On September 9, 1936, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt arrived in Knoxville, Tenn. He and his team traversed the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on their way to Asheville, where the commander-in-chief delivered a speech to a crowd of 20,000 people at McCormick Field.
As in hundreds of other cities throughout the country, urban renewal dramatically changed Asheville’s neighborhoods and streetscapes. Established by the Housing Act of 1949 to clear blighted neighborhoods, the federal initiative displaced millions of predominantly African American individuals and families between the 1950s and 1980s.
