 91. Shiloh Inventoried Properties.

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Figure 92. Shiloh Inventoried Properties.

Figure 93. Shiloh Inventoried Properties.

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Inventoried Properties

Name SSN Address Date Type/Association Neighborhood

Brooklyn BN6411 Centered c. 1910 Neighborhood Brooklyn on Brooklyn Road above W. Chapel Rd. Brooklyn Chapel BN6412 Corner 1912 Church Brooklyn Fire Brooklyn BaptitizedHoliness Road and West Church Chapel High Meadows BN6413 High 1971 subdivision Brooklyn Meadow Rd. & Wyatt St. Johnson House BN6414 129 c. 1971 Ranch house/ Brooklyn Wyatt St. FHA Part 235 program Rucker house BN6415 99 Wyatt c.1972 Modern split level Brooklyn St. FHA Part 235 program Wilson House BN6416 24 High 1972 FHA Part 235 Brookyn Meadow program Rd. Shiloh BN6463 South of 1888 neighborhood Shiloh W. Chapel Rd. White House BN6465 6 White 1900 House/early Shiloh Rd. settlement

Powell house BN6417 960 W. 1920 House- hipped Shiloh Shiloh bungalow Chapel roof/early Rd. settlement

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Roger’s Grocery BN1302 990 W. c. 1935- Grocery (white) Shiloh Chapel 1960s Rd. Corner W. Chapel Rd. & Marietta St. Young’s Nursing BN6418 400 1960s Nursing home Shiloh Home Caribou Rd. Masonic Temple BN6419 35 1971 Fraternal lodge Shiloh of Venus, Lodge Booker No. 62, F & A.M. St. Prince Hall Affiliated

Shiloh BN6420 SW 1938 Shiloh Shiloh Community corner Community League lot Hampton League St. & Century Blvd. Whitehurst BN6467 North of c. 1952 Early 1950s Brooklyn/ subdivision W. subdivision Shiloh Chapel Rd. Whitehurst Model BN6421 980 W. 1952 Model Shiloh Home Chapel home/Whitehurst Rd. subdivision

Whitehurst FHA BN6422 5 W. 1952 FHA minimal Shiloh home Chapel traditional Circle home/FHA loan program Shiloh BN6423 Corner 1932 Early private park Shiloh Community Park Shiloh Rd. & Brooklyn Rd. Roosevelt Park BN6424 Below 1926 subdivision Shiloh Shiloh Rd. Roosevelt Park BN6461 35 c. 1926 House as Shiloh sales office Jeffress commercial Avenue building

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Love House BN6425 30 Taft 1958 Roosevelt Park Shiloh/Roosevelt Avenue highway Park displacement FHA part 221 program

Lincoln Park BN6426 East of 1938 Subdivision Shiloh Caribou Rd around Booker St. Washington BN6427 86 Taft 1960 House/highway Shiloh House Avenue construction

Hicks House BN6429 32 Forest c. 1910 Early Shiloh Shiloh (Shiloh bungalow) Street bungalow

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National Register Study List

The survey recommends three properties for the National Register Study List.

Wilson Building, 13 Eagle Street The Wilson Building in downtown Asheville has a rich history ranging from its inception as an African American professional building in the 1920s through the 1960s.

The building is in its original location. It retains its workmanship. The retail bays and entrances are intact. The fenestration pattern remains and some windows appear original. The feeling and association remain. That portion of the streetscape is intact but it is also one of the last portions of the historic neighborhood that remains.

Rabbit’s Motel, 110 McDowell Street Rabbit’s Motel, constructed in 1947, on McDowell Street is also a notable instance of African American entrepreneurship in Asheville. It is also a good example of an automobile-oriented tourist hotel geared towards an African American audience. The owner, Fred Simpson, also navigated segregation in North Carolina through legal and illegal business ventures.

The buildings retain their historic integrity. The restaurant retains its original windows. It retains its sense of workmanship, The brick quoins and window details, character-defining features are intact. The motel building retains its integrity. The door and fenestration pattern remain. The building retains its original shape and form. While the interior has been removed these are secondary spaces.

The setting and association are intact. The neighborhood is still automobile oriented. The site itself does not have any intrusions. It retains the original automobile circulation pattern.

Walton Pool, 570 Oakland Road Walton Park and Walton Pool, the first African American municipal park in Asheville with a is significant under Criterion A, ethnic history. The pool is recorded in the press as the first pool and park made for African Americans in Asheville. This is not the case. The Mountain Street Pool was constructed in 1916 in the East End for African Americans. Magnolia Park was constructed in 1900 for African Americans. This makes the Walton Pool significant in civil rights and African American memory. The pool was constructed in 1948 to maintain segregation in Asheville.

The pool retains its historic integrity. The historic property is in its original location. The pool and pool house retain its workmanship. It has not been appreciably altered over time. The pool retains its association and feeling. There are no intrusions or changes in the landscape.

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Priorities for Future African American Heritage Surveys

Priorities for future African American Heritage Architectural Surveys should focus on these extant historic neighborhoods. Survey priority should focus on the areas most under development pressure including for infrastructure improvements. Development pressure can include zoning changes and infill housing pressures. Greater attention to the historic context is needed to fully ascertain significance. Previous Section 106 reports have often focused on matters of integrity without taking the historic context into consideration.

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East End

There is a portion of Asheville’s East End that is not surveyed. This area is roughly bounded by Mountain Street and College Place to the north, Beaucatcher Mountain to the east, Charlotte Street to the west and Carroll Avenue to the south. The area is residential with home based businesses such as boarding houses and various stores.

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Figure 94. Proposed Shiloh and Brooklyn future survey area (NC HPO WEB). Shiloh

Shiloh represents the architectural history of African American settlement in Asheville from 1889 to the present. It includes early examples of hipped and pyramidal roofed homes to recent suburbs constructed under various FHA loan programs. Research should include who developed various subdivisions and whether the houses were speculatively constructed or built by the homeowner. The extent of commercial activity in residential areas should also be examined.

Research indicates that the Brooklyn Community was bisected by I-40. The survey area extends north of I-40 around Brooklyn Road. Research also indicates that recent African Ameican susburban activity is east of Sweeten Creek Road. The survey should extend to this area.

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Figure 95. Proposed Burton Street survey area (orange dashed line) based on 1939 WPA Real Estate Index neighborhood boundaries.

Burton Street (BN

The Burton Street neighborhood has not been completely surveyed within its historic boundaries. Section 106 surveys have covered I-26 Area of Potential Effects (APE) but the interstate APE does not include the whole neighborhood. After the survey the entire neighborhood should be put into context and evaluated.

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Figure 96. Southside neighborhood survey recommendations.

Southside

These areas should have a Phase II survey. The Southside neighborhood has a richer historic context than previously revealed and a more intensive survey should reveal even more information about African American life in Asheville. It may also slow the inadvertent demolition of the community’s significant buildings.

The survey should inventory the buildings that have not been previously inventoried including newly recorded neighborhoods such as Oakland Forest (BN6432).

Additional resources that should be inventoried in this area are urban renewal infill houses; municipal architecture such as fire stations; urban renewal cultural landscapes; and landscapes that are approaching the fifty-year National Register of Historic Places cut-off.

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Emma/Violet Hill and Fairmont

These African American neighborhoods appear to have been somewhat rural in their heyday but are now within the city limits. Neither has been surveyed and more historical research is needed to delineate the areas and determine the extent of the extant cultural resources.

181

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Nickollof, Steven Michael. “Urban Renewal in Asheville: A History of Racial Segregation and Black Activism.” Master’s thesis, Western Carolina University, 2015.

McDonald, Heather Lynn. “The National Register of Historic Places and African-American Heritage.” Master’s thesis, University of Georgia Historic Preservation Program, 2009.

Merriweather, Taurean. “Preservin’ Blackness: Assessing the Values and Perceptions of Historic Districts in Neighborhoods of Color.” Master’s thesis, University of Florida, Historic Preservation Program, 2018.

Parker, Patrick Shane. “Appalachian Activists: The Civil Rights Movement in Asheville, NC.” Master’s thesis, Appalachian State University, 2016.

Waters, Darin. “Life Beneath the Veneer: The Black Community in Asheville from 1793–1900.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012.

Newspapers & Magazines

Asheville Blade

Asheville Citizen-Times

Asheville News-Gazette

Black Enterprise

Black Ink (Chapel Hill)

Carolina Times

Cincinnati Enquirer

The Daily Standard

Ebony

Mountain Xpress (Asheville)

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Ohio State News (Columbus, Ohio)

Negro World (Universal Negro Improvement Association)

Pittsburgh Courier

The Ridgeline (Asheville)

Urban News (Asheville)

Government Documents

Acme Preservation Services. Asheville Phase I Summary Report. 2011.

Acme Preservation Services. Asheville Phase II Summary Report. 2012.

Acme Preservation Services. Historic Architectural Resources Survey Report: Intensive Evaluation: Burton Street Neighborhood, I-26 Connector in Asheville, Buncombe County. 2015.

Dendy, Cissy. The Heart of Chestnut Hill Presents our Vision of the Road Ahead. Neighborhood Plans on a Page, http://ashevillencprod.civica.granicusops.com/departments/comm_public/neighborhood/plans.ht m. Accessed May 10, 2019.

Matthews, Richard. Historic Architectural Resources Report: River Arts District Transportation Project and Wilma Dykeman Riverway Project, Asheville. 2015.

Mattson & Alexander. Phase II Architectural Resources Survey & Report for I-26 Route, Asheville Connector.

Mattson & Alexander. Phase 2 Intensive Architectural Resources Survey and Report: I-240/US 25 Interchange Upgrade Environmental Assessment, Asheville. 1999.

Nolen, John. Asheville City Plan. 1925.

Works Progress Administration. Asheville Real Estate Index. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939.

United States Census Records.

Veterans Emergency Housing Program. Washington, DC: United States Printing Office, 1946.

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Archival Collections

Asheville Urban Renewal Files, at the D. H. Ramsey Library, University of North Carolina– Asheville.

Housing Authority of the City of Asheville, North Carolina, Records, at the D. H. Ramsey Library, University of North Carolina–Asheville.

Oral History Interview with Floyd B. McKissick Sr., December 6, 1973. Interview A-0134. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Pack Library North Carolina Room Collections

African American Oral Histories

African American Oral History Project

Asheville Chapter of the Links Inc.

Cissy Dendy Family Collection

Stumptown Collection

Asheville’s Black Churches Photo Collection

Voices of Asheville Oral History Collection, at the D. H. Ramsey Library, University of North Carolina–Asheville.

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Inventoried Properties

Name SSN Address Date Type/Associatio Neighborhood n Brooklyn BN6411 Centered c. Neighborhood Brooklyn on 1910 Brooklyn Road above W. Chapel Rd. Brooklyn Chapel BN6412 Corner 1912 Church Brooklyn Fire Brooklyn BaptitizedHoline Road and West ss Church Chapel High Meadows BN6413 High 1971 subdivision Brooklyn Meadow Rd. & Wyatt St. Johnson House BN6414 129 Wyatt c. Ranch house/ Brooklyn St. 1971 FHA Part 235 program Rucker house BN6415 99 Wyatt c.1972 Modern split Brooklyn St. level FHA Part 235 program Wilson House BN6416 24 High 1972 FHA Part 235 Brookyn Meadow program Rd. Shiloh BN6463 South of 1888 neighborhood Shiloh W. Chapel Rd. White House BN6465 6 White 1900 House/early Shiloh Rd. settlement

Powell house BN6417 960 W. 1920 House- hipped Shiloh Shiloh bungalow Chapel Rd. roof/early settlement

Roger’s Grocery BN1302 990 W. c. Grocery (white) Shiloh Chapel Rd. 1935- Corner W. 1960s Chapel Rd. & Marietta St. Young’s Nursing BN6418 400 1960s Nursing home Shiloh Home Caribou Rd.

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Name SSN Address Date Type/Associatio Neighborhood n Masonic Temple BN6419 35 Booker 1971 Fraternal lodge Shiloh of Venus, Lodge St. No. 62, F & A.M. Prince Hall Affiliated

Shiloh BN6420 SW corner 1938 Shiloh Shiloh Community Hampton Community League lot St. & League Century Blvd. Whitehurst BN6467 North of c. Early subdivision Brooklyn/ subdivision W. Chapel 1952 Shiloh Rd. Whitehurst BN6421 980 W. 1952 Model Shiloh Model Home Chapel Rd. home/Whitehurst subdivision

Whitehurst FHA BN6422 5 W. 1952 FHA minimal Shiloh home Chapel traditional Circle home/FHA loan program Shiloh BN6423 Corner 1932 Early private park Shiloh Community Park Shiloh Rd. & Brooklyn Rd. Roosevelt Park BN6424 Below 1926 subdivision Shiloh Shiloh Rd. Roosevelt Park BN6461 35 Jeffress c. House as Shiloh sales office Avenue 1926 commercial building

Love House BN6425 30 Taft 1958 Roosevelt Park Shiloh/Roosevel Avenue highway t Park displacement FHA part 221 program

Lincoln Park BN6426 East of 1938 Subdivision Shiloh Caribou Rd around Booker St. Washington BN6427 86 Taft 1960 House/highway Shiloh House Avenue construction

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Name SSN Address Date Type/Associatio Neighborhood n Hicks House BN6429 32 Forest c. Early Shiloh Shiloh (Shiloh Street 1910 bungalow bungalow)

Fairmont Baptist BN6430 4 Stoner 1965 Church Fairmont Church Rd.

Southside BN6431 Neighborhood Southside

Walton Pool BN5664 570 1938 Pool/Works Southside Oakland Progress Rd. Administration

Oakland Forest BN6432 Haith Dr. 1968 Subdivision built Southside off by Lacy Haith Oakland Rd. Arthur R. BN5662 133 1955 Recreation Southside Edington Career Livingston center/school and Education Street integration/urban Center renewal

S. Foster Tourist BN3814 88 1920s Tourist Southside Home Clingman home/Green Ave. Book

Livingston Apts.. BN6433 133 1968- Public Southside Livingston 1979 housing/urban Street, renewal located at Oakland and Depot Erskine BN6434 Located at c. Defensible space Southside barricade Erskine 1975- artifact Ave. and 1990 Erskine St. Orange Peel/Jade BN5181 101 1960s Commercial/ Southside Club Biltmore Entertainment Ave. Ellsworth House BN6435 85 Ora St. 1975 House/Urban Southside renewal infill Moore House BN6436 87 Ora St. 1975 House/Urban Southside renewal infill Rabbit’s Motel BN6437 110 1948 Hotel/restaurant Southside McDowell St.

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Name SSN Address Date Type/Associatio Neighborhood n New Bethel BN6438 580 S. 1942 church Southside Baptist Church French Broad Ave. Mae McCorkle BN5888 87 Blanton 1960s House/business Southside Beauty Shop St. Benevolent BN3766 382 S. 1920/ Fraternal/urban Southside Protective Order French 1958 renewal of Elks of the Broad Ave. World, Fawndale Lodge #363

Beulah Chapel BN4339 102 S. 1970s church Southside Fire Baptized French Holiness Church Broad Ave. Pine Grove BN6440 11 Pine St. 1965 church Southside Missionary Church

Gaston Street BN6467 30 Gaston 1957 church Southside Church of Christ St. Worldwide BN6428 85 1959 church Southside Baptist Choctaw Tabernacle St.

Buxton Hall BN5927 32 Banks 1920s Commercial Southside Ave. Burton Street BN6282 1912 neighborhood Burton Street

Herbert Friday BN6441 212 1920s House Burton Street Barbershop Fayetteville - /barbershop/civil St 1950s rights

St. Paul’s BN6442 170 1975 church Burton Street Missionary Fayetteville St. Baptist

Dreamland Cafe BN6443 173 1950 House/business Burton Street Burton St. Mt. Carmel BN6444 26 Mardell 1970 church Burton St. Baptist Church Circle

Hill Street BN6445 135 Hill 1958 church Hill Street Baptist St.

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Name SSN Address Date Type/Associatio Neighborhood n Hillcrest Apt. BN6446 100 1958 Public housing Hill Street Atkinson St. Fruit of the Spirit BN6447 5 1920s church Hill Street of God Church Roosevelt of God In Christ St.

Sycamore BN6448 11 Ann St. c. church Hill Street Temple of God 1960 Church of God in Christ

East End BN6464 1880s neighborhood East End

Wilson Building BN2157 13 Eagle 1926 Professional East End St. building/African American business

St. James AME BN6449 44 1970 Church East End Education Hildebrand building/Lacy Building St. Haith

Lee-Walker BN6450 50 Wilbur 1952 Public housing East End Heights Apts. Ave.

Stephens-Lee BN6451 55 1952 House/Stephens- East End Shop Class Hazzard Lee High School St. Nazareth First BN6452 146 Pine 1961 church East End Baptist St.

Calvary BN6453 44 Circle 1926 church East End Presbyterian St.

Boarding House BN6454 30 Ridge 1915 House/Business East End St. in 1940s

Allen School BN6455 22 College 19503 Education East End Dorm Place

Hopkins Chapel BN0433 College 1910 church East End AME Place South Asheville BN6456 c. neighborhood South Asheville 1890

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Name SSN Address Date Type/Associatio Neighborhood n Sherman Withers BN6457 87 1929– House/store South Asheville Grocery Wyoming Rd. 1960s

Solid Rock BN1342 104 c. church South Asheville Missionary Wyoming 1920 Baptist Rd.

Kenilworth BN1379 205 1920 Commercial South Asheville Commercial Kenilwort building h Rd. Grocery

5 Walnut Street BN2403 5 Walnut c. Restaurant Downtown St. 1900

9 Walnut Street BN2404 9 Walnut c. Restaurant Downtown St. 1900

Klondyke Apt BN6459 500 1975 Public housing Montford Montford Ave. McKissick 1 BN2797 42 1930 House/civil rights Montford Magnolia Ave. Magnolia BN6462 Magnolia c. Neighborhood Montford Ave & 1900 Flint St. Chestnut BN6460 1920s neighborhood Chestnut Hill Hill/Heart of Chestnut McKissick 2 BN4296 48 1910 House/civil rights Chestnut Hill Madison Ave. John Brooks BN4304 45 1920 House/sports Chestnut Hill Dendy House Madison Ave. Welfare Baptist BN6458 27 c. Church Stumptown Church Madison 1931 St.

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Note on Historic Integrity

Community historian and journalist Henry Robinson notes that during the Great Depression many people took in boarders or converted a portion of their home to a business. He also notes that this tradition continued into the 1940s and 1950s when both segregation and the informal neighborhood economy flourished. Often the home-based or residential-based business resulted in a home addition or other modification. While many examples of this kind of work have been lost in the East End due to urban renewal, Burton Street still exhibits the built environment of this period. Conventional historic integrity in an African American context is problematic when emphasis is placed on the retention of historic fabric.442 African American historic properties often instead exhibit cultural layering—different people and different uses through time. As preservationist Taurean Merriweather points out, “Buildings reflect time and culture through people’s interaction and existence.”443 This included additional uses, such as using homes for businesses or churches. African American home-based business buildings often have a different mass and shape that would challenge traditional notions of historic integrity but are classic examples of the historic forces at play in the neighborhood.

442 Heather Lynn McDonald, “The National Register of Historic Places and African American Heritage” (Master’s thesis, University of Georgia, 2009), 40. 443 Taurean Merriweather, “Preservin’ Blackness: Assessing the Values and Perceptions of Historic Districts in Neighborhoods of Color” (Master’s thesis, University of Florida, 2018.) 195