In Fitzgerald’s fields they toiled, sun-dappled and rain-soaked, caked in mud and in blood and in sweat. They raised corn and peas and potatoes and children and they always had plenty of butter and honey and wool so long as with ceaseless toil they coaxed the stubborn mountainside into giving up its seasonal blessings.

They worked about as hard as, and had about as much as, any other poor white Reconstruction-era Waynesville farmer except for the rights expressed in that document which begins, “We the people” because they were still somehow less than that. 

Longstanding plans for a park near the Pigeon Street corridor are about to move forward, as are other plans designed to connect — physically and symbolically — Waynesville’s bustling Main Street with the town’s historic African American neighborhood. 

Nearly 300 members of the Western Carolina University community came together Thursday, Sept. 5, to dedicate the campus’s newest residence hall in honor of Levern Hamlin Allen, the institution’s first African-American student and a woman characterized by WCU Chancellor Kelli R. Brown as “a quiet pioneer of integration.”

Many plotlines weave through the story of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but if the park were a book, some of those plotlines be written in bold, with others buried in small type. 

“We probably go overboard in telling the story of the white Appalachian settlers to this area,” said Susan Sachs, the park’s acting chief of resource education. “We do a better job of telling the stories of the Cherokee, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement. But then when it comes to the African-American story, we know that we are failing there.”

By Katherine Bartel • Secretary, Haywood County NAACP

“My little brother Isaiah is, as you would call it, ‘a boy of color,’” said 11-year-old Alicia Matthews. “He is probably one of the smartest 6 year olds you’ll ever meet. One time we were playing in his room and all of a sudden he asks me a question just randomly out of the blue, ‘Alicia? Why do I have brown skin?’ At first, I didn’t know what to say to him because he is so young and he barely knew who he was. I said, ‘Because that’s who you are. So don’t try to be anyone else.’ He responded to me with a simple ‘OK’ because he is still very young and that’s just how he responds to those kinds of statements.” 

Almost 120 years ago, local newspapers reported two separate instances of attempted rape in Haywood County. 

Similarities between the two cases are many. Both victims were young girls under the age of 11, both alleged perpetrators were grown men, both knew their victims, both were apprehended and both were immediately jailed. 

Years after demolishing a blighted structure in Waynesville’s historic African-American neighborhood, aldermen still haven’t funded the park that was supposed to take its place, and neighborhood residents aren’t happy. 

Michael Cohen’s recent testimony to the House Oversight and Reform Committee took an unexpected dive deep into America’s racial divide, and Western North Carolina’s Congressman Mark Meadows jumped right in to it. 

That led to relentless lampooning of the four-term Republican, culminating in his buffoonish portrayal on a recent episode of Saturday Night Live, but Meadows’ constituents of color aren’t laughing. 

In a county as old as Haywood, there exist all manner of half-remembered places and faces long gone from the physical world yet immortalized through penciled notes on the backs of dog-eared, sepia-toned photographs.

Sunburst, in southeastern Haywood County, is one of those places; the subject of intense historical research, it’s been documented better than most ghosts of Haywood past, but the story of Sunburst has always been short one chapter. 

A cultural survey currently underway that seeks to document the legacy of an overlooked Waynesville community could add to the town’s growing roster of properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places.