YMI Cultural Center starts its next chapter with renovations and new leadership

Inside the YMI Cultural Center’s remodeled auditorium, its new executive director, Sean Palmer, energetically leads a chorus in the singing of Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” to mark the center’s 132-year anniversary.

The event is one of several that have been held in recent weeks, culminating in the Feb. 27 grand reopening. After a five-year, $6.2 million capital campaign, marked by personnel changes and legal disputes, the organization’s board chair, Anthony Thomas, sees the ribbon-cutting as the center’s next chapter in its long history in Asheville.

Built in 1893, and known at the time as the Young Men’s Institute, the site originally offered housing and recreational opportunities for Biltmore Estate’s Black workers. Over the subsequent decades, the venue evolved into a central hub for the city’s African American community.

“It’s gone through Jim Crow, it’s gone through segregation, it’s gone through urban removal, and it still stands tall,” says Thomas, who has served on the board since 2018.

With renovations complete and new programming in place, Thomas feels more confident than ever about the YMI’s future. “It will be the first time, at least since I’ve been on the board, that we have a strategic plan that will allow the center to generate revenue for itself to become self-sustaining,” he says.

Meanwhile, Palmer, who has devoted his professional career to uplifting the Black experience, says he is eager to lead the YMI into its next iteration, elevating the organization’s reputation beyond Western North Carolina.

Undeterred 

Before Palmer’s arrival, financial disputes between the YMI and its former executive director Dewana Little resulted in multiple lawsuits. By April 2024, the organization hired Andrew Shannon to replace Little, but his tenure was brief.

Palmer, however, says the recent turnovers and legal disputes did not deter him from accepting the position.

“It’s not surprising that people will come into this work and realize that they are not a good fit or that the work is surprisingly more difficult from one vantage point or another,” Palmer says. “And I think a good director learns what they don’t know. They operate as a lifelong learner.”

For eight years, Palmer served as the assistant director at the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture at Duke University. More recently, he was the director at UNC Wilmington Upperman African American Cultural Center (UAACC), until his position was terminated when UNC System Board of Governors voted to eliminate its DEI policy at its 17  institutions in May 2024. Palmer still serves as the vice president for the Association for Black Culture Centers (ABCC).

“His love of history was attractive to us, as well as his work that he was doing at the Upperman Center at Wilmington,” Thomas says. “Our goal was to put the culture back into the YMI Cultural Center, and he just seemed to have a vast amount of experience in that space.”

Creating a third space

Part of Palmer’s vision for the YMI is to deepen its connection throughout Asheville.

“A cultural center that does not have a relationship with a larger community is a cultural center on the verge of death,” Palmer says, quoting his colleague Deidre Rouse, president of the ABCC.

Furthermore, he wants to distinguish the organization from other area nonprofits. “There are a lot of nonprofits in the city that have as their base Black entrepreneurship, Black workers. But there’s a need to tell the history of how Black folks got here,” he says.

Palmer also emphasizes the importance of the YMI being a “third space,” or a community hub where individuals can connect with one another.

“We only go from work to home and home to work, and those are first and second spaces,” Palmer says. “We need community and we need places to learn things and to develop hobbies and to work on ourselves.”

Inclusivity, Palmer emphasizes, is key.

“It means all the singers, all the artists, all the Black queer folks, all the Black writers, the children, the bourgeoisie, the Greek ones, the ones who all went to HBCUs [historically Black colleges and universities], the ones who went to PWIs [predominantly white institutions] like Duke and Chapel Hill, the ones who went to Asheville, the ones who like to hike, the ones who like to stay inside, the ones who like to shop,” Palmer says. “All of those microcommunities have to be convened, and we need to try and [welcome] as many of them as we can in our spaces.”

Above all else, Palmer adds, there has to be a rhyme and a reason. “Take people on a journey each year,” he says. “I have lived by that principle a long time, which is that you create programming that is connected, that has a storyline.”

‘Connective tissue’ 

In light of welcoming folks into the freshly renovated space, the 2025 theme for the YMI focuses on the spirit of teranga, a Wolof (West African) word meaning “radical hospitality.” Each year’s theme will be combined with a piece of literature. The inaugural selection is Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Knoxville, Tennessee.”

Part of Palmer’s interest in this concept is to offer a counterexample to what he’s seen at other organizations. He explains that sometimes cultural centers veer toward being reactionary rather than creating a “connective tissue” that breaks down the root of conflicts.

“They’re waiting for major catastrophes to happen, and then they’re responding to those catastrophes afterwards,” Palmer elaborates. “Like if you’re only responding to the George Floyd incidents, or the Black Lives Matters moment, [then] you haven’t created the connective tissue in your cultural center to teach how Black lives matter.”

Palmer is kickstarting a residency program, Kujichagulia, for Black organizations to host meetings in the space and has plans to launch “Banjul-Banjo,” a music series that highlights cultural connections between West Africa and the Blue Ridge Mountains. The YMI will also continue to host the annual Goombay Festival, which showcases Black culture, art, food and entertainment.

Along with new and returning concepts and events, the center is also adding an operations and finance director and director of cultural arts, Thomas says.

“Historically, it’s always been an executive director and then piecemealing the staff,” Thomas explains.

The big goal for Palmer, however, is for the YMI to enter the national conversation. After all, he says, it is one of the oldest Black-led cultural centers.

“Telling just the Asheville story isn’t the only story that we need to tell,” Palmer adds, noting the several Black legacy communities throughout the region. “We need to be the cultural center for this entire land — North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains.”