2020 African Americans in WNC and Southern Appalachia Conference

UNC Asheville’s seventh annual African Americans in Western North Carolina and Southern Appalachia Conference will take place online this year, from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 16. The conference is free and open to everyone with pre-registration required; the conference schedule and Zoom access information will be posted here closer to the conference date.

Continuing last year’s theme, Existence as Resistance: Expressions of Resilience, this year’s conference will include time for Q&A and discussion. Conference founder and director, UNC Asheville Associate Professor of History Darin J. Waters, who also is the University’s executive director of community engagement, and producer of BPR’s The Waters and Harvey Show, will provide a welcoming talk at 10 a.m.

Featured Presentations:

Community Building and Resilience in Huntington West Virginia:  The Making of a Black Appalachian Community

• Cicero Fain III, professor at the College of Southern Maryland and author of Black Huntington: An Appalachian Story.

African Americans and the COVID-19 Crisis

• Rochelle Monique Brandon, M.D., a Fellow of The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and principal of Brandon Gynecology Associates in Charlotte, N.C.

African American Resistance and Resilience through Artistic Expression in Southern Appalachia: Memorializing the Black Lives Matter Movement, featuring four people instrumental in creating the downtown Asheville BLM mural

• Marie T. Cochran, founding curator of the Affrillachian Artist Project, and Lehman Brady Professor at Duke University.
• Joseph Pearson, whose recent commissions include Heritage, a mural at All Souls Cathedral in Biltmore Village; New Shiloh, a Visual History, for the Community Foundation of WNC; and a multi-panel work for BPR addressing the George Floyd protests.
• Jenny Pickens, the first artist-in-residence at 22 London, has been commissioned to create a giant mural in the courtyard of the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts downtown.
• Asheville City Council Member Sheneika Smith.

Changing Our Narrative: Diversity and Inclusion and American History

• Ron Carson – Vice Chair of the 400 Years of African-American History Commission; co-founder of The Appalachian African American Cultural Center in Pennington Gap, Virginia; and director of three clinics in southwestern Virginia serving and advocating for coal miners with black lung disease.

The program also will include presentations of undergraduate research by UNC Asheville students.

For more information, visit aawnc.unca.edu.