Priscilla Ndiaye Robinson looked across the empty fields where her Southside neighborhood once thrived. “It’s all gone,” she said. “One thousand two hundred businesses and homes were lost.”
The neighborhood, where approximately half of Asheville’s Black population lived, suffered major upheaval under Asheville’s urban renewal program in the 1970s and 1980s, one of the largest urban renewal projects in the Southeastern United States.
Ndiaye Robinson’s memories of childhood delights a neighbor’s cupcakes, playing with chickens, charging up the grassy hills are tainted by sadness and umbrage at what happened. “It broke up a loving community. It tore up families,” she recalled.
Juanita Wilson / Buncombe County Special Collections, Pack Memorial Library, Asheville, NC
Six months ago, as part of a reckoning on racial injustice, the City of Asheville and Buncombe County both passed resolutions to consider reparations to the Black community as a way to begin making amends for slavery and generations of systemic discrimination.
The votes were hailed as “historic” by The Asheville Citizen Times, and ABC News asked, “Is Asheville a national model?”
Since then, local officials concede, little has been done. Some in the Black community see zero progress.
“From my understanding, they’ve done nothing,” said Rob Thomas, community liaison for the Racial Justice Coalition.