Change of face: Attracting diverse visitors to a mostly white city

Local tourism operators are sensing a shift in the racial makeup of visitors to the Asheville area. Though the data don’t definitively support that conclusion — at least not yet — efforts to make Asheville a more welcoming and inclusive destination continue, as do fledgling initiatives to give minority tourism entrepreneurs a bigger piece of the industry’s pie.

Lynching memorial confronts our country’s past

Students and scholars from Asheville, as well as representatives of several religious organizations here, are among those who have traveled to the National Memorial for Peace in Justice in Montgomery. The 6-acre site houses more than 800 monuments the organization has created, each indicating a county where racial terror lynchings occurred, including Buncombe.

Bought & Sold: Forgotten documents highlight local slave history

In Buncombe County, thousands of slaves toiled as cooks, farmers, tour guides, maids, blacksmiths, tailors, miners, farmers, road builders and more, local records show. And after mostly ignoring that troubled history for a century and a half, the county is now taking groundbreaking steps to honor the contributions of those former residents by making its slave records readily available online.