Asheville Citizen, August 30, 1890

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1880-1900
6.4 Evaluate the effect of racial segregation on various regions and segments of American society.

Edward Stephens, a Black immigrant from the West Indies, came to Asheville to be the first principal of the Mountain Street School in 1889. A year after his arrival, he became a central figure in the establishment of the Young Men’s Institute in Asheville and its first director. The YMI was one of the first public facilities for Blacks or Whites that had the newly available private services of running water and electricity. The majority of citizens did not enjoy such conveniences until well into the first two decades of the 1900’s. In the heavily segregated society, the opportunity to gather in a public place promoted community solidarity. As the letter to Mr. McNamee indicates, the true force of racial segregation was violence. The presence of the Ku Klux Klan in the mountain region was real and deadly.

In the 1890’s Buncombe County was a reflection of the loss of political and economic power of Blacks across the South through the enactment of Jim Crow laws limiting opportunities and institutionalizing violence and segregation.

Some time ago the white ladies of the Northern Methodist Mission School were warned late one night by a white crowd that “if they didn't clear out in two days they would swing on the same tree where the nigger was lynched.” Next day the ladies appealed for protection to the mayor and chief of police who spurned them and their request. In terror they packed their trunks at night and early started to leave when, at the Square, some “leading citizens," realizing the seriousness of this step, urged them not to depart. Miss Dole, principal of the school, which is on College Street, recently told me of this and other persecutions by white persons because she and her friends persisted in teaching “niggers.”

—Letter from Edward Stephens to Charles McNamee in an appeal
to help establish a place where African Americans could safely gather,
dated January 20, 1892. Biltmore House Collection

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