Gentrification Threatens History and Community in Rosenwald

Rosenwald, Brevard's traditionally African-American neighborhood, is seeing intense residential investment. The housing is needed, but it's "tearing up the community," a nonprofit leader said.

Rosenwald natives Carl and Sheila Mooney pictured in front of their brick home on Mills Avenue

BREVARD — You need to know the history, Sheila and Carl Mooney said, as they looked down from the rear of their home on Mills Avenue to the side-by-side frame houses on North Lane where they grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s.

You need to know what the Rosenwald Community was like back then to understand how they feel now as brand-new, half-million-dollar homes are shoehorned into tiny lots on nearby streets; as white outsiders crowd out young African Americans who grew up here; as heavy equipment levels land for condominiums in what was once the heart of a Black-owned business district.

When they were kids, the couple said, neighbors freely walked in and out of one another’s homes. They mowed each other’s lawns. They got together to do work left undone by the city — digging drainage ditches and installing culverts along roads that were little more than dirt lanes. They fought to make Transylvania County Schools one of the first integrated systems in the state. They pitched in to raise the neighborhood’s children.

Rosenwald wasn’t just close, said Carl Mooney, 73. It was so communal that he compared life in the neighborhood to the tribal existence of American Indians — and the current wave of newcomers to the settlers who took their land. 

“It’s a new version of white people coming in and taking what they want,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Let’s offer them a few beads and blankets.’ ”

That’s one view of Rosenwald, the traditionally Black community west of downtown Brevard distinguished by a history of activism and independence, and, in recent years, by some of the city’s most intensive residential development.

“I think it’s being targeted as the most desirable place for investors,” said Shelly Webb, executive director of the Sharing House charity in Rosenwald, “and it’s tearing up the community.”

Here are some other perspectives:

The city’s dire shortage of housing means the dense “infill” development of available lots in Rosenwald is satisfying a crucial need. Interest from investors has allowed some Black residents to capitalize on the land held in their families for generations. Soaring prices are the result of market forces, including fast-rising construction costs.

Finally, the influx of white residents is the inevitable result of integration that Rosenwald residents fought to achieve.

So, the transformation of Rosenwald isn’t all bad, said Tommy Kilgore, 73, president of the Transylvania NAACP. He grew up on West Main Street and shares many of the Mooneys’ memories and some of their sense of loss.

But he praised the city’s recent investments in the neighborhood — the Tannery Skate Park, a new basketball court and playground at Silversteen Park and, especially, the $2.5 million Mary C. Jenkins Community and Cultural Center, which is intended, like its same-named predecessor, to serve as a hub of Brevard’s African-American community.

Kilgore also supports the work of the city and nonprofits such as Sharing House as they try to attract affordable housing. The goal isn’t to recreate the old Rosenwald but to retain some of its heritage, to allow the sons and daughters of longtime residents the option of remaining close to home.

“You can’t stop change,” Kilgore said, “but you can address change, and that’s what we have to do here — address the change.”

Knowing the Boundaries

The Mooneys walked a few hundred yards from their home to a line of mature pines on West Main Street that marks the former site of a bridge over long-gone train tracks.

“We called it the Overhead Bridge,” said Sheila Mooney, 71, a retired school guidance counselor. Unaccompanied Black children “didn’t go across that bridge,” she said. “We knew that was our limit.”

Even older residents who lingered in downtown Brevard after dark would be sent on their way, Kilgore said. “It was generally understood that the local police had a sunup-to-sundown rule.”

White residents drank from a water fountain with a handsome stone base in front of the courthouse, he said, while the spigot beneath it was for African Americans.

More significantly for the exercise of democracy was segregation inside the courthouse. Rosenwald teachers in the early 1960s drilled Black students to answer civics and history questions so they could help their parents cast ballots, Kilgore said.

“When my folks went to vote, we went with them because they were asked questions that white voters were not asked,” he said. “I distinctly remember standing beside my father and mother, and seeing one aisle for the coloreds and one for all the whites.”

Black residents couldn’t swim at the city’s Franklin Park Pool. They could shop at Belk’s department store but not try on clothes, Kilgore said; they could buy hamburgers at Varner’s Drug Store but not sit down and eat.

The first movie fully open to Black viewers in downtown Brevard, Sheila Mooney said, was Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas in 1964. Before then, the Co-Ed Theater, just a few blocks from Rosenwald, was off limits to Black residents, and the neighboring Clemson Theater was accessible to them only by a back door that led directly to the balcony.

This confinement bred cohesiveness, said Kilgore, who now marvels at the limited horizons of his childhood. He didn’t venture into other city neighborhoods, didn’t explore the woods or hunt or fish. Mostly, he said, he left Rosenwald only to attend services at Black churches in nearby towns.

“This community through elementary school was all inclusive to me,” he said. “I knew nothing outside the community.”

A Working Community

L.C. Betsill, 93, in his Brevard apartment, recalled the limited job opportunities for African Americans before integration.

What Transylvania did offer African Americans starting at the end of the 19th Century were jobs, which is why Rosenwald evolved as a working-class neighborhood with high levels of property ownership, according to "Walking around the World", a 2019 history of Transylvania’s Black community funded in part by North Carolina’s State Historic Preservation Office.

The completion of the railroad in 1895 jump-started the tourism and timber industries, the document said. And in 1917, Joseph Silversteen opened a Transylvania Tannery Co. plant in western Brevard.

But the jobs available to Black workers weren’t the best jobs, said L.C. Betsill, 93, who, shortly after graduating from high school in the late 1940s, was hired at the tannery to haul hides from a chemical vat and feed them into a machine that removed the hair. The labor was hard and dirty enough that he only stayed about a year and white workers with other options didn’t work there at all.

“It was Blacks and poor whites,” he said of the workforce, though he added “we got along fine.”

Until the mid-1960s, the DuPont factory in Cedar Mountain and the Ecusta Paper Mill in Pisgah Forest hired Black residents strictly as custodians, groundskeepers and cafeteria workers, and one of the most esteemed leaders of Rosenwald, longtime Brevard City Council member Cornelius Hunt, could rise only to a supervisory role in housekeeping at Ecusta.

Better-paying manufacturing jobs at the plants became available to African Americans only after the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, said Carl Mooney, a retired DuPont employee and a former longtime board member of the Brevard Housing Authority.

“What happened was the laws changed,” he said. “It wasn’t because of any particular good will on the part of the mill owners.”

White Support for Civil Rights. Sometimes.

Rosenwald School, now Transylvania County Schools’ administration building, pictured in 1950. (Photo courtesy of the Rowell Bosse North Carolina Room Transylvania County Library)

The good will of other white leaders gets a lot of credit for the advancement of Black residents in Transylvania — an inspiring narrative of collaboration that sometimes seems accurate and sometimes like wishful revisionism.

The original Mary C. Jenkins Community Center was championed by a young Black school teacher, Mary B. Kilgore, and built in 1952 on land previously owned by its namesake, the wife of the white owner of a lumber company who also raised money for its construction.

As described in the documentary Almost Cured, Coach Cliff Brookshire stood up for his players and against white prejudice to lead the newly integrated 1963 Brevard High School football team to a share of the state championship.

A Black minister, F.H. Goldsmith, advocated for the 28-home affordable subdivision called Mickey Park, while U.S. Rep. Charles Taylor helped secure federal funding to build the project on the former site of the tannery in 1970.  

Ecusta founder Harry Straus may have presided over discriminatory hiring practices, but he also used his company’s taxpaying clout to pressure the county to pay for the construction of the stone Rosenwald School off West Main in 1948, according to Betty J. Reed’s 2004 history, The Brevard Rosenwald School.

“I always thought the school should have been named for Straus,” principal Ethel K. Mills later told an interviewer, Reed writes.

Instead, naming rights for the school — and, informally but indefinitely, the entire neighborhood — were awarded to Julius Rosenwald for a total contribution of $900.

Rosenwald, the one-time president of Sears, Roebuck and Co., created a fund that helped build about 5,000 schools for African-American children in the South. But the fund had been dissolved long before the construction of the stone school that bore his name and contributed only that previously mentioned sum to Brevard’s original Rosenwald School, which was built in 1920-21 and burned down in 1941.

Black residents, meanwhile, raised nearly $1,200 of the $4,850 cost of this wooden school, with the rest coming from public coffers, Reed wrote.

And there is little evidence of white support for the Rosenwald Community’s landmark accomplishment — integrating Transylvania County Schools at a time when the county’s Black students, after finishing eighth grade at Rosenwald, were bused to Hendersonville’s Ninth Avenue High School.

The Transylvania Citizens Improvement Organization, which Rosenwald residents formed in 1960, unsuccessfully requested that the Transylvania County School Board desegregate schools in 1962.

Though Brevard High School did admit nine African-American students that year, according to a history written by the Transylvania County Library’s Rowell Bosse North Carolina Room, county schools weren’t widely integrated until the following year — after the TCIO filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Asheville and a judge ruled in its favor.

And once school started, white students “were very standoffish and treated us like we were complete foreigners,” Sheila Mooney said, “and there were always white girls who wanted to touch your hair.”

Kilgore, in a 2015 column in the Transylvania Times, recalled facing a gauntlet of jeering students when he and other Black students arrived at Brevard High for the first day of school in September of 1963.

“The racial slurs, encounters and even confrontations did not stop that day or for the remainder of my high school career,” he wrote. “They were too numerous to mention. My fellow Black students and I learned to live with them.” 

Integration and Exodus

This integration also marked the beginning of the end of the close community of his youth.

Though Rosenwald is now usually defined as covering most of the land between West Probart and South Caldwell streets, including the site of the old tannery, it was originally separated into several distinct neighborhoods, according to Walking around the World.

The name “Rosenwald'' referred just to the few blocks around the school. There were also nearby African-American enclaves such as Goose Hollow and Georgia Hill, all of them anchored by a business district on Carver Street called Greasy Corner — originally, perhaps, a pejorative name derived from the foul smells from the tannery, but eventually embraced by residents.

Edith Darity, 76, a historian of Brevard’s Black community, said her parents operated a soda shop and dance hall on Carver. Betsill’s father ran an off-the-books taxi service as well as a barber shop that, he said, served both white and Black customers.

“My dad was a hustler. Anything legal to make money,” he said. Other businesses, Darity said, included a pool hall, grocery, cafe and beauty shop.

But as African Americans started to earn good wages, and as downtown stores began to welcome their business, fewer of them shopped at Greasy Corner.

Mills, the Rosenwald principal, preached to students before integration that they were being prepared to excel in the broader society, not assimilate into it, Kilgore said.

After integration, however, Black residents began to shop at the A & P Supermarket in downtown Brevard, for example, rather than Jip Mills’ grocery, Kilgore said. “They started to want to be like white people. It was, ‘I want a boat. I want a house. I want a nice car. I want to learn to play golf.’ ”

Even before integration there was a long history of young Black people leaving the community to attend high school or college, said Kilgore, who moved in with family members in California after high school, graduated from Pepperdine University in Los Angeles and remained in the state until 1984.

This exodus accelerated in the early 2000s, after the closure of Ecusta and DuPont eliminated hundreds of well-paid jobs. More recently, Sheila Mooney and others said, young African Americans have been displaced by skyrocketing housing costs.

The 2000 U.S. Census, the last conducted before the closure of the plants, counted a total of 951 Black residents in Brevard. By 2020, the tally had fallen to 686.

“Has it dropped that far?” Sheila Mooney asked. “Six hundred? That’s so depressing.”

Though the count does not break down the ages of those residents, the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which provides annual demographic data, shows especially small numbers of working-age African Americans remained in the city by 2020 — only nine Black males aged 35 to 44, for example.

The survey results come with a considerable margin of error, demographers say, especially when trying to measure such small population groups.

But that size also means Sheila Mooney knows most of the remaining residents and can at least verify the general trend of young African Americans leaving town, she said.

“Just count the people,” said Mooney, whose adult daughter took a high-tech job in the Raleigh area after graduating from North Carolina State University. “Count the families.”

Buying and Building

Land grading at the site of planned condominiums on Carver Street

The recent rush to develop Rosenwald started in earnest in 2019, according to county records, when Bracken Mountain Builders took out the first permit to build what would become six contemporary homes on Georgia Hill, off Mills Avenue.

First Victory Inc., the Brevard-based company that built the community center, is planning more than 20 units across the street from it on Carver, said Brevard Planning Directory Paul Ray.

Though First Victory president Travis Fowler did not return calls for comment on his plans, Ray said that the company’s current permit only allows it to grade the land. Because the property lies in a 100-year flood plain, he wrote in an email, First Victory was required to submit hydraulic engineering plans that are still under review.

But the company has discussed a tentative proposal for building 16 condominiums and a mixed-use building that will include six residential units as well as stores or restaurants.

Development in the small grid of streets around the old stone school include a new home going up directly across from what is now the Schools’ administration building on Rosenwald Avenue.

Other houses have either recently been completed or are under construction on North and West Lanes, while a new three-story residential structure emerging on Jordan Lane threatens to overshadow its neighbor, Bethel “A” Baptist Church.

On Mills, three 1,400-square-foot homes have been completed on small lots created from a parcel Darity sold in 2020, for $60,000, to Mills Ave. Properties LLC, owned by Brevard builder Ben Stone.

He sold one home he built for $420,000 in 2021 and another this year for $520,000, according to county property records. A third was built by another contractor on a quarter-acre lot that Stone sold last year for $135,000. It was listed by Brevard Realtor Paul Wilander and sold this week for $545,000, he said.

Wilander said the development in the neighborhood follows a pattern that the city has encouraged — building dense infill development on available lots in existing neighborhoods with access to utility lines. It’s no different from other completed or planned projects on West Main, West Probart and East Jordan Streets.

“The whole infill pattern of development is not specific to Rosenwald,” he said. “Anywhere in Brevard where you can find a lot to build on has been very active.”

The price of the house he listed reflects the amenities packed into it, including a finished basement, he said. And the home’s location, a few blocks from downtown, is “absolutely” a major selling point.

As is the planned multi-use Estatoe Trail, which will run just to the east of the three lots on Mills, Stone said. But the success of his small development was far from certain when he bought the land in May of 2020, shortly after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Nobody knew what was going to happen when Covid hit,” he said. He owns three modestly priced rentals on Mills and would like to build more affordable properties, he said, but soaring construction costs have made that all but impossible.

“I wish I could,” he said.

But this is what’s different about development in Rosenwald, said City Council member Maurice Jones: the large number of new houses and high-priced renovations in such a small grid of streets — and how far out of reach their prices are for longtime residents.

Jones, 51, is co-chair of the city’s Rosenwald Community Advisory Board, which oversaw the construction of the community center and is now guiding the city’s work in the neighborhood. He is also a Rosenwald native who can see firsthand why so many of his peers have left the city.

A newly renovated, 2,100-square foot home on Brown Lane listed for $399,000 is so close to his 800-square foot house, he said, that “I could throw a rock from my front porch and hit it.”

With “a family of six, a child with special needs, it would be the perfect house for me, in my home neighborhood,” he said, “but I can’t afford it.”

If that’s true for Jones, an insurance broker and a merchandising manager at Lowe’s Home Improvement store, he said, it’s all the more true of Rosenwald natives living on the wages of the service jobs commonly available in the county.

“I know it’s not true, but honestly for those people, it almost seems like (real estate investors) are intentionally moving minorities,” he said, “that they are finding systematic ways of getting the land and getting them out.”

A Cultural Divide

All the more so because the new white residents don’t seem interested in mixing with longtime residents, with whom they share few common interests, said Carl and Sheila Mooney. 

She can see why safe, beautiful, culturally rich Brevard seems like “the perfect place for white people,” she said.

But not necessarily for Black residents, said Carl Mooney: “I ain’t into hiking. I ain’t into biking. I ain’t into classical music.”

White neighbors walking their dogs might nod and say hello, he said. They don’t stop and engage in conversations, and the Mooneys don’t encourage them to.

“They haven’t extended an olive branch and neither have we,” Sheila Mooney said.

That’s true, said Andrea Gately, 56, a former restaurateur who still lives part-time in Florida, but in April of 2021, established a second residence and future retirement home in Georgia Hill.

“I feel I’m an outsider. I know we’re not part of the community of people who have lived here forever,” she said.

But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to be, or that she won’t be in the future. She welcomes the diversity of the neighborhood, she said, pointing from her side yard down the hill to Silversteen Park.

“There are people out there every day playing basketball and playing music and having fun. It’s life and we love it,” she said.

Her adult daughter formerly worked at Neighbors in Ministry’s Rise & Shine after-school tutoring program, which is based at Bethel “A.” With more connections to the community and more time, she said, the new and old residents of Rosenwald should be able to find common ground.

“There’s always hope,” she said. “I think it will be a new kind of community.”

A Center of Community — and History

Tyree Griffin, director of the Mary C. Jenkins Community and Cultural Center, pictured with the historical displays that line the center’s walls

Building such cohesiveness — along with honoring Rosenwald’s history — is a key aim of Mary C. Jenkins, Director Tyree Griffin said during a tour of the gleaming new center earlier this month.

The building features a conference room with a table made with the hardwood planks of a tree harvested from the property and a collection of books with African-American themes donated by Darity, who had pushed the city to build the center for more than a decade.

“This is Edith’s library,” said Griffin, 30, who grew up in a public housing apartment “about 30 seconds from here.” The meeting room provides space to seat as many as 290 people, a full kitchen, a billiards/ping pong table and a stage flanked by video monitors.

The center has hosted groups from around the city, including the Rotary Club of Brevard, Griffin said, but will be especially welcoming to the people of the neighborhood, including children served by Rise & Shine, which is scheduled to use the space two afternoons a week.

“Obviously, we want to highlight some of the diversity of the neighborhood,” Griffin said.

That is also accomplished by displays lining the walls and highlighting the accomplishments of TCIO, the history of Black churches, the stories of the Rosenwald School and of the neighborhood’s most prominent residents, including comedian Moms Mabley, the daughter of pioneering Black business owner, James Aiken.

The building is “amazing,” said Council member Aaron Baker, “but I was honestly more impressed with what was hanging on the walls . . . That’s the anchor that allows the neighborhood to hold on to that history and maintain its heritage.”

Council member Geraldine Dinkins said she learned about more of the neighborhood’s history talking to longtime residents at the center’s opening in October, which she hopes served as a preview of the evolving Rosenwald community.

“It was packed wall to wall and it’s the most integrated I’ve ever seen Brevard,” she said. “There was a kind of energy that I floated on for the rest of the day.”

Brevard’s Challenge

But the views from the center during the tour showed the challenge Rosenwald presents to city leaders, which is the challenge of Transylvania as a whole in concentrated form: setting aside affordable spaces so working-age people can live close to their ancestral homes.

The windows forming the back wall of the meeting room looked out on the new, upscale homes on Mills, while windows on the other side of the center, in Griffin’s office, displayed beeping heavy equipment leveling the lot for the condominiums on Carver.

At a session the city held in October at Bethel “A” to hear public input on the city’s ongoing rewrite of its land-use rules, Dinkins said, “the refrain was loud and clear that affordable housing is the number-one concern of people who live in Rosenwald.”

Before last year’s city elections, several Council and mayoral candidates called for Brevard to explore “inclusionary zoning,” which mandates that each new residential project includes a specified percentage of affordable units.

City attorney Mack McKeller, though not ruling out the legality of such a policy, has advised the Council to tread carefully before implementing it.

Which is wise, said James Joyce, an assistant professor of public law and government at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s School of Government. Though some cities in the state, including Chapel Hill, have incorporated such mandates in zoning laws, he said, there are no statutes or court rulings that specifically allow it.

“It’s not what we call settled law,” he said.

There is more legal protection for offering incentives such as density bonuses to encourage developers to provide a share of affordable units, he said.

This approach might work for large projects, said Mayor Pro Tem Gary Daniel, the chairman of the council’s Housing Trust Fund Committee, but not for the piecemeal development of small lots that is the dominant pattern in Rosenwald.

And it won’t be needed for large lots, including the nine acres the city owns on Cashiers Valley Road, on the western edge of the neighborhood, which are being analyzed for suitability as sites for affordable housing by the School of Government’s Development Finance Initiative, Ray said.

The City Council agreed in September to pay the group $98,000 for this purpose and to develop plans for the most promising parcels. New projects there won’t need to offer a share of reasonably priced units, Daniel said, because “they will all be affordable.”

Saving the Sense of Belonging

A better approach than inclusionary zoning may be a community land trust, an idea that has attracted the attention of Sharing House and other local nonprofits looking to ensure availability of reasonably priced housing in Rosenwald.

Land trusts are a proven “way to maintain the affordable bubble on a property and keep the speculative market off its trail,” said Tony Hernandez, director of technical assistance for Grounded Solutions Network, which leads such trusts across the country.

These nonprofits either build houses or buy them as they come on the market. They then sell them to working families at affordable prices, while retaining ownership of the land. This allows the trust to cap the appreciation of the homes’ values and maintain their affordability as they pass from owner to owner.

One long-standing example of such a program is the Community Home Trust in Chapel Hill, which can trace its history to 1991 and now claims 334 “permanently affordable homes,” according to its website.

The main obstacle to launching such programs, predictably, is finding the money to start acquiring residential units. In Brevard’s case, it won’t come from the city’s existing land trust, most of which has been committed to other housing efforts, including the School of Government’s Finance Initiative, said assistant city manager and finance director Dean Luebbe.

But Webb said that Sharing House is partnering with Rise & Shine, Transylvania Habitat for Humanity and Transylvania Vocational Services to not only explore approaches such as the land trust but sources to fund them.

A similar initiative in Rutherford County, for example, recently received a grant from Dogwood Health Trust. And in Flagstaff, Ariz., Habitat has built small, affordable “forever homes” with monetary contributions and donated labor from students and contractors.

It takes time for land trusts to build momentum, to gain credit with lenders and credibility in the community, Hernandez said. But such long-term commitment is necessary, said Webb, because of the erosion of the community that she sees from her organization’s vantage point in Rosenwald, that she hears when talking to the residents Sharing House serves.

One Sharing House neighbor recently lost her long term-rental after its building was sold to an out-of-town investor, Webb said. Aggressive offers from buyers are especially tempting to people “struggling to keep their heads above water” — and feeling the additional squeeze of rising property taxes. These homeowners are also subject to the “visual pressure” of high-end residences emerging next to their smaller, older houses.

“Some of them feel that they just don’t belong anymore,” Webb said. “The people who have lived here the longest should still feel like it’s their home. They should never feel like they’re being forced out.”

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