In a century-old home in East Knoxville, Tenn., a revolution powered by Black art and culture is building a strong community to replace one destroyed by racist housing policy.

Named after a Black neighborhood destroyed by urban renewal, The Bottom is a community-based nonprofit that provides a safe haven for the culturally isolated in the city. A tour around the home, located at 2340 E. Magnolia Ave., proves why. Young minds are empowered by Black literary works in the bookshop. The next wave of podcasters are trained in a community recording studio. Black-grown herbs bring peace and warm vibes in the tea room.

The Bottom stays booked and busy with a lively events calendar that has included hair braiding workshops, ceramics classes and literary readings . A monthly exhibit  showcases the work from Black creatives. Black musicians, comedians and singers flood the home with laughter and creativity during the tiny bookshop concert series.

With all of that going on, executive director Kalil White believes anyone can find their people at The Bottom.

“It’s all Black-affirming in all facets of what we do here,” White said. “When we think about world building or community building, we all have our own views of what community looks like. So when we have people come in, we want them to envision how they see community with us.”

This space is more than just a community center. It’s an act of historical preservation. Founded in 2020 by Dr. Enkeshi El-Amin, a sociologist studying race and place, The Bottom is a product of El-Amin’s archival research. Co-founder of the Black In Appalachia Podcast, El-Amin has a passion for unearthing the hidden histories of Black communities. She moved to Knoxville in 2019 to pursue a doctorate in sociology at the University of Tennessee. Her research revealed a commonality amongst Black Knoxvillians: a sense of displacement and loss of place.

As El-Amin studied the history of the Bottom neighborhood, she sought to create a space with impact. The Bottom was where doctors, educators and business owners were neighbors who looked out for each other. The destruction of the space was more than the loss of Black homes, businesses and neighborhoods. Urban renewal destroyed a sense of communal safety.

By resurrecting the kindredness of a Black neighborhood, the Bottom nonprofit finds itself in an interesting place in the land justice movement.

“I can’t replace the neighborhood, but I can help stir the memory of it,” El-Amin wrote in the recently released literary journal called “The Bottom Line.” “In my time of work here, I have learned that while physical structures were a conduit of community, it was the relationships that really held the community.”

From urban renewal to “negro renewal”

Urban renewal has been a racist bomb boxed in a gilded package. The federal Housing Act of 1949 spurred what would become known as urban renewal programs, which emboldened more than 400 cities, towns and suburbs to erase Black neighborhoods under the guise of cleaning up blighted areas. Black Americans made up 55 percent of the more than 1.2 million Americans who were displaced by these projects.

Knoxville’s first urban renewal project, Riverfront-Willow, desecrated a century’s worth of Black culture in the Bottom neighborhood. According to Beck Cultural Exchange Center, an African-American history museum that has archived the impact of urban renewal, the Riverfront-Willow Project started in 1959 to address the Bottom’s chronic flooding. Residents had to be rescued by the American Red Cross and build their homes on stilts due to yearly flooding from a nearby creek. But when city officials expanded the scope of Riverfront-Willow, it led to the demolition of a lively Black business district that bordered the Bottom neighborhood. By the time the 97-acre project was completed, an estimated 500 dwellings were demolished and 508 Black families were evicted..

In August, former Bottom residents collaborated with Al-Amin’s nonprofit to create a living exhibit called “Streets and Feets.”  White’s heart swelled as elders reminisced about the spaces of their youth. They pointed to where their grandmothers’ homes once stood, down the street from the church where they communed and prayed. They talked about going to the schools that were once the focal point of the neighborhood.

In 2020, the Knoxville City Council passed a resolution apologizing for the city’s role in the urban renewal area. But the tour showed White how the damage was already done. Once the Riverfront-Willow project ended, former residents either scattered to different areas of Knoxville or moved out of state. She said the city rubbed salt in wounds by not recording that history.

“It was a very humbling experience because you don’t even realize that the people who are still living today, who went through such racist and traumatic experiences, just had to act like it never happened because there was no history of it. No one was talking about it,” White said.

The impact of the urban renewal era still harms communities of color today, but under a different name. As gentrification fuels rising housing costs, a Stanford University study discovered that residents from historically Black, gentrifying neighborhoods move to poorer, non-gentrifying areas when they are displaced. White said the loss of Black homes and businesses means lost opportunities to build generational wealth.

“It makes me think about how often we hear, ‘You need to pull yourself up by the bootstraps. My grandmother and great-grandfather had this piece of land,’” White said. “And it’s like, we have those same stories, but the difference in our stories is that we had some land and that land was stolen from us. So it couldn’t be passed down.”

The solution to this issue is community, White believes. It’s a strategy the folks of the original Bottom neighborhood know well. They found sanctuary in each other as they endured the hellscape of the Jim Crow South. White said The Bottom nonprofit is talking to different organizations to coordinate land ownership workshops. But to give people space to vent about the topic without being tone policed or without fear of retaliation from people who think differently is also liberative in itself.

“Community healing occurs through mutual support, amplification of voices, and collective efforts to uplift one another,” White said. “The act of coming together, listening, and empathizing with one another’s experiences not only strengthens the bonds within the community, but also promotes healing and resilience among its members.”

‘Be as Black as you want to be’

Each space at The Bottom contributes to the nonprofit’s ecosystem of Black liberation. The bookshop’s very existence is an act of resistance. The shelves are curated with Black-affirming literature, most of which are on the banned books list. Avid readers can connect with each other through the Book It At The Bottom monthly subscription service. To make sure the literature is accessible to readers of all ages, The Bottom started its LitKidz Program in January, which gives one free book a month to children up to age 18.

The bookshop, which also doubles as a communal space for writers, artists and creatives, is White’s favorite space at The Bottom. With politicians attempting to whitewash Black history, White believes it’s important that children read inspirational books that mirror their lives.

“I feel like a lot of books in libraries and in school libraries are about Black trauma,” White said. “Those things definitely have a space within literature, but also we’re not a monolith, there’s so much joy in our community that should be highlighted.”

The Bottom isn’t just focused on the stories people find on the shelves. The nonprofit gives the community the power to find the stories within themselves with its community podcast studio. Having access to high quality equipment helps the next wave of musicians, oral historians and radio reporters. The Bottom makes sure people aren’t entering the soundwaves alone. The nonprofit helped aspiring podcasters get a good start in the space during its first 8-week podcasting cohort earlier this year.

“It was so important to instill and carry on the tradition of storytelling in our communities,” White  said. “When we think about a lot of our history and how it was kept, it was through oral storytelling. That’s how a lot of those stories stayed alive.”

Whenever there’s a problem involving Black folks in the city, The Bottom tries to create a community-based solution. Knoxville touts itself as a maker city due to its manufacturing history. But White said a lack of inclusiveness in the maker and craft space is a common complaint among Black artists.The disparity in diversity makes it harder for Black creatives and crafters to access the inner networks and opportunities needed to showcase their works.

“We allow our Black artists to come in here and be as Black as they want to be,” White said.  “We’re not telling them that you need to hold off on this because it’s going in this space. Like, create how you feel like you need to create.”

Artist Brittany Rosette-Jones said she makes a new connection every time she works with The Bottom, and it has added to the success of her business By Sunday Love. The lifestyle brand adorns women with clothing and affirmations while also hosting healing events that soothe Black women’s souls. Rosette-Jones has planned a couple of events with The Bottom the past two years, including a cocktail hour celebrating Black-woman owned businesses and a Women’s History Month tea party back in March.

Rosette-Jones said she feels disconnected from her community when she attends other artist events in the city that are not affiliated with The Bottom. She was one of the few – if not the only – Black creative in the space. But the intentionality behind The Bottom’s mission makes the nonprofit the perfect spot for Rosette-Jones to host events centering Black self-care.

“That’s one thing about The Bottom. It’s somewhere you can go for refuge,” Rosette-Jones said. “They’re gonna look like you. They’ll understand your jokes. So for me, The Bottom has been like home for me and I think a lot of people as well.”

The Women’s History tea party was White’s favorite moment of joy at The Bottom. While all women were invited to a night of healing sisterhood, special invitations were sent to the Black women revolutionaries who’ve played a role in transforming East Knoxville. The atmosphere was rich with benevolence as both the youngins and the elders poured love and wisdom into each other. Tears fell and laughter boomed throughout the space as they connected with the works of bell hooks and Toni Morrison. White said it was a beautiful way to honor the community-building legacy of Black women.

“I feel like often – and especially in our community – we don’t give the women who set the tone in our communities their flowers until they’re gone,” White said. “To see us not only cry with each other and have those cross-generational connections, but to share so much love and light, it felt so great.”

Attending events at The Bottom inspired Rosette-Jones to amplify her impact in the community by easing the load of Black motherhood. She connected with mothers of color during a maternal health event called Sister Circle in January. Rosette-Jones strengthened those relationships by hosting a few relaxing mother-focused events at the Knox County Health Department, where she used to work. She is looking forward to planning additional events centering maternal healthcare at The Bottom next year. Rosette-Jones said Black moms deserve reprieve.

“Black women just historically are constantly seen as the prototype for just being strong and not really needing help,” Rosette-Jones said. “So I think a lot of times what has led to the suffocation that Black mothers feel is that they need stuff taken off their plate. If it’s not going to be taken off their plate, then they at least need to have a tribe to help hold them up.”

The Bottom recently celebrated three years of uplifting its community. The staff went with a vibe dripping with Afrofuturism — a genre that uses elements of science fiction and fantasy to restructure Black people’s past and present. Afrobeat spun by local DJ Ty Dye electrified the air by . Black makers sold their merch in a pop-up marketplace. Black Afrofuturistic art hung in the gallery.

It was the perfect way to honor a space that’s making a legacy of transforming grief into a sense of empowerment, White said.

“Afrofuturism makes those connections of looking at all the trauma and all the things that we deal with as African Americans in this society and pumping joy out of it,” she said. “I think that speaks so much for what the bottom does because it is an extension of Afrofuturism. We’re taking so much of this reality that we’re seeing around us, and we’re building a world that we want to see.”