Down Payment to Save a Free Black Family's Legacy

Hi, my name is CC Paschal, I'm an audio documentary artist and this is a Hail Mary attempt to preserve history by rescuing the last of my family’s property, an all-too-rare example of homeownership by many generations of free Black Americans.

The House that Hope Built

It is a 3 bedroom house on a third of an acre in Raleigh, North Carolina, and it has been in my family for over 60 years. However, its existence is the result of a far longer story of my family - the Pettiford family - Free People of Color who inherited land in North Carolina starting in the late 1700s through an incredible combination of escaping enslaved ancestors, Revolutionary War veterans who fought to buy their freedom and Indigenous lineage (Elizabeth the Nansemond, the daughter of the tribe’s chief, and the colonial settler she married, James Bass, are my 10th great-grandparents).

The house is also bound up in my own search for identity. I am a journalist and podcast producer whose work has been centered around telling the stories of Black American history and culture at such places as NPR’s Louder than a Riot and Gimlet Media’s Uncivil, for which I and my colleagues won a Peabody Award. These projects inspired me to research my own personal story and to connect to parts of my family that were previously unknown. Following those threads led me to this house and its exceptional history, and I am determined to preserve it.

(Grandma Mary in her house in Raleigh in the 1960s)

The story of Grandma Mary buying the house is a remarkable one. She was the daughter of free Black Americans, who were able to buy their freedom and property from the people who enslaved their ancestors. In 1966, my grandmother made the huge decision to leave her ancestral home in Spring Hope and anchor her family in Raleigh in this house, planting new seeds of opportunities for her descendants to thrive.

And, like so many other Black American families, the small gains of intergenerational wealth are whittled by systemic disadvantages, making it nearly impossible to maintain and build on lifetimes of hard work. Like many Black mothers “making it work”, Grandma Mary sacrificed much to secure and keep this house — and was a ripe victim for mid-century racist and predatory lending practices. Saddled with a balloon mortgage, she had to leverage the equity of her land inheritance to make the Raleigh homestead a reality.

Now her investment for the family’s future generations is taking shape: the house and the land it sits on have doubled in value as Amazon and other major tech players relocate to the Research Triangle, seeking homes in the historically Black southeast Raleigh because of its proximity to downtown.

The Pettiford-Martin family is the only family to ever live on this property as it was built in the 1960s and purchased in 1966, in part through my grandma’s portion of her family’s farmland in nearby Spring Hope. This line of Pettifords settled in Spring Hope over 200 years ago and stewarded over 100 acres of land as cotton and tobacco farmers for most of that time. However, like many rural Black families, much of our ancestral land was lost in the 20th century. This property is the end result of one free family of color’s 400-year migration from being property to owning property.

The house in Raliegh is currently the last property in our family up for sale. It is owned by my cousin, but due to personal circumstances, she needs to sell it this summer. She would love to be able to keep it in the family if at all possible. I do not want to see it fall into other hands.

This house has been a rock in my family - an anchor of support and a place of refuge through many challenges, losses, transitions, and celebrations. Maintaining ownership of it is also an extremely personal issue for me: after 12 years of hopeless searching for my father and his family, I finally found them. This house was among the first artifacts I discovered, along with evidence of my (now deceased) aunts and uncle, and grandpa. It was the first tangible piece of history that filled my imagination with all the lives and loved ones I would never know, but whose history I feel called to honor and preserve.

My sister, artist Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, found her way to the family a few months later and was instantly drawn to this family center as well. We’ve heard tales from our middle sister who spent summers there along with our cousins, celebrating the magic and care that our grandma provided in this house that held so many. Grandma Mary’s legacy is one of profound love, and it is apparent from the care she poured into the space and the way she sheltered so many here. We want to come home to this house as well, knowing that the land itself will regenerate and heal. Regardless of what happens, I will continue to archive, research, and document my family history.

(The Pettiford family of Spring Hope, North Carolina. Grandma Mary pictured, bottom right)

The Vision:

- First I intend to keep it as a haven and refuge for our family. Many of us have known housing insecurity, intersections of incarceration, and abandonment, this represents us always having a place to come home to, and a tangible way to continue building our relationship with our long-lost family.

- My sister and I would love to eventually create a retreat and rest space for Black femme artists in honor of my creative aunts—a DJ and a painter— who due to life constraints never got to invest in their talents fully. I am deeply inspired by community healing through land caretaking, in the spirit of Black Women’s Blue Print .

-I am eager to deepen my connection to living family, as I continue historical research and documentary production about our family.

The Reality:

My family and I are realistic that closing a 40K gap is a tall order, especially as the real estate agent prepares to begin showing the house next week to investors eager to invest in a gentrification opportunity. However, my cousin is willing to sell it to me at the base value of the house, regardless of outside offers, in order to keep it in the family. We are determined not to let this be yet another case of losing grandma’s house, another missed opportunity for intergenerational community reinvestment.

The fact is, it is disproportionally difficult for Black folks to own property in the United States. According to a 2022 Pew study, only 45% of Black Americans own their homes, compared with nearly 75% of White Americans– the biggest disparity since the 60s when my grandmother bought this house. We own this already and just want to be able to maintain what our family has collectively worked so hard for and rightfully earned.

If our family is able to hold on to the property, we see it as part of our duty to contribute to the value and history of the neighborhood by not erasing the legacies that made it possible. Keeping this property in our family not only secures the sacrifices of our grandmother but also would allow us to continue to invest and build on our little bit of intergenerational wealth, seeding a more financially stable core for our family and community through land ownership. The house will go into a family trust for future generations to steward. Once paid off, it could be the home base of our community non-profit work, or even an income-generating property in the future, giving us something to leverage equity for future dreams and creative work within the community.

Other goals of this work:

-Collecting and digitizing the Pettiford family archives

-Collecting family oral history about grandma and memories of the house

-Piloting a podcast series about the experience of finding my family and our 400 year family journey as Black Indigenous stewards of land.

Where we are in the process:

-Gathered family stakeholders

-Site visit in March to evaluate the property

-Secured contractor donation of labor to fix the house up for move in

-10% Down payment between my sister and myself, and any other family -contribution (this fundraiser is to increase the downpayment to $60k so we can meet the minimum asking price)

-Pre-approved for a $175,000 mortgage, $40K short of the $215k asking price,

Time constraints:

My cousins who own the house need to sell by early summer to get a bigger house for their expanding family. They have graciously given us until the end of April to see if we can make a miracle happen...

What YOU can do:

I’m deeply grateful for any support you can give. Financial donations will help me purchase the house, and that is certainly my main goal. But if you are able to help share or otherwise amplify this story, that is a huge help too.

In the event that we don't meet our goal for the downpayment, these funds will be used to begin the process of buying back acreage in Spring Hope to continue our commitment to legacy stewardship.

On behalf of my ancestors, my living relatives, and myself: Thank you.

More about me:

CC (she/they) currently heads editorial content and development at the audio production house, Molten Heart . CC also teaches audio documentary art, most recently at The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies at Maine College of Art & Design. Their book, "Audiocraft, The Art and Business of Making Podcasts that Mean Something" is out later this year from Routledge.

Previously, CC was the series editor of NPR’s critically acclaimed narrative series Louder Than a Riot, about the interconnected rise of mass incarceration and hip-hop culture; as well as Malcolm Gladwell’s Broken Record and the award-winning independent show about intimacy and power, The Heart. In 2017, she was a lead producer on Gimlet Media's Peabody award-winning production Uncivil where she honed her genealogical research skills and first discovered her Melungeon/ Free People of Color ancestry.