For years, visitors wanting to know about the contributions and lives of Black Americans in Asheville have been fascinated by the Hood Huggers Tour.

And right now I'm with co-founder DeWayne Barton, who's gonna take me on a ride.

We ready to go?

- Yes.

- Let's do it.

Asheville's like one of the fastest gentrifying cities in the country.

So this community is transforming in a real way.

- [Deborah] Hood Huggers offers several different tours, both walking and driving through legacy Black neighborhoods.

DeWayne steers you to parts of Asheville once solely occupied or owned by African Americans due to segregation.

As we drive around, he connects the past to the present.

Today he took me to Burton Street in West Asheville, home to his family for four generations.

- With the tours, the goal is to have young people in the community be the ones that keep the spaces up.

A elder will tell the story, those real-life stories, a church or organization that's doing work in the community right now to improve it.

- The Hood Huggers Tour is more than what you might expect.

This is just almost overwhelming.

I mean- - Oh, right.

- What in the world?

So how did all of this come together?

- Picking up trash, [Deborah laughs] picking up trash in the neighborhood.

And historically, African American places that they would tear down, we would go grab the door, the sign, a window, anything we could, and incorporate it in the space, make large and small sculptures of it, and keep telling the history even though it's not here anymore.

This section right here is called "Make Our Water Safe, Surrounded by Water, None Can We Drink."

This is "Ancestors in the Garden, Emotional Dysfunction of Consumption," and up top is "Urban Nightmare, Silent Screams."

So a lot of this is picking up garbage, cleaning out the river.

If we couldn't make the neighborhood safer, we could make the neighborhood clean.

We could clean up, so that's what we did.

You're gonna see sculptures that talk about social justice and environmental justice all at the same time, and, of course, the art of resilience of people who created a way out of no way in spite of all the challenges of the past and present.

- Sometimes I ask, you know, "Why would anyone want to relive this?"

But you have to because it's the resilience that it needs to remind you of.

They went through so much, and let it not all be in vain.

The tour ended in an empty lot that looks like an empty lot, but in this quiet, uncluttered space, DeWayne sees promise.

So where are we right now?

- All right, this is our final stop.

This is the future site of The Blue Note Junction.

The founder of Burton Street was E.W.

Pearson.

That was a store that he built back in the early 1920s, and we wanna bring it full circle and put that same name in the future.

It's gonna be a health and business resiliency hub designed to support the region.

- Well, that's an exciting future, and I look forward to seeing it come to fruition.

[DeWayne laughs] Thank you for the tour.

- Yes, thank you.

- To book your walking, driving, or specialty tour of Asheville with Hood Huggers, go to hoodhuggers.com.