Haywood County’s Black Generational Wealth committee is the product of a long-dissolved 2020 book club.
That year, a white police officer murdered an unarmed Black man named George Floyd with the assistance of three other officers. Like many COVID-era racial justice collectives, the book club was a response to the horrific act perpetrated in Minneapolis, said committee chair Nancy Thomason.
“We read ‘White Fragility,’ and we read several others, and after the after the series was over, the question was, ‘Now what are we going to do about this?’” recounted Thomason, who is white, adding that participants initially pursued the theme of “reparations.”
The modern-day reparations movement calls for material and financial compensation to Black folks for wealth disparities originating with enslavement and perpetuated through manifestations of structural racism — among them predatory loans, wage discrimination, mass incarceration and gentrification.
Thomason added that Rev. Keith Turman of Waynesville discussed the proposal with Black leaders and change-makers in Haywood County, and a multi-racial coalition took root.
But after conversations with affected residents, Thomason said the committee ditched the idea of reparations, instead opting for an open meeting with the Black community to solicit feedback about strategy and gain insight into local issues.
“One of our committee members suggested the name ‘Black Generational Wealth’ committee, and that the idea and the focus would be to help people acquire, maintain and pass on financial security and wealth from generation to generation,” she said.
BGW fittingly described a group aiming to empower Black folks amid an enduring racial wealth gap.
As of 2019, Black families were twice as likely as white families to have no wealth. While 75% of White Americans owned homes in 2020, the same could be said for only 45.3% of Black Americans. Racial minorities are disproportionately represented when it comes to student debt, unemployment and the makeup of generationally poor communities.
These outcomes are a result of compounding policies at the federal, state and local levels, the stuff of which can sometimes look individual but largely have to do with generational and systemic barriers.
A mortgage loan refusal might seem interpersonal, but racially motivated mortgage loan and credit denials to qualified Black recipients were practiced in masse by the 1930s Federal Housing Administration through a process known as redlining, preventing home ownership and generational wealth-building.
Exclusionary zoning, which has its roots in pre-1940s laws preventing Black families from living or building in majority-white areas, today limits the availability of affordable housing through square-footage or residential use requirements.
Now, years down the line, BGW continues to provide educational, empowerment-based programming. Much of its work resembles that of a financial literacy nonprofit, though seminars are annual, volunteer led and feature limited but intentionally chosen topics.
The solutions are more individualized than structural. But in a world where a handful of everyday people might face significant barriers enacting large-scale change, collaborating with the local community is often the best place to start.
The group’s first-ever round of open workshops followed a people-first strategy “to figure out areas that we could focus on for developing and maintaining wealth,” said BGW member LaVonne Casey. “We had the banking institutions represented, we had real estate, we had legal aid.”
“As Nancy [Thomason] said, [we started] asking folks what they really wanted to hear from us, and then we started being able to come up with these seminars geared towards what the needs are,” she said.
Immediately, the focus became more detailed, Casey recounted.
Following the first event at Waynesville’s Pigeon Community Multicultural Center the group’s second seminar on July 16 will concern the concept of “heirs,” for example; committee members said locally, it’s a topic seldom understood.
Heirs are invoked when one does not write a will or use another legal mechanism to pass down property. And Casey said quite a few elders had lacked a basic will at previous seminars.
This comes down to lack of basic financial education, said Gregory Wheeler, Pigeon Center co-chair. Personal finance is typically offloaded as a domestic subject rather than one taught in the classroom. But some parents, lacking that knowledge themselves, are then unable to teach their children.
And a 2024 National Institute of Health study found that financial resource access disparities contribute to lower financial literacy for “racial and ethnic minorities.”
Wheeler is himself an heir, a designation he credits to his grandparents’ lack of understanding regarding the importance of writing a will.
The property was left to his parents’ generation, but all five heirs are dead. Some in the next generation — to which Wheeler belongs — have passed away too, leaving the property to their children.
“There’s probably 30 or 40 heirs. One property that all have rights to,” Wheeler said.
He underscored the chaos of this situation.
“What do you do? How do you work that out? And we [might] end up losing our property because we can’t pull it together and pull people together,” he added.
Melford Wilson asserted inheritance is “a pandemic here in Haywood County.”
As branch manager of the Waynesville United Community Bank, he’s witnessed the problems it causes among his customers.
One man, for example, strategically didn’t pay taxes for 1/12th of a property he’d inherited in a rugged mountainous area.
“He was hoping that it would be auction off on the courthouse steps, so he was playing that game,” Wilson explained.
Instead, Wilson continued, the man received a garnishment on his business account, a legal order permitting a creditor to seize assets to collect a debt. It disenfranchised him immediately.
“It’s a real trap when you’ve got a bunch of heirs and you need to liquidate things,” he said, adding that heirs must reach unanimous agreement about what to do with the property.
So, BGW will present a master class on inheritance at the committee’s second series seminar. It’ll be held July 18 at the Canton Library, with programming facilitated by Legal Aid of North Carolina.
And the third and final seminar on September 26 will cover wealth building through home ownership. It’ll be hosted at the Pigeon Center in Waynesville, like the first event held May 16 about building and sustaining credit.
Wilson, the presenter for the introductory seminar, emphasized that the public believes many myths about credit — most notably, perhaps, that it’s favorable to run a balance on a credit card.
However, the opposite is true: solid credit is built when card balance is paid on time each month.
Wilson warned against debt consolidation services, companies that negotiate with banks and businesses to accept a payment below a client’s official debt.
But these services rely on unsuspecting individuals. Debt is not absolved with a settled payment, tanking one’s credit score.
Home ownership is one of the primary ways to build wealth, hence BGW’s third seminar.
In previous years, the committee would often advertise Habitat for Humanity’s services to event participants. The responses, however, were less than enthusiastic.
“Oftentimes people would say, ‘Well, I like where I live…I don’t want to move to a Habitat house neighborhood where I don’t know anyone,’” recounted Thomason.
But then the committee learned that Habitat’s post-Helene grants could be used not only to build new houses but also to renovate existing property.
“One of the members of our committee also was on the board of Habitat, and became a liaison,” said Thomason, noting that volunteers pooled BGW and Habitat funding to “restore the properties that people are already living in.”
“Our organization is now supplementing the funds that Habitat was able to provide through that initial grant to pay for the materials,” she told The Smoky Mountain News.
BGW has already completed two major projects in Canton.
“In both situations, the houses were located on a sloping lot, and water was coming down and going under the house,” explained Thomason.
Habitat volunteers repaired decks and gutters — and restored both waterlogged foundations.
What’s more, one house had also been rendered nearly inhabitable by termites.
The rotten wood was removed and replaced, including the flooring. The same was done with the joists and pilings.
“Before, [the houses] would not have passed inspection, anything, because you couldn’t sell them. More of a liability than an asset,” she said.
Now, both are priced at the market value for the area.