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Tempers flare over idea of renaming Waynesville thoroughfare for MLK

fr MLKstreetMembers of the African American community in Waynesville hope to rename a major street for Martin Luther King Jr., not only to honor his legacy but also to serve as symbol of acceptance and inclusion for the historically shunned black community.

WNC’s African-American history

bookThis is a monumental work. Ann Miller Woodford has gathered an astonishing amount of information, including old letters, church records, unpublished and previously published histories, mementos and dairies. She has spent some seven years, visiting family elders, cemeteries and the abandoned sites of churches, factories and villages. 

Haywood to patch up Pigeon Center, albeit reluctantly

When Haywood County put up $35,000 to replace a chronicly leaky roof on the Pigeon Community Center in Waynesville, it was both a tangible and symbolic gesture, one that saved a major landmark of African-American community from certain demise.

Canton school to be reborn

fr reynoldsWilliam McDowell remembers when segregation was a reality in Canton.

“When I was a kid we weren’t allowed to sit anywhere but the balcony at the Colonial Theatre in downtown,” he said. “You couldn’t eat in certain restaurants and there were black and white drinking fountains — segregation was really enforced.”

Forgotten African-American cemetery finds an unlikely hero

fr cemeteryThe dead lay in indiscernible rows beneath the earth, their resting places marked by a jumble of faded and often illegible stone markers — the most distinguishable carrying etched dates and names, but the most nondescript void of any writing and covered in a thin layer of moss.

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