A Beloved House, A Beloved Community

Wooden double doors bordered by a pale blue arch creak open, allowing beams of sunlight into the house. Dark wooden planks line the floors inside, an ornate spiraling staircase winds up to the second story. Sounds of conversation come from the back of the house, where a food line has formed. In a room across the hall, workers engage in deep discussion with clergymen and local business leaders.

For years, this was the Beloved Community Hospitality House. The property has been largely unused since the pandemic. But many in Greensboro hope the house and its former purpose will be restored. “It’s a community space,” said Joyce Johnson, the founding executive-in-residence of the Beloved Community Center. “It’s what it always has been, where everyone is truly welcome as long as everyone is able to respect each other.”

Built in 1876 as the home of George and Nancy Kestler, the pale yellow house at 437 Arlington Street in Greensboro celebrates its 150th birthday this year. 

In the nineties and early 2000s, the house was filled with activists, students, religious leaders, members of the unhoused community, even city staff.

One of the few remaining Italianate-style buildings left in the city and one of a handful of houses built before 1880, it remains structurally sound. But it’s fallen into disrepair over the last few decades, with evidence of decay inside. 

The Beloved Community Center of Greensboro is now looking to revitalize the property as a community hub. 

The group came one step closer to its goal last month when the Greensboro City Council unanimously approved its application to designate the building as a Guilford County Historic Landmark. The move solidifies the importance of the building and the organization and offers tax credits to help with renovation efforts.

Irving Allen, at-large city councilmember, worked and organized at the Beloved Community Center for years. It’s where he got his start in local organizing, he said.

“I think it’s great not only for Beloved, but the city of Greensboro,” Allen said. “The property has a deep historical connection with architecture, but also the service and brand of Greensboro and activism.”

‘A Vision, A Dream’

The home sits just a few lots away from the Beloved Community Center in downtown Greensboro and was originally built for the Kestler family in 1876 during Reconstruction. At the time, the house was situated in a predominantly white part of the city known as Shieldstown, after the original owner of the tract, Joseph Shields.

Segregation kept Black families further south in the neighborhoods of Warnersville and Ole Asheboro. Local businessman George Kestler and his wife Nancy were Greensboro socialites, according to the building’s application for historic designation. In 1905, the family sold the house to their neighbor, W. A. Fields. Over the next few decades, the home changed hands a number of times. Peggy Whalen-Levitt sold the property to the Beloved Community Center of Greensboro (BCC) in 1995.

“The house…flows from a vision, a dream,” said Johnson, who helped found BCC with her late husband, Rev. Nelson Johnson, in 1991. 

Two years later, the couple started Faith Community Church, currently housed within the Beloved Community Center at 417 Arlington Street.

“There was an active vision to bring people from disparate places to understand each other,” Johnson said. “We would call it the Beloved Community Center and build a beloved community with dignity, worth, equality for all.”

Stemming from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a “beloved community,” the Johnsons and others had been cultivating a grassroots, locally centered coalition built on the ideals of social justice. In the mid 2000s, they helped lead a Truth and Reconciliation Commission project focused on the 1979 Greensboro Massacre. In the years since, the organization has been involved in issues of police brutality, immigrant rights, voting access, and more.

The group originally sought to buy the house because of its location in an area marked by poverty. 

In the late fifties, the area around the house was prosperous. A supermarket existed up the street, and several attractive two-story homes set the landscape. It was where the wealthy lived before they lived in Irving and Fisher Park, Johnson said.

“All of this was a white community,” said Lewis A. Brandon III, Beloved’s executive-in-residence and the organization’s historian of sorts. “But in the mid sixties, there was white flight and all the white folks started moving to the suburbs.”

By the nineties, when BCC looked to buy the property, the area was predominantly Black and rundown due to decades of disinvestment. That’s where the organization wanted to plant its roots.

“It was in the heart of a poor community,” Johnson said. “Our view is if you focus on those who are the least respected in the community, then everybody gets lifted up.”

‘A Community Building Effort’

While BCC officially purchased the house in 1995, it began making payments on it a few years earlier. The organization had an agreement with Whalen-Levitt, who offered a payment plan without interest. Collecting donations from members of the community, the group gathered enough—about $70,000—to pay it off.

“All of the money was from individual donations from people primarily in Greensboro,” Johnson said. “The purchase was literally from nickels, dimes, five hundred here, a hundred there. There were no big foundations, no city funds, no philanthropic support…. It was a community-building effort.”

The Beloved Community Center and Faith Community Church are known and respected citywide now. That wasn’t always the case. Many considered Nelson Johnson, who passed last year, a militant radical, even before the events of the Greensboro Massacre. The late Jim Melvin, one of Greensboro’s longest-serving and most influential mayors, once called Johnson “the most dangerous man in Greensboro.” Years later, city leaders—including Melvin—would praise Johnson and his work.

Jeff Thigpen, Guilford County’s register of deeds, was a Guilford College student in the mid 1990s. He was working on a paper about poverty and empowerment when his professor suggested he speak to people locally. But he cautioned Thigpen against speaking to Nelson Johnson.

“That was a flashing red light that I should talk to him,” said Thigpen.

Eventually, Thigpen connected with BCC, including with the Johnsons. He quickly became involved with the organization, helping further its mission to understand issues at the intersection of race, class, politics, and faith.

One of the organization’s first efforts in the house was feeding people experiencing homelessness.

“We got up to feeding up to 200 people per day,” Joyce Johnson said. “It was beyond the feeding. It was the building of community, the relationships, and embracing the whole idea of being a neighbor.”

People who needed an address for resources used 437 Arlington Street as their home base. Community members came and dined with their unhoused neighbors. Years later, when the Interactive Resource Center looked to open its doors as the city’s first day center for those experiencing homelessness, they came to the Beloved Hospitality House, as it became known, for advice.

Groups without a meeting place—from environmental activists and student leaders to Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous chapters—all found a home within the house’s walls.

One of its most significant impacts came in the mid-nineties when Kmart workers began meeting at the Faith Community Church, which was operating out of the house at the time.

Hundreds of workers fed up with conditions at the local Kmart distribution center joined others across the country in boycotting the corporation. At the time, Kmart was the prime sponsor of the Greater Greensboro Open golf tournament, which would eventually become the Wyndham Championship. Despite the prestige of the event, workers grew tired of low wages, mismanagement, and harsh working conditions at the distribution sites. To protest, they sat in the middle of the golf course on the ninth hole.

“They became demonized,” said Thigpen, who was working for BCC at the time. 

But then things started to shift.

Workers, local faith leaders, business owners, and city leaders began meeting at the house to come to a solution. Over the next year or so, the disparate groups started to understand each other.

“In a way, it was like negotiating Middle Eastern peace,” Thigpen said. “We got everyone in the same room.”

Those efforts led to a town meeting, one of the first of its kind, according to Thigpen, to discuss economic issues happening in the city.

“That was when the house began to take on its own identity in that space,” he said. “It’s a physical house, but it’s a space where people want to call Greensboro to its best self and iteration across all divisions.”

By the time the community finally paid off the house in 1995, Thigpen was the register of deeds. He was invited back to the house and buried the deed in the yard.

“The burying became an opportunity for people to love each other and the ground it was buried in,” Thigpen said. “It was an act of affirmation and the humanity of all of us.”

The deed is still buried there, Thigpen said.

In 2000, Beloved Community Center and Faith Community Church moved operations to a nearby building. During the pandemic, the organizations largely stopped using the house. Now, with the historic designation, the group wants to renovate the property and revitalize it as a community gathering place.

“Our thinking is putting it to use in a way that benefits the community,” said Brigette Rasberry, BCC’s executive director. “Have it as a meeting place where we can…solve some of the issues and problems that impact the people of Greensboro.”

‘Remembering Our History’

On Feb. 17, the Greensboro City Council unanimously approved a county historic landmark designation for the house. The vote came after the Guilford County Historic Preservation Commission also unanimously voted to recommend the move.

Much of the reason why the building was approved comes down to its significance as an architectural landmark rather than the work that took place within its walls.

The house is eligible for historic preservation based on its 1876 Italianate architecture, according to Samantha Stewart, founder and principal consultant of Gate City Preservation LLC, which helped put together the group’s proposal.

Italianate architecture, popular in the mid 1800s, is defined by double-door entries, a central tower aesthetic, and specific architectural detailing in the millwork. One of the prominent examples of this architectural style in Greensboro is the Blandwood Mansion, a national historic landmark.

The Beloved house is just one of two such structures on Arlington Street built in the late 19th century. While the building’s interior may need some care, its structure and many of its original features—like its winding staircase, plaster walls, closets, and doors—remain intact.

“It’s about the quality of the integrity of the architecture,” Stewart said. “There’s still so much of the historic materials and historic designs. There haven’t been a lot of changes to the exterior and interior.”

With its local historic recognition, BCC will get tax credits and be eligible to get money back from state and federal governments if they renovate the property, Stewart said.

Stewart is currently working on an application to get the building on the National Register of Historic Places. If approved, it would add another layer of protection from federal construction projects that might impact the building.

“The reality is that we are very locally based, but we’ve always had national and international reach,” Johnson said about the bid for national recognition. “People come, and they learn from what has happened through Beloved’s work with Greensboro.”

While the current state of the home is significant for its design, in another 50 years, the work of Beloved within its walls will become significant, too.

“It’s remembering our history,” Stewart said. “It’s responsible of us to keep these buildings. Not just for us, but for future generations.”

The group now plans to launch a fundraiser to restore the house in hopes of, once again, continuing social justice work through local support.“It shows that if this old raggedy building can still have life and come back and serve the community,” Johnson said. “That means you and I can do the same.”