Chapter 7

Rebuilding Affrilachia

DeWayne Barton

Hood Huggers International

Chapter Context

I was born into community work. My father was very active in the neighborhood and showed me at a young age the importance of doing things within the community, including how to develop relationships between youth and the adults. I definitely hated it, particularly on Saturday mornings when I wanted to be playing with my friends. As an adult, I can look back now and appreciate the gift of being the youngest person sitting in those community meetings and being the “gopher”—go for this, go for that! My father’s words and actions, as well as the elders, taught me about collaboration and how working together makes a community thrive.

Hood Huggers International exists to create opportunities within historically marginalized communities for its members to gain knowledge, learn skills and trades, and become entrepreneurs, all of which gives back to and sustains the community. Our goal is to restore our neighborhoods and to build them back to the loving environment where we lifted each other up and supported one another—to gain what we lost before the introduction of crack cocaine. Hood Huggers International realizes that people cannot sustain themselves wading in a pool with only one foot of water when we can design one that is thirteen feet deep; people can safely jump in and go a lot further.

Hood Huggers International’s focuses primarily on arts, the environment, and social enterprise. The arts, including visual and performative art, serve as a creative outlet for individual expression and healing. We look to the environment to provide us with a reflective and conscious lens for rebuilding connection. Engaging the community in social enterprise allows us to uplift and celebrate our collaborative work and to grow individually and collectively.

On every tour, patrons engage with the history of Asheville, North Carolina, and are educated about what has been lost over the years. Tour income is not only reinvested in the business—Hood Huggers International maintains and supports additional programming like experiential classes on collaborative networking and team building and the Peace Garden. We have also supplied startup capital for grassroots organizations, MS Lean Landscaping and Green Opportunities. Lastly, we are able to further our research in identifying protecting and securing infrastructure within our community.

What we are realizing is that the trauma and pain in our community runs deep, preventing collaborative connections. We now know that we have to go even deeper to get to the root and heal those wounds. It will truly take local grassroots efforts to effect the changes that we’d like to see. While there are many well-intentioned organizations that are doing great work in our communities, the challenges that have been targeted for improvement still exist. We suggest that these external influences are not always community driven, often operate on perceived notions of community needs, or are motivated by funding priorities, all of which ultimately exacerbates the divide.

We intend to create a new pattern in our neighborhoods that operates on what the community identifies as its priorities, and then we will match those needs to already existing and newly developed programs led by community members. We will solicit and obtain external resources to grow and expand strong community initiatives and to support redevelopment. We would act as liaison and encourage partnerships with outside institutions that create systems and have the ability to put mechanisms in place that will support, educate, and train individuals to continue the work on their own.

Introduction

As a young man, the US Navy gave me the opportunity to see many parts of the world. At the age of thirty-three, I determined that I would return to traveling and exploring other cultures, either in the Peace Corps or as a civilian contractor, not in the navy. One day, my mother called and said that she wanted me to leave Norfolk and head back to Asheville. My instant reaction to that request was a resounding no! There was nothing in Asheville for me except my mother and other family members. I tried to understand her perspective though; my father and aunt had recently died and my mother needed me. There really was no option. I resolved to return home for maybe six months, maybe a year, to see if I could help my mother settle in again after the loss of our loved ones. I headed back to Burton Street.

My family had moved from Asheville to Washington, DC, when I was a young man, so I was raised in the city. I always loved our frequent trips to Asheville to be with family. In Asheville I experienced country life with woods and neighborhoods that felt safe and warm to me after the fast-paced life of DC. Things were changing in DC with the advent of drugs and violence. On returning to Asheville after a number of years, I was shocked to find that my old neighborhood was being affected by the same self-destructive forces that had torn areas around DC apart were at work here on Burton Street. The health of the community was being destroyed.

I looked around at mountains of discarded needles, homemade crack pipes, forty-ounce liquor bottles, cans, lighters, and piles of garbage. There was an open-air drug market in place that literally regulated the flow of traffic in the neighborhood. I couldn’t help but think about the destruction drugs brought to my DC community, and was afraid the same thing was happening to my Burton Street neighborhood. Families were destroyed, the land value dropped, and prisons were full. This was a reality for so many young and impressionable people with limited opportunities.

How I Got Started

One morning, a short time after my return home, I stepped outside my house and ended up between two guys shooting at each other. It was a profoundly sobering moment. I decided then that I was going to try something to help restore the health of my community. When I was a child and, later, during my teen years in DC, my stepfather had worked extensively in our community; as a result, I spent a great deal of time working with him, and I hated it. I didn’t think working with my stepfather was cool. Determined to avoid facing armed drug dealers, I began to wonder what I could do that would be a relatively safe enterprise. I looked around the neighborhood and again saw the immense piles of garbage and decided to start by simply picking up trash. When I was twelve years old, I started my own small business collecting cans, so this was not new to me. Additionally, this was something that would not be perceived as threatening to anyone in the neighborhood. This may sound like a small and insignificant task, but it was a safe place to start.

For a very long time, I was alone in my endeavors. Neighbors would peer at me through closed windows. They began looking for me, wanting to see if I would continue what seemed like an overwhelming and pointless task considering the other more pressing problems the neighborhood had, so I continued my work. It took several years of picking up trash, day after day, before the neighbors began to realize the depth of my commitment and started connecting with others who wanted to help. Folks began to open up to me then. At that point, we began to pay young people to join our efforts and help.

I had been totally unaware that mothers in the neighborhood started the Burton Street Advisory Committee in 1967, the year I was born, and had been meeting regularly since then. My mother showed me a newspaper article that had a photograph of more than two hundred women marching on Haywood Road, the main road that runs through West Asheville. The neighborhood mothers were marching, trying to bring attention to the issues of the Burton Street neighborhood in 1992. I was humbled. The mothers had a long history of hard work in trying to save the neighborhood from the war on drugs.

Burton Street was founded in 1912 by E. W. Pearson, a veteran of the Spanish-American War, and founder of the first North Carolina chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was a self-sustaining, culturally enforced, segregated, African American community. There was a nursing school, several businesses, and a Negro League baseball team. There was an annual agricultural fair that drew more than fifteen thousand people, both black and white, to the neighborhood. There was a strong emphasis on education and universal support for the elementary school. It was a strong, healthy, thriving community.

Urban Renewal began in Asheville in the 1950s and continued into the 1970s. It was the largest urban renewal project in the Southeast. Over four hundred acres of black homes and businesses were lost throughout the city. The Burton Street neighborhood was decimated by the widening of Patton Avenue in the 1950s and, later in the 1960s, I-240 further fragmented the community. Roots were being ripped out and many prominent families moved away, leaving a vacuum.

This urban renewal led to the thirty-year war on drugs. The overall health of the community was interrupted. The great reputation and connection of the community were lost. How does a community rebuild itself from the inside out? We continued our revitalization efforts in the neighborhood. One day the City of Asheville sent a representative to one of our community meetings and informed us that they had plans to close the community center under the pretext of budgetary considerations and the drug problem. This helped galvanize the community. We convinced the youth to get involved working to help save the center to start writing letters, and even a song, to the city, state, and federal officials. The youth sang, “We going down if Burton Street is not around. Our whole life will be turned upside down” at neighborhood meetings and during a city council meeting in order to get people to support the effort. Elders and young people went to the city council, and our combined efforts paid off. The city decided to keep the center open.

Capitalizing on our momentum, we took our actions further and asked for help renovating the center and other neighborhood improvements. Officials came out to the neighborhood and walked around, looking at things like the antiquated heating system and kitchen. We continued with our clean up and the renovations to the community center. During this time, I was working at the Youth Development Center (YDC), essentially a youth prison. Looking back, this was a crossroad in my life. I spent my days at the YDC teaching these young men. In the evening, I returned home to witness the environmental conditions that helped send them there. They weren’t being taught; they were just being held there. I began to get creative with the youth. In the lobby of the building was a snack machine. Getting something from this snack machine was a very big deal for the youth, so I bargained with them. I went to Prison Books in Asheville and picked up a wide assortment of books. They were free, and I would take them to the YDC with me. When one of the kids would ask me if I would get him something from the snack machine, I would say, “Sure if you’ll read one of these books and write about it—no less than two pages and no more than five pages—I will certainly get you a snack.” The youth didn’t spend a lot of time reading so I was trying to get them engaged. It was a wild success. I still have hundreds of these book reports from the young people. Later, I began paying them for the artwork they produced in their art classes to encourage them to practice creative expression through the arts. It became very apparent to me that the community is the headwater in society. They go to school to practice what they’re taught at home and in the neighborhood. I was in a position between my work in the Burton Street community and my work at the YDC to clearly see the connection between lack of support and poor infrastructure and how that led to an increased number of young people going to prison. Once I realized this, I left the YDC and began to focus on the neighborhood with renewed efforts.

The Peace Garden

I met my wife, Safi, when she came around to help clean up the neighborhood. She was an activist in her own right, trying to prevent a Walmart from being built in a historical area of Asheville. She was also environmentally aware, and we had much in common. We moved into our home on Burton Street. One day Safi walked around the neighborhood came back to the house and said, “Let’s make a garden.” We named it the Peace Garden because of the war in Iraq and the war on drugs in our neighborhood; we did it in order to draw people out of their homes to interact with each other and build relationships. We would make art out of trash we collected and would also grow food. We focused on our neighborhood. We developed relationships with schools and communities to help maintain it. The garden, a labor of love, lies in the heart of the Burton Street community. From its humble beginnings as an overgrown lot filled with trash, the gardens have grown to include two vegetable/flower gardening sites, a staging area, a fire pit, a cob pizza oven, a greenhouse, a pavilion, a store, paintings, sculptures, and a composting toilet.

With a focus on environmental and community responsibility, the garden design and sculpture park have been created using found/reused items mostly from the immediate neighborhood. The gardens are hydrated using direct rain, in addition to rainwater collected in the 550-gallon tank of a neighboring residence. The greenhouse frame was constructed using steel poles from a discarded McDonald’s playground. Brick, block, and concrete used to build the fire pit, garden beds, and cob oven are all sourced from residences or sidewalks that were demolished and headed for the landfill. The 300-square-foot pavilion, which serves as a gathering space and teaching tool for the neighborhood and beyond, is also made of many salvaged and repurposed materials. Of special note is the sculpture park, which is the creative endeavor of a lot of local artists, myself included. The installations are created with found/reused items and each tells a separate and compelling story of social and environmental justice and black history.

The goal of the peace garden was to establish infrastructure and relationships that would allow health-related programs to occur. We distribute organic vegetables to elders and help others grow and maintain their own gardens. We have a pizza oven that is used for special events. In the community, we provide a free space for people to visit—school groups, tourists—we hold special events to bring diverse people together. It is used for community service projects. We allow environmental and social justice groups to meet in the garden. We use it for training space for young and adult people who need to learn more about business and gardening.

The Burton Street Peace Gardens have, over the years, become a sanctuary for positive action, designed to create neighborhood food security, community cohesion, and a vibrant, sustainable local economy. Every spring and fall we hold plant and flower sales, so neighbors can have plants to start their own gardens. There is a donation bin near the garden gate with a sign that reads: “Take what you need, leave what you can.” This way people without gardens have access to homegrown vegetables and they often leave money to contribute to the refurbishment of our garden. Several times a year we have neighborhood parties where we cook vegetables or pizzas and have live music from the neighborhood to continue to engage with the people around the city. The pavilion is used as a classroom. It is also available for meeting space. There is a library so that people in the neighborhood have access to reading material.

After our initial success, the city applied for, and received, the federal Weed and Seed grant. The point was to “weed” out the drugs and “seed” the neighborhood. We had been working to find more sustainable ways to pay the kids and adults for their work in the community. They were able to obtain this grant because of the work that we had already been doing in the neighborhood. Unfortunately 70 percent of the funding went to policing the neighborhood and only 30 percent came to the neighborhood itself. Safi and I had been paying the kids to help with the work in the neighborhood, but when so little of the funding from the Weed and Seed grant came through, we began to look for more sustainable ways to pay the kids. The money received from the grant was used to build the neighborhood entrance sign. The young people in the neighborhood built the sign and were trained in skills of painting, woodworking, and design. The men in the neighborhood helped with the training and the sign was built. I realized then that we needed to start a program around training young men with skills. This project provided the impetus for a landscaping business and Green Opportunities, a green jobs training program.

Asheville Green Opportunities

Later, I was very excited to attend a conference on the state of black Asheville—held at University of North Carolina, Asheville. This UNC project does research about differences along racial lines in terms of healthcare, business, criminal justice, and education in Asheville. I wanted to be able to share and learn about other neighborhood efforts and how we might connect. But at the conference, I learned the issues were greater than I imagined. The historical background and current conditions as presented made me realize just how widespread and monumental the issues were. I left the conference angry and went to a play at the Edington Center and watched a performance that showed a lot of young people believing that they had a future in this city. I was still upset from what I had learned at the conference and realized I had to go harder and larger.

I focused on a plan to be able to train young people in trade skills that were environmentally friendly. I spoke to many people about this idea; those who knew about solar, weatherization, and building in an environmentally conscious way. I found that nothing existed for training young people in green skills that would be focused in their neighborhoods. The idea for Green Opportunities (GO) was born. In my youth, I had gone through a similar training program to learn trade skills like masonry, carpentry, plumbing, and electricity, but the program was poorly run, which is how I ended up in the navy. With Green Opportunities, I knew that we could make the neighborhood the school itself. We could recruit youth from the neighborhood, help them acquire trade skills with a specific environmental focus (thus green opportunities). The goal would be for the kids to advance from obtaining their GED’s to establishing trade skills, and then go on to become entrepreneurs, inventors, or to seek advancement in school. There was a lot of creativity in youth that had yet to be tapped. Additionally, it was equally critical that we engage with workers and business leaders in the community, so we could build a lasting base for training these young people.

We began training young people to be more environmentally conscious in their own neighborhoods. We weatherized churches, homes, and all public housing units in Asheville, using people who lived there to do it. We were recruiting young men and women who had been convicted of felonies, training them, and giving them skill sets to do the work. Engagement was the most important part of GO. We had to involve these young people because they were only going to be in the program for a period of six months to a year.

With help from co-founder, Dan Leroy, we began canvassing and recruiting businesses in the Asheville area that would commit to supporting our Green Opportunities program. From these beginnings, Green Opportunities built an energy team that performs home energy audits and basic weatherization services for private clients. It has grown into a healthy fee-for-service program and is now an apprentice host for others in the program. Other apprentice hosts include FLS Energy, Sundance Power Systems, Winter Green, and the Asheville Housing Authority. The Asheville City Council approved the housing and community development plan, which included approximately $162,000 in funding for Asheville GO across two categories: construction and non-construction. Along with the green energy program, Green Opportunities also renovated the Arthur R. Edington Education and Career Center, a multimillion-dollar project. The center was located in a low-income neighborhood and would be used to house Green Opportunities training, academic enrichment, after-school programs, and other community events. Partners in this project included the City of Asheville, the Western North Carolina Green Building Council, AB Technical College, the Empowerment Resource Center of Asheville, the Asheville Housing Authority, the YWCA, Mountain Bizworks, area churches, neighborhood associations, and community groups. The Peace Garden green space is a place for healing. It is an incubator—it cultivates other things like the GO job training program and protecting the neighborhood community center, et cetera. A community accountability plan (CAP) is the formula to start and maintain these community programs. GO is currently set to start renovation on the theatre in the Edington Building. The Edington Center holds offices for GO, the housing authority, and academic enrichment activities, including an after-school program. GO Kitchen already serves lunch and people come together for a meal. People in the training program are paid with donations from members of the community. Once a year there is a fundraising dinner, and everyone is invited.

Green Opportunities celebrated its tenth year in 2018. Now I’m the president of the Burton Street Community Association. We were told that the highway project that was proposed several years earlier was back on the table and the neighborhood was going to take a significant blow like others from the past. We were shocked after all the work, relationship building, and sacrifice. One night at a Department of Transportation (DOT) meeting in the neighborhood, I asked the local executive director from the Asheville Design Center for help. Can you help create our own neighborhood plan, a plan we could give to the DOT to honor? If you’re going take over 160 homes and businesses, we want you to honor our plan by lessening your impact and investing back into our community. We attended thousands of meetings, marches, and interviews. The process of creating a neighborhood plan was intense, but everyone was talking about “Save Burton Street.” We later found out our community was designated as an environmental justice community. They will have to invest back into our neighborhood. We began in 2009 with help from students from Appalachian State University. Despite door-to-door survey and group meetings that led to a finished plan in 2010, it collected dust. In 2018 it was finally adopted by the city but with no timeline or budget. Our goal now is to make the plan come alive by expanding on existing infrastructure.

The Community Accountability Plan

These experiences led to the creation of Hood Huggers International, a social enterprise designed to heal, rebuild, and sustain historically marginalized communities. We would use the profits from Hood Tours to help restore the neighborhoods we visit. All our lives we’ve heard about tree huggers and how they chain themselves to trees to prevent their destruction, and I knew I felt that way about my neighborhood, thus Hood Huggers International was born.

I designed the community accountability plan (CAP). It’s a framework designed to assist others in similar activities. I wanted to put together a plan that would hold people, both in the neighborhood and in the surrounding communities, accountable for the commitments they make to sustain community health and growth. I wanted to highlight the importance of building a pipeline of support and creating a platform via practice.

We live in an atmosphere of historical trauma, which makes it hard to build on united strengths. It is important to create an atmosphere where gaps in service can be filled and existing services can be made stronger. We struggle to connect and build while maintaining trusting regenerative relationships. CAP is based on trial, error, and success—a ground-up learning experience. It is challenging to get support, but this is crucial. CAP can provide a framework to connect the dots and build capacity. It helps with filtering out people or businesses that say they want to commit, but never follow up. CAP has an internal and external framework design and flowcharts that help identify and weed out the unnecessary complications. This is a way to implement and celebrate grassroots revitalization and accountability. It is a system designed to build, maintain, and protect pillars of resiliency in historically African American neighborhoods. The CAP supports a culture of sustainability that is inclusive and economically just. The plan also includes creating, maintaining, and connecting green spaces that help absorb trauma.

The state of black Asheville conference was part of the fuel that led to the creation of CAP. A public policy course at the University of North Carolina Asheville, which Dr. Dwight Mullen has been teaching since 2006. Students pick a topic of interest and study the influence race has on local public policy. Afterward, they share their findings with the public. With CAP, businesses, nonprofits, community volunteers, and government agencies operate in response to the plans of neighborhood leaders, working to implement their vision for their communities rather than prescribing solutions or programs. The three key components of CAP are the arts, the environment, and social enterprise. With community capacity building, we utilize some community engagement tools such as interactive storytelling, community coaches, neighborhood beautification projects, inclusive community events, resources, and education. One example of this is our development of a neighborhood-based Youth Credit Union where young people can practice financial literacy. The kids are paid for their work and then offered an opportunity to have their money matched should they choose to set up a savings account. We have a current working relationship with Self Help Credit Union, a local-based credit union in Asheville.

A large issue has been connecting city policy with action on the ground. Working with Green Opportunities, the Peace Garden, and other projects gives one the ability to see how all the working parts could come together, but it’s difficult to get groups to work together. Commitment and connection are vital. The City of Asheville has developed a comprehensive plan, the Disparity Study, which aims to assess whether minority and women-owned businesses face any barriers in the city’s contracting processes. The city also has a Human Relations Council and a gentrification study in place. Another one is the I-26 Connector Project, which will seriously affect the Burton Street community. My vision, as far as the community accountability plan goes, is to ensure that the city is working with individuals and businesses from the neighborhood. This will facilitate a healthy working relationship with many different perspectives taken into consideration to achieve the various goals set in each of these initiatives. The goal of the CAP is to connect the neighborhood with the city’s various plans and programs to build a culture of community accountability and relationship building to ensure that the community works together to maintain health and growth.

Hood Huggers and the Hood Tours

I thought about the importance of our history in Asheville. I wanted to find a way to share that past and help inspire the future. Black history was obscure in this city. So much so, in fact, that areas of important black historical significance were being erased. The black hospital, located in what is now part of the South Slope Brewery area, is now a parking lot for tourists. The E.W. Pearson Building, once located on Burton Street, is now gone. Seeing tour buses flying through the black neighborhoods I wondered to myself, How are they talking about the black neighborhoods? I went to visit the chamber of commerce. There, I was told by a local tour company there was no real interest in the black history. They told me that if I wrote up a synopsis, they would give them to their drivers. I tried writing the script, but thought, No. I’m going to do this myself. I wanted this to not only be about informing people about the history but also the current health of these places. They needed to understand what it means to tear down neighborhood landmarks. The cultural history is rich here. I wanted to highlight the history and protect what was left of our landmarks. Entire neighborhoods were obliterated, and Allen High School, the only school for African American women, saw E. W. Pearson’s two daughters through their curriculum as well as Nina Simone. We still have Triangle Park and the Stephens-Lee Community Center. We still have the YMI Cultural Center, one of the oldest in the country. If we don’t talk about our spaces and people, they will be lost in memories. These communities make an art out of making a way forward. The Stephens-Lee Alumni Association is trying to turn what is left of the school into a museum. The Hood Tours works to support organizations that are already doing the work to save these places. The county has now allocated funds for historical markers to be displayed, and tourism and development have allocated over $100,000 to assist with the creation of a museum in the Stephens-Lee Auditorium.

Conclusion

These days I spend my time giving tours to both locals who want to learn about the black history this city holds, and to tourists coming in from all over the world. The tours support nonprofit groups and businesses who are trying to rebuild the community, I give guest copies of the Hood Huggers Green Book, highlighting current black-owned businesses and nonprofits that are helping rebuild the community in Asheville. The Hood Huggers Green Book is loosely modeled after the Negro Motorist Green Book that was published for many years by Victor Green, directing traveling African Americans to friendly businesses, restaurants, and hotels in he Jim Crow era. We want to show people where and how to connect today, right now, with black-owned businesses. We talk about the resilient economic history of the past, current conditions, and how we can rebuild a stronger future together.

                I then take my visitors to the Peace Garden to wander through the vegetables, flowers, and sculptures to soak in the serenity and creativity that emanates from that wonderful space. When I am not touring, I divide my time between the neighborhood, city hall, and the surrounding community, looking to fill gaps and holes where I find them; shoring up the foundation of what we continue to build in Asheville, a healthy environment for growth and creativity.

If you really want to build a healthy and flourishing environment for your community, start with picking up trash and building a garden.