Some African American families in Henderson county are starting to celebrate Kwanzaa, a unique African-American celebration that focuses on the traditional African values of family, community responsibility, commerce and self-improvement. https://www.blueridgenow.com/article/NC/20051230/News/606079887/HT
Hendersonville’s annual Martin Luther King Unity Breakfast promotes understanding, collaboration and unity. https://www.cfhcforever.org/impact-insights/funds-in-focus/mlk-unity
The people of Black Bottom in southern Hendersonville had a community group to govern and police the neighborhood to avoid crime. Click Here to read excerpt about Black Bottom in Hidden History of Henderson County, NC by Terry Ruscin
Freed slaves founded the Kingdom of Happy Land in the 1870’s near today’s Lake Summit. With money they earned as porters carrying packages up the mountain to Saluda, they bought land from the Davis family’s plantation, Oakland. There is little documentation about the Kingdom and …
In the early 1960’s Henderson County’s Community Council successfully pressed for the desegregation of schools and other reforms. Excerpt from A Brief History of the Black Presence in Henderson County by Gary Franklin Green The year was 1960. The Civil Rights movement had given a …
While the Kingdom of the Happy Land was realizing its commitment to communal living in south Henderson County, in what is now the East Flat Rock area, another form of community self-help was taking place. Again, like the people of the Happy Land, the needs …
Throughout the history of Henderson County no other chapter is perhaps so intriguing and yet so veiled in mystery as the efforts of a group of freed slaves to establish a cooperative Kingdom grounded on a philosophy of “one for all, and all for one.” It is …