Asheville’s First Public Schools For Blacks For more than a year, I have collected every newspaper article on the Beaumont Academy, Beaumont School and the Mountain Street School, in my quest to gather information on the first public schools for blacks in Asheville. But something puzzled me – where was the original location of the
In Part One we focused on Stephens’s work as a principal and teacher in the Asheville City Schools and as the organizer and first general secretary of the Young Men’s Institute (YMI). In this new post, we’ll look at the events that led to Stephens’s departure from Asheville and the work he and his wife
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
