A few months ago some questions arose about a couple photographs in the North Carolina Room’s Special Collection. They show a group of African-American masons erecting a wall up against a building with a large “Drink Pepsi-Cola” sign painted on it. Zoe asked me if I could confirm the details in the description. Here’s part
This post begins the two-part story of Edward Stephens and his work in Asheville and other cities. Although Stephens wasn’t one of the original five black teachers when the Asheville public schools opened in January 1888, he came to the system two years later and made lasting contributions to the black community as a teacher,
This installment offers a look at the life and career of the fifth of the five original teachers at Asheville’s first black city school, Beaumont Street. We’ve saved one of the best teachers for last. We’ve also included information on the members of her family because of their prominence in Asheville and their connections to
The Woodfin community, like many other Buncombe County communities is named for a man who enslaved human beings. If you’ve followed along in this series, you’ve probably recognized that to be a common theme among communities; they’re named for people of extravagant wealth. Wealth earned on the backs of enslaved black people. Indeed, our county
I remember “worst” Asheville. It’s the neighborhood where my Grandfather was born in a house with dirt floors, where I went to preschool (back when Crossroads Assembly was “West Asheville Assembly” located on Haywood Rd.), attended my first dance lessons (in the building where Asheville Greenworks is today), and went along with my mother to
Henry Robinson wrote in 1992 about his childhood community of Southside–a mournful eulogy really, to a place that no longer exists–that the sprawling community “stretched over 400 acres from Biltmore Avenue westward to the French Broad River.” Robinson informs us today that it was “the largest residential area for African-Americans in Asheville and a melting
In our last post in this series on early black public schools, we looked at the lives and careers of Harrison B. Brown and Daniel Cato Suggs, two of the original five teachers who opened Beaumont School on January 9, 1888. This new post profiles two more of these teachers, Edward H. Lipscombe and Mary