Episode 10: This is My City

Priscilla Robinson says the Southside neighborhood of Asheville, North Carolina was once a thriving, tight-knit community. She describes fruit trees and multigenerational homeowners, booming small businesses and neighbors who looked out for one another. But that all changed in 1968, when the city approved plans for “urban renewal” and displaced more than fifty percent of Asheville’s Black residents, including Priscilla and her family.

Decades later, in 2020, Asheville became just the second city in the US and the first in the south to approve reparations for its Black population, and Priscilla is making sure that the harms of urban renewal aren’t forgotten as a community Reparations Commission shapes its plan.

To see photos of the Southside prior to Urban Renewal, and to explore Priscilla’s research, click here. And join us in calling for President Biden to establish a federal Reparations Commission here.

Read Episode 10 Full Transcript Below

ASHLEY C. FORD [VO]: This is Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry’s podcast about joy & justice, produced with Vox Creative. I’m Ashley C. Ford.

PRISCILLA ROBINSON: And my name is Priscilla Ndiaye Robinson. I’m a native of Asheville, North Carolina.

[MUSIC IN: WHISTLES, STOMPS AND HAND CLAPS AS A CHOIR HUMS JOYFULLY. A PIANO JOINS IN.]

ASHLEY: Tell me about growing up in Asheville. Like what, what was a normal Sunday like in your childhood?

PRISCILLA: For me, a normal Sunday for my childhood would, first of all, be Grandma getting me up to send me to Sunday school, to send me to church. And church was maybe about four or five houses up.

Coming home, sitting on the front porch, watching everybody else, you know, go to church. Lots of good food, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, sweet potatoes, collard greens, cornbread, you know, and everybody just sitting around.

Community. People visiting. A lot of laughter, a lot of unity, and just sitting around enjoying life.

ASHLEY: Yeah.

PRISCILLA: The older women and men, they instilled wisdom, value, and morals. They used to tell me, “Now, you sit up, Priscilla, you sit up, and you cross your legs like a young lady.” And my Mama used to dress me in can-can skirts, you know, and you couldn’t tell me I wasn’t a little princess. And, I was “Prissy.”

ASHLEY: I love it. Still Prissy.

PRISCILLA: Uh huh.

[MUSIC FADES OUT.]

ASHLEY [VO]: Priscilla grew up on Asheville’s Southside, on the ground floor of a 3-story apartment building. Miss Emma on the second floor. Miss Angeline on the third. And Miss Littlejohn, down the street.

PRISCILLA: Ms. Littlejohn was just a sweet little old woman. And she had the sweetest little voice. And she made the best cupcakes. I mean, she lived probably about seven, eight houses up Black Street.

ASHLEY: Mm-hmm.

PRISCILLA: And our apartment building sit right in front of Black Street. She’d bake her cupcakes and we could smell it just all over the neighborhood.

ASHLEY: Laughs.

PRISCILLA: And you’d go up and she’d have chocolate icing, she’d have the white icing, and I tell you, those were some good cupcakes! I mean, melt in your mouth cupcakes. And, uh, that’s what she did. She made the cupcakes for the children, you know, in the neighborhood. And she was just so sweet. Sweet little old lady.

ASHLEY: Just a sweet little old lady.

PRISCILLA: And I think I was special because I got to get more than one cupcake.

ASHLEY: Mm-hmm!

ASHLEY [VO]: Asheville’s Southside was Priscilla’s whole world. A world defined, in her growing mind, by cupcakes and cornbread and community. It was the sixties, and between church and visits to Miss Littlejohn, there were pool days and playdates.

PRISCILLA: Southside was booming. I used to love it. Anything you wanted, we had it right there in that community.

And the stores had fresh vegetables. My granddaddy would say, go down to Sands’ store and get this or get that and tell them I’ll pay them on Friday. You know, that’s it. Nobody was hungry. Nobody was homeless.

We had cherry trees, apple trees, strawberries, everything. It was like… It was beautiful. You know, people got along.

Children out in the yard playing. Walton Street Pool was the only place that the whole Black community could go. And we even had other community members outside of Asheville Buncombe who would come and we’d go to that pool. We, everybody met there. Cookouts. The carnival would come. I mean, it was...

It was just, just beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful.

When I go over now, it’s so sad. It’s just, all I see is ghost town.

ASHLEY [VO]: Around 1968, the Southside as she knew it began to change.

PRISCILLA: Well, I was around nine years old and I used to hear the adults, they’d sit on the front porch and they used to talk about what was going on.

ASHLEY [VO]: Priscilla kept hearing the adults use this one word: appraisal.

PRISCILLA: I remember when the, uh, photographer… the appraisal, they came around and they were snapping the pictures and my family was sitting on the front porch when he snapped, you know, our apartment.

ASHLEY [VO]: That year, 1968, the city of Asheville approved plans for Urban Renewal, a federal program aimed at revitalizing neighborhoods across the country. An enormous cash infusion to rejuvenate civic and economic life.

Priscilla lived through urban renewal in Asheville, and she’s making sure it’s remembered, as a leading community documentarian and researcher.

PRISCILLA: When Urban Renewal implementation occurred, we were one of the families who were happy at first. We lived on the ground floor. And then we had two bedrooms with five girls, two grandchildren, and my grandparents. And I tell people, it was one of those that was a slum landlord. It was blighted. And so that was one of the reasons why… justification why Urban Renewal happened was to go in and remove the blight.

ASHLEY [VO]: Like all memories of our childhoods… Priscilla’s is complicated.

[MUX IN: Contemplative, swirling horns, with hand drums and a lo-fi beat.]

ASHLEY [VO]: In vivid technicolor, she describes a Southside where no one was homeless… but also recounts the day her grandmother took in a young unsheltered woman and her two children.

The block was booming… but she grew up without central heat or running water.

Her mind’s eye may have blurred the edges a bit, but the center of her memories remain fixed: people looked out for each other in Southside.

Urban Renewal was meant to dial up opportunity, and dial down hardship.

But who was that opportunity for?

PRISCILLA: I just, I remember everybody buzzing about it, talking about it and they said, we’re going to have a better life. And then once the appraiser start giving the dollar amount, the worth, the value of the property. Then I started hearing a different story. “They’re stealing our property. They’re not giving us what it’s valued at.”

Because like Miss Littlejohn… now, she was a widow but she owned her property and her property was not blighted. And so where they gave maybe a slum landlord less… we understand that. But not Miss Littlejohn, not Miss Virginia Holloway. Not, you know, many other homeowners in the community.

[MUX OUT]

PRISCILLA: I tell people we had three, three categories of being impacted.

You had the ones who were excited because we were moving to brand new four bedrooms after living in a two-bedroom, rat infested… you know. Then you had, um, the ones who own their homes, the widows. They were paid off and they knew that they wouldn’t be able to repurchase the lot, as they were told: you’ll be able to come back and buy the lot for a dollar. But it didn’t happen.

Uh, and then we had the landlords. Uh, of course, they couldn’t make the money that they were making any longer.

So, you know, when I look back, and when I think about it…. The whole community. A whole community of people was uprooted. And I tell people, I say, even the trees were uprooted. You know, you had pear trees, apple trees, grapevines, strawberry, uh, all of that. Cherry trees! All of it was uprooted. Just taken away.

We were given our address. Like I said, we were, we were excited. And people were given the amount of rent that they would pay. And I think they were given a few dollars for relocation.

You know, we, we were told where we were moving, which apartment number, and... headed out. We did what we had to do.

ASHLEY [VO]: Over 50% of Asheville’s Black population was displaced by Urban Renewal during the sixties and seventies.

It wasn’t just Southside. It was East End, and Stumptown... Majority Black neighborhoods given directives, not options, to move into public housing to make way for what officials called revitalization.

[THEME IN: Propulsive with jangling percussion, shimmering chimes, and an organ.]

ASHLEY [VO]: Homes, apartments, small businesses... entire thriving communities were evicted by the city. Displaced in the name of progress, at the expense of something much more precious.

Urban renewal wasn’t unique to Asheville... but it’s under recently renewed scrutiny here.

Because in 2020, Asheville became just the second city in the U.S. and the first in the south to approve financial reparations… not only for the harms of slavery, but also for the devastation of urban renewal.

And according to experts close to the reparations discussion happening here.... there wouldn’t even be a discussion if it weren’t for Priscilla, and the work she’s done to unearth the truth about urban renewal in Asheville.

If Asheville’s past is defined by urban renewal, how will reparations shape its future?

Let’s get into it.

[THEME MUX OUT]

[MUX IN: Simple folk guitar and a banjo.]

ASHLEY [VO]: When it was first incorporated as a city, Asheville was a sleepy mountain town of just a few hundred people, nestled between the Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests.

[MUX CONTINUES: A banjo joins in, and a man begins to sing:

“I’m going back to that Swannanoa Tunnel. That’s my home baby, that’s my home. Asheville junction…”]

ASHLEY [VO]: Asheville’s tourism industry, which accounts for a quarter of the city’s economy today, took off in 1887, when George Washington Vanderbilt broke ground on the Biltmore House. It made Asheville home to America’s largest residence, open to visitors almost since day one. 35 bedrooms. 43 bathrooms. 65 fireplaces, on over a hundred thousand acres of land.

Biltmore was made possible by the completion of the Swannanoa Tunnel just prior to that, in 1879. The tunnel brought the railroad, and with it, Asheville’s transition from rural community to a small city – now the seat of modern Appalachia, bustling with tourists from all over the south.

[MUX CONTINUES:

“Last December, I remember, the wind blew cold, baby the wind blew cold. Hammer falling from my shoulder, all day long baby, all day long.”]

ASHLEY [VO]: The music you hear is a folk song documenting the history of that tunnel: which was built in large part by Black laborers. Leased to the Western North Carolina Rail Road during incarceration, they were forced to work at gunpoint. At least 300 of them died during its construction.

[MUX CONTINUES:

”When you hear that hoot owl squalling. Somebody dying, baby, somebody dying. Hammer falling from my shoulder. All day long, baby, all day long.”]

[MUX REVERBS OUT.]

ASHLEY [VO]: Today, about 94,000 people call Asheville home. Black people make up just around 10% of the population. But in 1950 – that figure was 20%.

PRISCILLA: Even now, you know, people come to Asheville and they say, “Do black people live here? Where are they?”

We in our own little world. We got pushed away, pushed out.

ASHLEY: When I got off the plane until I got in the Uber and came downtown, I did not see another Black person.

PRISCILLA: People look at me like, where you come from, what you doing here? And I just grabbed my little head up. I don’t know why you looking at me like that. Cause I was here before you came. This is my city.

ASHLEY: I know that’s right!

[MUX IN: Contemplative piano, minimal swirling synth notes in the background.]

ASHLEY: What does urban renewal mean to the Black community in Asheville today?

PRISCILLA: Negro removal.

ASHLEY: Oh, wow. Wow.

I mean, you hear that and I’m like, and I’m going to… I’m going to respond to your spirit of boldness because I really like the way that’s worded.

And it makes me think… So many people I’ve run into so far here, and to be fair, you are the first Black person I’m having a full conversation with since I got in…. Everybody immediately wants me to know: “We’ve got this in the city. This new thing is coming to the city. We’re working on this in the city. Like this city is just, it’s going to be, and it already is…” and everything. And I am having the feeling of looking around and being like, “yeah, but I don’t think you meant it for me.”

[MUX OUT.]

ASHLEY: And it’s strange to me that in a city in North Carolina, that I could be walking around downtown with all these shops and stores and restaurants. And I have not seen another Black person so far who is not unhoused or working at a hotel.

PRISCILLA: That’s right.

I see a lot of community members who are homeless. And it didn’t just start now, because when we went to public housing, if your child had gone to prison, got in trouble, they couldn’t come and live with you.

And even right now when they get out of prison, if they’ve been to prison, they gotta go get permission to even live in public housing.

ASHLEY: That’s condemning people to the streets.

PRISCILLA: Exactly.

ASHLEY [VO]: Almost all properties purchased by the city during Urban Renewal were redlined — meaning, in the decades prior, federal mortgage lenders designated these majority Black neighborhoods as quote-unquote “undesirable” for lending.

These literal red lines on municipal maps condemned entire neighborhoods to disinvestment... paving the way for the blight Urban Renewal sought to eradicate.

In Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, Baltimore... two thirds of people moved into public housing via Urban Renewal were people of color.

In Lubbock, Texas, Urban Renewal displaced just over a thousand families by the end of the sixties in the name of revitalization. One hundred percent of them were families of color.

Most lands seized in Asheville’s Southside were sold to real estate developers at rock bottom prices – and the value of that land has increased by an average of 400% by conservative estimates.

Urban Renewal leveled Southside. It re-named the streets, and built over the community. So it’s hard to make a one to one assessment of properties purchased by the Asheville Housing Authority, and tell you exactly how much they’re worth now. But Priscilla is trying.

[MUX IN: SIMPLE STAND UP JAZZ BASS. A BIT UNSETTLED, BROODING.]

ASHLEY [VO]: She and a team of collaborators reconstructed a map of the Southside of her youth that details the financials of Urban Renewal.

Click on a property, like 450 South French Broad, right up the street from where Priscilla grew up. A timeline shows when an offer was made, and how much the Housing Authority bought the lot for. 450 South French Broad sold for three thousand five hundred dollars in 1968.

Today, that’s equivalent to about thirty-thousand dollars.

According to Zillow, the home that stands on the old 450 South French Broad lot is worth three hundred fifty five thousand dollars today…

A one-thousand percent increase.

[MUX FADE OUT.]

ASHLEY [VO]: As of June 2021, the city of Asheville still owns at least 62 properties and 42 acres of land as a result of Urban Renewal – around 18% of its original holdings.

But it wasn’t just property that was black community of Asheville.

PRISCILLA: What was taken – and this is just not what I think is what I’ve been told – first of all, dignity was taken. Unity was taken. Um, pride. History. Um, home ownership. Business ownership. Generational wealth. Um, health.

They just, just took a sense of belonging in Asheville.

ASHLEY [VO]: 3,902 residents living in 1,179 households, many of whom were homeowners, like Miss Littlejohn, were displaced in Asheville.

Those who stayed were moved into public housing.

Ms. Littlejohn, Ms. Virginia Holloway… Southside’s widowed matriarchs were all assigned to live in a highrise, far away from their communities.

PRISCILLA: Ms. Littlejohn was so sad. You know, a lot of the elderly, they were very, very sad because now you’ve separated, you’ve, you’ve divided and they would not see the young children running around in the street. Ms. Littlejohn would not, uh, bake her cupcakes, you know, as she used to do.

You know, we would still go visit as much as we could, you know. We just didn’t want them to feel like they were alone, uh, but the one who stands out most in my mind is Miss Virginia Holloway.

She was excited about the fact that she would be able to come back and build, rebuild, brand new on her dollar lot. Well it never happened and Miss Virginia Holloway grieved herself to death.

ASHLEY: Oh.

PRISCILLA: So, very sad. And her son, she has a son who’s still living. She has grandchildren and you know, even when he talks about it, sometimes you can feel, um, as I learned… the wound that has never healed.

ASHLEY: How could it? There’s been no attempt really to remedy that pain.

ASHLEY [VO]: What one group calls renewal, another calls devastation.

[MUX IN: PIANO, HAND DRUMS, SAXOPHONE. CONTEMPLATIVE AND MOURNFUL.]

ASHLEY [VO]: Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, a leading researcher on urban renewal, calls the effect of losing your community “root shock.”

Root shock is what we often see in trees after replanting: dropped leaves. Weak roots. Increased vulnerability to disease.

“The short term consequences were dire,” Dr. Fullilove writes, “and nothing short of assault.”

[MUX FADES DOWN.]

ROB THOMAS: I knew Ms. Priscilla’s work before I knew Ms. Priscilla, and you know, that’s how you know when you’re in the space of somebody who’s great, when you know their work before you know them, right.

ASHLEY [VO]: Rob Thomas is the Executive Director of the Racial Justice Coalition of Asheville, and a native Ashevillian himself.

ROB: I learned who she was after studying some of her research on urban renewal and looking at the history of Asheville in general, and realized that a community member had been compiling information for years, and decades, and…

[AMBIE: HAMMERING AND BANGING IN THE BACKGROUND.]

ROB: Yeah, just wasn’t getting any traction towards justice as, you know, an oral historian and somebody who has collected a massive amount of facts and really investigated systemic inequity. And doesn’t get enough credit for the work or enough platforms to speak on of how personal the work is…

ASHLEY: Right, but you feel it. You feel that work. So one of the things that we talked to uh, Ms. Priscilla about was the… do you want me to just keep going?

[AMBIE: PRODUCER ASKS OFF-MIC: “CAN YOU HOLD FOR JUST A SECOND? YEAH, FEL IS GONNA GO AND TRY TO WORK THEIR MAGIC.”]

ASHLEY [VO]: We spoke with Rob at the Noir Collective, a Black-owned boutique that supports local artisans of color.

It’s a lovely oasis in the middle of downtown Asheville... except for the construction happening next door. Each time a jack hammer started up one door over, Rob shifted in his seat. Of course, noise like this is less than ideal for recording a podcast interview. But it was clear that something else was going on.

ROB: There’s been a lot of issues with some of the construction workers because, you know, they’re all white companies, of course. It’s hard to find a Black construction company. They are building a building that, you know, our community plans to frequent. And so you can only imagine the whole space next door and the tensions that exist therein.

ASHLEY [VO]: According to Rob, his colleague Fel, and Alexandria, the owner of Noir Collective... the noise was intentional. Alexandria had posted a sign on the door: Closed this afternoon for a podcast interview about reparations. The construction supervisor walked past, clocked the sign, and after the site had been quiet for days... the hammering picked right back up.

Until, that is, Miss Priscilla got involved... with her microphone still hot.

<<AMBIE: FOOTSTEPS AND DOOR CREAKING OPEN AS PRISCILLA MARCHES OUTSIDE]

PRISCILLA: How y’all doin?

ASHLEY [VO]: We want to protect the contractor she spoke with, so we won’t play his voice here. But this man... he is so apologetic.

PRISCILLA: We apologize for interrupting. But this… we’re interviewing about reparations and urban renewal implementation. I know you would understand that, an he may not.

ASHLEY [VO]: The contractor explains that he’s already gone toe to toe with the supervisor, arguing over the decibel of the work that all of a sudden needs to get done now.

And then he gets quiet.

“Black lives don’t matter in their eyes,” he says.

PRISCILLA: Oh, that’s all you need to say.

[MUX IN: SIMPLE PIANO. WARM, CONTEMPLATIVE.]

ASHLEY [VO]: As one Uber driver during our time in the city described it, Asheville is a bright blue dot in the middle of a deep red sea. A place where past and present collide: frequently, and harshly. Where the pedestal of a now-removed Confederate monument stands encircled by a mural declaring BLACK LIVES MATTER.

Unlike Urban Renewal, which had bipartisan support for at least a little while, reparations efforts have fallen starkly along political lines.

[AMBIENT: ASHEVILLE CITY COUNCIL MEETING.

Councilman: “I’d like to call this meeting to order. Before we take roll call I’m gonna filibuster just a few seconds more because I have to tell y’all something.”]

ASHLEY [VO]: Today, the Asheville Reparations Commission is stuck in an all-too-familiar cycle. Committees to discuss committees to debate recommendations on the establishment of yet more committees.

Bureaucracy is a beast of its own, but so is partisan pushback.

The city has been sued a couple of times now, as opponents to the project decry reparations payments and appointments to the Commission as “racial discrimination.”

Almost three years after the reparations project was approved, there’s no clear answer on how the city will pay out the 5.6 million dollars it’s earmarked for reparations.

[AMBIENT: ASHEVILLE CITY COUNCIL MEETING.

Councilman: “You’ve been working on this project longer than most public projects I’ve ever been involved in. You have put more energy into it, and I appreciate you. I really do. Sometimes, it’s not even clear on where we’re going with this.”]

ASHLEY [VO]: The Commission is struggling with a familiar question that has plagued reparations discussions of all shapes and sizes: how do we do this?

[AMBIENT: ASHEVILLE CITY COUNCIL MEETING.

Councilman: “Now If we have public policies and procedures that have aggrieved Black people in Buncombe County that came through the local government, we can reverse that through the local government. If we have public policies and procedures that have hindered people from economic development, from housing, from health care, from education on a local level, we can remedy that on a local level.”]

ASHLEY [VO]: Remedying harmful public policies, like Urban Renewal. That’s how Keith Young, the author of the original reparations proposal in Asheville, describes this recompense.

Early on in the reparations process, Priscilla applied for a seat on the Commission. But she withdrew her application – she says she didn’t want to feel muzzled – her word – in speaking truth to power about the devastation of Urban Renewal in her community.

[MUX OUT.]

ASHLEY [VO]: The city spent 6 million dollars on Urban Renewal projects… and it’s impossible to quantify exactly how much wealth, how much potential and power, Asheville stole from its Black residents.

And that’s why Rob calls urban renewal a check, taken out on the backs of Black people.

ROB: If urban renewal wouldn’t have came through, this residential area would be expanded. And it would be multi-million dollar housing because it would be in the center, the epicenter of Asheville. And it would be mostly, predominantly Black for that matter! And other communities, Stumptown, which is, you know, multi-million dollar houses, an upscale community, which was mostly predominantly Black. East End, um, Burton Street community. All these communities, if treated properly… the whole demographics of Asheville would look completely different right now.

So it’s like we have all these things against us and we still exist to a certain extent here, which… you know I always have to add in our resiliency. Like all these things against us, and we still, still are trying to move forward. And we are still trying to push forward and right the things that were wrong.

Which brings me to again, reparations.

ASHLEY: Right.

ASHLEY [VO]: When we come back, reparations beyond slavery, and the future they could make possible.

<<MIDROLL AD BREAK>>

ASHLEY [VO]: 40 acres and a mule.

[MUX IN: SIMPLE STAND UP BASS. PROPULSIVE.]

ASHLEY [VO]: Those were the famous promises made to survivors of slavery with Sherman’s Order, in 1865.

Six months after the order was issued, 40,000 freedmen had settled in the fertile rice fields of coastal Georgia designated as “Sherman’s Land.”

It didn’t last long – by the end of the same year, the order was overturned, and the land returned to the former slaveholders who originally owned it.

But Sherman’s Order acknowledged something crucial: land ownership as an essential vehicle to build, and pass on wealth.

Reparations discussions have continued ever since, in many forms. And we’ve paid them, too – for systemic violence of all shades.

Payments were made to Japanese-American survivors of internment in 1988. They’ve been made to Native American communities to settle land disputes. In 2015, the City of Chicago made reparations in the form of cash payments and a free college education to survivors of police violence.

And at every congressional session since 1989, one congress person or another has introduced H.R. Bill 40, which would establish a commission to examine the legacy of slavery in the US from 1619 to today… and what potential remedies to its harm could look like.

In 2022, history was made when it passed out of the House Judiciary Committee. But it died on the House floor.

While the reparations process sputters on the federal level, smaller cities like Asheville and Evanston, Illinois are figuring out what they could look like at the local level.

Evanston made their first reparations distribution of $400,000 in 2021, in pursuit of “revitalizing, preserving, and stabilizing Black owner-occupied homes.”

The modern reparations conversation increasingly is focused through the lens of home ownership, and the power and promise of the dirt we root into.

[MUX OUT.]

ROB: A lot of the families that currently reside in public housing in Asheville, if you look back, their grandmother, great grandmothers lost property, or grandfathers lost property through urban renewal.

And now we have generations inside of public housing that don’t even know. Like don’t even know that they were robbed decades ago. Of a future, of a healthy environment, of liberty. Simply.

ASHLEY [VO]: Rob Thomas again.

ROB: I do believe that cash payments is most definitely due to, um, completely destroy the generational wealth gap.

ASHLEY [VO]: That generational wealth gap by the way — an estimated $14 trillion between Black and white Americans.

ASHLEY: Can you talk to me about the shape of Asheville’s reparations plan at this time?

ROB: Malleable. I would say kind of like an amoeba. Laughs.

ASHLEY: Yeah. Laughs. Yeah, I love that.

ROB: But no, the status of it, you know, I don’t think anything that we as humans create will be perfect upon creation thereof. So, you know, we have a process and we have a thing that has great potential, but I mean, it also has weaknesses and threats as well.

But I believe that, um, the pros greatly, uh, outweigh the cons. They’re at a great place where they’re creating the initial recommendations. And I feel like they’re starting to get their stride a little bit. They’re starting to get their direction. And I feel like they are understanding the power that they possess.

ASHLEY [VO]: Almost right after it formed, the Reparations Commission put a hold on the sale of properties that came into city possession from Urban Renewal… until the Commission could make informed recommendations on how those properties should be dealt with in the scope of the reparations project.

But according to Priscilla, the city can’t seem to give the Commission or concerned citizens like herself a straight answer about how many urban renewal parcels the city still possesses.

ASHLEY: What do reparations mean to you personally?

ROB: Reparations to me right now is just an opportunity.

ASHLEY: Yeah.

ROB: Opportunity. Potential. Um, to address things that need to be addressed so that the future of Black people is survivable. I mean, cause like our, our disparities are getting worse, like we’ll literally have like no wealth in 50 years or so.

So, that’s the nature of our situation and that’s the nature of our fight. And reparations is just a tool in that fight for me. It’s a strong weapon. It is a sword that my ancestors have been tempering for decades. You know what I mean? And now it’s like, yes, it’s hot, it’s ready. Laughs.

And yeah, so that’s what I’m out here doing.

[MUX IN]

ASHLEY [VO]: Reparations for slavery, for widespread systemic violence against Black people, have never made it out of the theoretical in this country, and into the practical.

In a country built with this violence as its foundation, where the perpetual back and forth over reparations is both a symptom of this foundation and a tool to preserve it… the struggle for solution falls again on the shoulders of those in most pressing need of it.

And while Priscilla is cheering for the Commission from the sidelines… she’s tired.

PRISCILLA: I’ve gone and presented, I’ve gone and spoke three times.

But, um, when I went back this last time, I was really, really, really, I don’t want to say angry, but frustrated. Because I sat and I listened to the group. I listened to the Commission. And it was like... It was so depressing. It was depressing for me and discouraging because it was like, it was no hope.

ASHLEY: Yeah.

PRISCILLA: They were talking like it was no hope.

And... I was like, I can’t wait to get up there. I can’t wait! I just feel like, you know, this is going to be really, really interesting.

ASHLEY: Right.

PRISCILLA: To see how this turns out.

ASHLEY: After watching what happened to your community, after doing the research, after having conversations with the people who were adults when they were impacted in that situation, it kind of sounds like to me, anyway, at this point, you’re just kind of… you’re done being offered bad deals and taking them.

PRISCILLA: Exactly.

[AMBIENT: INSIDE OF A CAR. BLINKER CLICKING AND PRISCILLA GIVES DIRECTIONS.]

ASHLEY [VO]: Before we left Asheville, we took a drive with Miss Priscilla.

PRISCILLA: So to the left right here….

ASHLEY: Yeah.

PRISCILLA: That’s where… this empty, where that pole that’s, that was mine. That’s where we lived. That, it was, um, all lined up with apartment buildings.

And we, and we live up on the third, uh, I mean the first level. But this fire hydrant, fire hydrant right you look out, that was there when we lived here. That’s how I can tell.

PRISCILLA: And if you went up there, that’s Black street. That’s where we were dragging all of our furniture.

PRISCILLA: This is Clingman Avenue. Black owned, used to be Black owned, a lot of Black owned homes.

If you look around Asheville, all you really see… Uh, you see apartments, condos being built, you see hotels, and you see bars. Pretty much what you see.

ASHLEY [VO]: As she points out these pillars of her past — Black Street, and Erskine Street, Sands Grocery and the pool where she first learned to swim — there’s a wistfulness to her voice.

ASHLEY: You have this magnificent view, not just because of the research, but also because of your life here, your familial connections, your friendship connections. Um, this is your home and these are your people. So what are your hopes for the Black community in Asheville?

PRISCILLA: Um, my hope for the Black community is for them to come out of the shell. Come out of the woods. You know, we’ve been pushed away, pushed aside. Come out, reap the benefits. Go downtown, walk around, enjoy what you see.

Be a part of it. Don’t be afraid. Let’s join, Let’s unite as we were before urban renewal. To bring about change, to make a difference.

To reconnect.

ASHLEY [VO]: If root shock is a disease of severed connections, reconnection might be its antidote.

Forests are nothing without their networks. Through vast invisible webs that span generations, trees flourish or flounder… together.

Scientists have also discovered that trees communicate with one another. They share resources and warn their neighbors against environmental threats. They might even share memories.

And even when there’s pain in these memories... there’s power in them, too.

[MUX IN.]

ASHLEY [VO]: Because, Priscilla doesn’t have to work too hard to imagine a brighter future for her community. She’s already lived that vision. She’s been that little girl in can-can skirts with a cupcake in her hand, doing her rounds on Sunday afternoons. She’s been watched after by her elders. Embraced by the block. Witnessed her neighbors thrive in the small ways that add up to a big life.

Her hope for the future, lies in her memory of the past.

ASHLEY: Miss Priscilla, thank you so much for this conversation. I feel like I’ve learned so much about you and your community. Um, and even when it made me mad, I was still having a good time talking with you.

PRISCILLA: Good. That’s what matters.

ASHLEY: Thank you for your work.

PRISCILLA: Thank you. Thank you for coming and hearing the story.

ASHLEY [VO]: In October 2023, seventeen months after their first meeting, the Asheville Reparations Commission released an initial draft of their recommendations. We’ve linked to those in our show notes.

Their work continues, and so does Priscilla’s. If you want to see photos of the Southside of her youth, and learn more about her work, check out “Urban Renewal Impact dot org.”

Also, join Ben and Jerry’s in calling on President Biden to establish a federal reparations commission and reach out to your reps about supporting H. R. Bill 40. Check out the link in our show notes to take action now.

[THEME MUX IN.]

[CREDITS]

Into the Mix is a Ben & Jerry’s Podcast produced with Vox Creative.

This episode was written by Martha D. Salley.

The Vox Creative team includes Lead Producer Bethany Denton, Production Supervisor Taylor Henry, and Production Coordinator Jessica Bae. Martha D. Salley is our supervising producer. Annu Subramanian is our executive producer.

The team also includes Ariana Jiffo, senior manager of creative services, Design Director Brittany Falussy, and post-production stars Greg Russ and Andrew Hammond.

Andrew also played the version of “Swannanoa Tunnel” you heard in this episode.

Kyle Neal engineered this episode. Original music by Israel Tutson.

A special thank you to Erin Watley and Bridger Dunnagan for their expertise, and to Arianne Young for her support. Thank you also to Alexandria from the Noir Collective, for sharing her space with us.

The Ben & Jerry’s team includes Jay Tandon, Jay Curley, Sanjana Mahesh, Chris Miller, and Palika Makam.

Thank you for joining us for this season of Into the Mix. Next, we’re headed to Chicago, to learn more about bail reform, and how it could reshape our justice system.

I’m Ashley C. Ford. Thank you for listening.