Sylvia D. Wells- Sell, 50, died Friday, April 2, 2021 at Salem Regional Medical Center.
Sylvia was born on March 17, 1971 in Cleveland, Ohio, daughter of Joseph Wells and Jannette A. (Rickman) Leatherman.
She was a 1990 graduate of Salem High School and received her cosmetology license from Raphael’s.
She was a cosmetologist doing hair and nails out of her home. She also taught at Raphael’s.
Sylvia was of the Christian faith and loved attending Bible studies at various groups.
Some of her joys were crafting, cooking, bringing the family and friends together, and karaoke.
She was a lover of music and knew every song.
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.
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Black Restaurant Week in PNW encourages support of local, Black-owned restaurants
Kent s Altha s Cajun Spices owner, Reginald Robinson, with customer Sir Mix-A-Lot.
Every April in Seattle is Seattle Restaurant Week, where hundreds of the city’s restaurants offer special three-course menus, at set prices, to lure diners in. But this week is Black Restaurant Week, a marketing campaign created to encourage people to eat in Black-owned restaurants.
“It started in Houston in 2016,” said co-founder Falayn Ferrell. “We have a really robust Houston Restaurant Week, but a lot of the businesses in our community didn’t really fit that model. They don’t have the fine dining, three course, so we wanted to create a platform to really showcase and let the businesses in our community shine. Just to bring awareness, celebrate the food, the heritage.”
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.