by Janet Hurley / photos by Brent Fleury

Johnnie Grant, publisher of Asheville’s monthly newspaper The Urban News, begs to differ with Thomas Wolfe’s famous book title You Can’t Go Home Again. “You can go home again,” she says fervently. You just might be surprised what you find when you get there. 

Grant came home to Asheville in 2003 after living for nearly 25 years in the small town of Southport on the North Carolina coast. There she and her husband Robert, an engineer with Progress Energy and also an Asheville native, raised two children, Jayda and Robert III, whom they call Tre’. Grant’s varied career began in nursing, traversed the corporate terrain of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and then took her to the offices of the Brunswick County Board of Elections, near Southport. She’d never had any experience in publishing, and she admits it was the furthest thing from her mind before her family returned to Asheville. But Grant discovered that the stories of the diverse communities that helped build Asheville were being trampled by the rush to build upscale condos and trendy shops—seen as “progress” by many. “I’m not against progress,” she says. “But Asheville’s growth continues to push people aside.” In 2005, after being back for two years, she founded The Urban News, whose tagline is “Gateway to the Multicultural Community.” The paper is now published the second Friday of each month, has a circulation of roughly 7,000 and is distributed in nine Western North Carolina counties.

Grant says several experiences inspired her to reinvent herself as a publisher. The first came unexpectedly, in 1998, while she was still living in eastern North Carolina. Robert suffered kidney failure, the result of a family predisposition to high blood pressure and diabetes. “I saw my husband almost die several times,” Grant says. “I knew that life could be short and end in the twinkling of an eye, and how tragic it would be not having lived your dream.” After several years of dialysis and waiting for a transplant, Robert told Johnnie he wanted to return home to Asheville to die. She was not surprised. “We always longed for Asheville,” she says. “We longed for the mountains and our friends and family that we left behind.” 

This led to the second factor in her reinvention. Upon their return, they found that Asheville had changed more than they ever suspected. Grant saw that people who were born in Asheville and who had provided talent and decades of hard work to build the city were being pushed aside by the city’s growth—and not for the first time.  

During the mid-1960s and early ‘70s, Asheville, like many other American cities, went through the painful process of “urban renewal,” the result of controversial theories about urban design. In New York City, for example, planner Robert Moses built massive freeways through outer-borough neighborhoods that displaced thousands of low-income residents. In Asheville, as a young woman, Grant witnessed the demolition of long-established African-American neighborhoods including the East End. Her family homes at both 55 Circle Street and 151 Valley Street (now Charlotte Street) were razed and the city-owned Wilcock building now stands in place of the Valley Street house. Grant wanted to unearth and acknowledge the history that had been buried along with the houses and businesses that were bulldozed. So in 2005, with Robert’s health improving, she set out to find those stories—old and new—and vowed to create a venue where diverse communities could be celebrated.  

While her journalistic experience may have been slim, her love of stories goes way back. Born to Frances and John D. Nelson at Memorial Mission Hospital, she learned the importance of family history at family reunions. Her paternal grandfather and his siblings came from a plantation close to Blairsville, Georgia, establishing themselves in Asheville among other iron craftsmen. Grant points out that the Asheville Police Department, the Grove Arcade and the Biltmore House still boast the fine ornamental works from African-American artisans. Her great-great-grandmother Mary Hooper was of Cherokee lineage and a well-established insurance business owner in the early 1900s. Her grandfather Wesley T. Mauldin was the first African-American to work for the Asheville Transit System. Her father, a Korean War veteran, was a nurse at the VA Hospital and her mother worked as a domestic until she went to nursing school. In many ways, Grant has continued their legacy of pushing through doors previously closed to women or African-Americans.

When Johnnie enrolled at Asheville High in 1969 with one of the first racially integrated classes, she brought along a strong sense of community and self instilled in her by her family.  She’d also been taught by Franciscan nuns at the only private black elementary school in Asheville, St. Anthony’s Catholic School. “They were visionaries,” she says, noting that she studied French in first and second grades. Entering high school during a time of experimental integration, the challenges were of a different sort. “Would they look at me as if I were equal?” she remembers wondering. And yet her Asheville High class was surprisingly diverse, racially and ethnically, including whites, African-Americans and Asians. “Asheville has a really strong, culturally diverse history and that is one of the main things I represent in The Urban News,” she says. 

After high school, Grant went to nursing school at Asheville-Buncombe Technical College and then to work as a critical-care nurse at Mission Hospital for four years. Afterwards, she worked in a private practice with Dr. Otis B. Michael, Internal Medicine, one of the few black doctors in Asheville at the time. 

One day, Grant stepped out the door of her family home just as a handsome young man in a U.S. Air Force uniform ran up the steps to her neighbor’s house. He was a son of that household, but she didn’t know him well. “I thought, oh my, what a striking young man!” Grant says. “I always pictured myself as that woman who was being kissed by the soldier in Times Square.” After dating for some time, she and Robert married. In 1976, when he was hired by Progress Energy, they moved to the coast with their two young children. 

In 1980, Grant’s medical background led her to a job at Pfizer, one of the oldest pharmaceutical companies in the country. She started as the health-and-safety coordinator at a local plant, eventually making her way into sales and corporate management in Pfizer’s Coty Division, where she worked with the New York office but stayed in Southport. For the first time in her life, she was in a male-dominated arena. Still, Grant had male mentors who taught her to hold her own as she met with clients who were often taken aback when she walked in the door. She didn’t have a gender-specific name and Grant says they were expecting to see a man. “And you weren’t expected to be as knowledgeable and savvy as your male counterparts,” she says. Despite this occasional friction, she says she enjoyed her 16-year tenure with Pfizer—until she was “out-placed” during a company restructuring.  

Grant turned her attention to the close-knit African-American community in Southport that had once looked at her as a outsider, though she was just from the other side of the state. After years of living there, she had relationships with families who could trace their genealogy back to the 1800s. These connections motivated her to advocate for the elderly and the underserved, and she got involved with various social-services organizations. This did not go unnoticed by the local Brunswick County Board of Election, who recruited her for the staff position of deputy director. 

The region, just south of Wilmington, had a history of strained relations with black voters. According to a 2006 report from a bi-racial commission convened by the NC General Assembly, the overthrow of the predominantly black municipal government and free press of Wilmington by whites in 1898 laid the foundation for the Jim Crow laws and voter disenfranchisement that followed throughout North Carolina. Even after the 1965 Voting Rights Act, African-Americans had to clear numerous obstacles in order to vote, including passing literacy tests. That legacy, coupled with Grant’s role as the first African-American on the job, made the election board position very challenging. But she collaborated on new registration software for North Carolina and worked closely with the State Board of Elections, eventually becoming a nationally-certified election administrator. It was something she never pursued after Robert’s kidneys failed and they returned to Asheville. After he received his transplant and regained his health, she had no desire to return to election administration. She wanted to start her own business. 

With Grant’s love of stories and history and her concern that many native Ashevilleans were being overlooked, a newspaper was a logical choice. She also had always been an avid reader. Growing up, she remembers an older woman, Miss Alice, who ironed clothes for Johnnie’s mother but couldn’t read. So Grant read the newspaper to her, especially the obituaries. “I loved reading papers,” she says. “I saw how integral a paper could be to a community.”  

She started by talking to someone she knew and trusted, the late Clarence Benton, a family friend who published The Asheville Advocate until he became ill. He agreed there were stories in Asheville that needed to be told and encouraged Grant to take the risk. Further research led her to books on newspaper publishing and then to the Mass Communications Department at UNC-Asheville, where professors allowed Grant and her husband to audit classes. “And then we took a leap of faith,” Grant says. “We always talked about faith but I’ve learned faith without works is dead.” Though Robert isn’t involved in day-to-day operations, he does provide daily support and encouragement.

That support helps Grant get through the long days of producing the paper. She works from an office on South Market Street in Asheville with a passionate group of freelance writers, editors, proofreaders and graphic artists, plus one full-time assistant. Readers can find their monthly issue in 27 locations around Asheville, and Grant hopes to expand further east and into Upstate South Carolina. 

Urban News copy editor Moe White says the publication functions like small community papers of the past, providing writing opportunities for young minority writers. With more than two decades of editing experience, White’s job is to make sure every story adheres to the same standards as those found at larger papers. “The Urban News is not a mainstream paper, but it’s a paper for everyone,” Grant says. “It’s for and about people of all different ethnicities and cultures and walks of life who have consistently contributed to Asheville.” Regular features include community news and history, health information, local and national politics, book and film reviews and opinion pages. Each issue has several profiles—of local artists, community leaders, educators—people whose stories probably won’t be covered elsewhere. Like musician Alma Stone Williams, the first and only black student at Black Mountain College, or Yolanda Bopp, who coordinates Project Justice for All at Pisgah Legal Services for non-English-speaking clients. 

Robert Smith, director of the Asheville-Buncombe Community Relations Council, says people want to talk to Grant because “they know she is not looking for a sensational story, she is looking for a sincere story.” Smith says The Urban News plays an important role in Asheville. “Often, minority communities are only of interest when there is trouble,” he says. “All too often, the good stories are ignored.”

Grant started out writing many of the stories and taking photos herself. Now, her contributors’ list has grown, but she still writes a story or two. She particularly enjoyed writing one in March this year about an operatic composition, Pastime, which celebrates the lives of Negro League baseball players like Hank Aaron and Jackie Robinson. Her story accompanied a longer feature on Asheville’s historic Negro Baseball Leagues. 

In addition to writing and editing, Grant sells most of the paper’s advertising and would like to feature the same advertisers that appear in Asheville’s mainstream publications. But, she says, “I don’t think the broader advertising community was (or is) ready for this paper.” In the October issue, her advertisers included arts organizations, community organizations such as the YWCA, a wide variety of medical and service providers, funeral homes, a local bank and an auto dealership. Given the season, there were also many inches of political advertising. Other than a few retailers and restaurants from the historically African-American Eagle/Market street area known as The Block, there were no advertisers from the popular downtown area that includes Haywood, Lexington, Patton, Broadway, College Street or upper Biltmore Avenue. Grant says she’ll keep knocking on doors. “I think it’s sad because it’s the opposite of what we advocate,” she says. “It’s a testimony to just how divided Asheville’s become.” 

Grant sees this segregation as Asheville’s greatest challenge. “As much as people talk about diversity, there isn’t really an inclusive spirit in Asheville,” she says. “If this community were more galvanized, you would see people walking downtown that don’t look like you, you would see them in the restaurants. The city would have a more cosmopolitan and kindred feel.” This distinction between “diversity” and “inclusiveness” is not necessarily about census data. Grant says it’s vital for Asheville to understand that a true multicultural feel means more than just seeming eclectic or heterogeneous.  According to Grant, both the people and the community’s foundation need to be recognized.  

“The Urban News will just try to continue on our mission of empowering people to tell their stories, no matter what color they are,” she says. Or what language they speak. The Urban News began as a multilingual paper—with some stories translated into Spanish, Russian and Ukrainian. The paper is still translated in Spanish and Russian online.  

For Grant, the most challenging aspect of the publishing business is gaining the trust of people she deals with daily, something that requires sincerity and commitment. It was also difficult stepping out on her own. “I had to take the same energies that I gave to someone else in all my life’s work and redirect it into something that I can do for myself and my community. This is my country,” she continues. “I don’t mean it in a selfish way. This is where my extended family and the community embraced me and let me roam the streets and valleys and the woods and the mountains and made me feel secure. This is the place I call my home.”   

An exhibit called That’s Me! Scenes From Black Asheville Before Urban Renewal, featuring vintage photos of the East End neighborhood where Johnnie Grant grew up, will be on display at the YMI Cultural Center through April 30, 2009. Visit www.ymicc.org or call 828-252-4614 for details.