2022
The RAIL Memorial Project
We are proud to recognize The RAIL (Railroad Incarcerated Laborer) Memorial Project as the winner of our 2022 Outstanding Achievement Award for telling the story and memorializing the work and sacrifice of the thousands of incarcerated laborers who were forced to build the railroad through our region under brutal conditions.
2022 Finalists
Buncombe County Remembrance Project
We are grateful to the team of the Buncombe County Remembrance Project who have joined the national work of the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice to ‘acknowledge and remember individuals lynched in Buncombe County’ as a way to reflect the history of racial and economic injustice and inequity that continues to have an impact on our community.
Buncombe County Special collections
We value the work of the Buncombe County Special Collections and collection manager Katherine Calhoun Cutshall and her colleagues to remove barriers and to encourage all library patrons to discover and contribute to our understanding of our shared past.
AS Long As the Grass Shall Grow
We are grateful for the work of the Buncombe County Register of Deeds Drew Reisinger, collaborating with Cherokee counterparts, for the Cherokee Land Acknowledgement website ‘As Long as the Grass Shall Grow,’ the first step in building relationships built on an understanding of how land was taken from the Cherokee people to create Buncombe County.
Nikwasi Initiative
We are impressed by the work of the Nikwasi Initiative in present-day Franklin, NC, to ‘preserve, protect, and promote culture and heritage in the original homelands of the Cherokee people’ as part of a vision to ‘make intercultural understanding universal.’