Civil rights came to Asheville in the 1960s, as did Minnie Jones. Jones, a young woman from Spartanburg, SC, had previously worked with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to secure voting rights in the deep south.
She had relatives in Asheville – Gilbert Sligh, the cop; Ruben Daly, the lawyer; Jesse Ray, the funeral director – and when the NAACP received the call to incorporate public housing there, she was nominated. Jones moved into the Pisgah View Apartments, which used to be all white. The police and project staff protected them from reprisals.
Shortly after Jones’ arrival, she was called to a meeting with Carl Johnson, the head of tenants at the Hillcrest Apartments. The tenants’ association protested against unjust rental agreements.
At the meeting with Johnson were AC Mitchell, an African American citizen; City Administrator Weldon Weir; and, Jones recalls, “that big old white man, Claude DeBruhl, sitting in that big old chair.” DeBruhl was a MP.
“This meeting was about me,” continues Jones. “The big man in the chair greeted me in Asheville and North Carolina. He told me he had good feelings for me and he knew I would do a good job. But one thing I had to do was get involved in politics . “
Jones was a quick learner and was able to speak up about the needs and rights of Asheville’s low-income African-American residents. Her list of achievements over the next four decades has expanded from national committees to the poor children and sick community members she has encountered.
The Minnie Jones Family Health Center on Haywood Road is one of the testimonies of their efforts. Her two most recent awards are the Sophie Dixon and Grace Dorn Leadership Award from the Asheville NAACP and the 2009 Buncombe County Democratic Woman of the Year Award.
Jones looks back on her origins as an activist in Birmingham, Ala., Where she left for personal, not political reasons. Jones’s landlady took them under their wing.
“I went to church with her,” Jones says, “and Martin Luther King was preparing to set up this march, and they asked for volunteers and she said,“ Do that. ”So I went and I reported at me. “
A few days later, the march organizers knocked on the landlady’s door to get Jones and the landlady to hold secret meetings.
“When we were getting ready for the march,” Jones says, “we went to a meeting and Martin Luther King was there himself, telling us the rules and regulations and what he wanted us to do.
“He told us about the Lord and how the Lord would do this – not he, not us. The Lord will guide us, and the Lord will help us make the difference and He would take it.” us to the promised land.
“He told us we had to be thick-skinned. … He told us about ugly, he told us about cute, he told us about sour. And he told us everything.
“And then he wanted to know if we would really accept God. It was like being baptized or renewed – recreated. And then he wanted to know if we really believed in following God because when you didn’t. ” I believe in following God, he really didn’t want you in the crowd because we were nonviolent. And I had to work on it. But I didn’t have a bad spirit and he said I would do good.
“Martin Luther King told me I would do good,” Jones repeated.
Rob Neufeld wrote the weekly column “Visiting Our Past” for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. Minnie Jones, a lifelong civil rights activist and staunch advocate of public housing and health care for Asheville’s working poor, died in 2015 at the of 81. This column originally appeared in September 2009.
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