Interview with Clifford Cotton

Interview with Clifford Cotton

African American baseball team owners

African American businesspeople

Agricultural exhibitions

Asheville (N.C.)

Baseball teams

Cities and towns -- Growth

Community development

Cotton, Clifford

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People -- Officials and employees

Neighborhoods

African Americans

Clifford Cotton talks about his grandfather, Edward. W. Pearson, who founded the Burton Street community and started the Buncombe County District Agricultural Fair to celebrate the African American agricultural community of Asheville. E. W. Pearson was also a business owner, the founding president of the Asheville chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founder and president of the Blue Ridge Colored Baseball League, as well as many other organizations. Cotton left Asheville after high school in 1961 to pursue a music career. Upon his return in 2017, he found his community and childhood neighborhood had changed dramatically. He shares what he remembers of his grandfather, growing up in the Burton Street community, and playing gigs around the Asheville area while attending Stephens-Lee High School. Cotton also discusses his efforts to protect what remains of Burton Street from an I-240 expansion.

Cotton, Clifford

WCU Oral History Collection - Introduction to Oral History

2022-03-26

Cadmus, Emily

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/CNE/1.0/

sound recordings

transcripts

interviews

eng

Sound

Text

63727

https://southernappalachiandigitalcollections.org/object/63727

Buncombe County (N.C.)

Asheville (N.C.)

North Carolina, Western

0:48:45(duration)

13(pages)

Oral Histories of Western North Carolina