Asheville has gotten whiter over the past two decades. The proportion of African-American residents in the city dropped from 17.6 percent in 2000 to 12.3 percent in 2016, a change city officials attribute to a combination of white influx and black exodus. For the people of color who remained in Asheville, 2018 proved a mixed bag.
The history lessons and talks of 2018.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, The Asheville Citizen featured a weekly Monday column titled “Excerpts From Sermons Preached Here Sunday.”
In his latest work, ‘Tangled: Organizing the Southern Textile Industry, 1930-1934,’ historian Travis Sutton Byrd explores the region’s labor movements that would help lead to a nationwide textile worker strike.
In 1928, city officials, business owners and residents came together to launch the inaugural Rhododendron Festival.
Between 1880 and 1890, Asheville’s population grew by over 350 percent. With an influx of new blood came plenty of new businesses as well.
In March 1926, demolition on the 1892 city hall building began.
“When all the wounds of war are healed/And hate’s grim sorrows fade/With pulsing heart we’ll read the part/The Red Cross Nurses played,” reads a poem in the Nov. 23, 1918 publication of The Oteen.
World War I ended on Nov. 11, 1918. That Thanksgiving some local residents celebrated with nontraditional dishes.
Broken promises and false starts plagued the city’s early hopes of developing an airport.
In 1912, the owner of a raucous rooster was taken to court by his very tired neighbors.
In March 1918, construction began on a new hospital in Asheville. The facility was specifically built for World War I soldiers infected with tuberculosis.
On Friday, Oct. 26, the Charles George VA will celebrate its centennial at its grand reopening of building No. 9, known today as the Hope and Recovery Center.
The African Americans in Western North Carolina and Southern Appalachia Conference will take place Oct. 18-20 in Asheville. The theme this year is “Making the invisible visible.”
In the summer of 1912, self-proclaimed clairvoyant Mme. Nina Lester arrived in Asheville for a brief stint. By late July she would flee the city with hundreds of dollars worth of stolen jewelry.
In the fall of 1923, a demolition crew began tearing down the original Battery Park. Later that year, flames would consume parts of the remaining property.
In the final months of 1922, news spread that E.W. Grove had plans to raze the original Battery Park Hotel and demolish the hill it stood atop. Not everyone was on board with the plan.
On Tuesday, Sept. 25, historian and author Christopher Arris Oakley will discuss his latest book, New South Indians: Tribal Economics and the Eastern Band of Cherokee in the Twentieth Century at UNCA.
In June 1902, North Carolina Sen. Jeter Conley Pritchard invited President Theodore Roosevelt to join him on a bear hunt in the western part of the state. The possible expedition created all sorts of commentary in the local papers.
In 1941, two years before the Asheville Colored Hospital opened, Asheville’s African-American population numbered 14,500. At the time, the segregated city only had 21 hospital beds available for the entire African-American community.
On April 7, 1927, Asheville’s Colored Library opened inside the YMI Building.
