Sean Palmer arrived at YMI Cultural Center near the end of a rough year.
Earlier in 2024, Palmer M.Div.’11 had lost his director role at UNC Wilmington’s Upperman African American Cultural Center as a result of a diversity, equity and inclusion ban in North Carolina’s public universities. Reassigned and demoted after eight years in the position, he knew it was time to leave. Meanwhile on the other side of the state, YMI – an independent African American cultural center in downtown Asheville – sought a director. On the heels of Hurricane Helene’s devastation in western North Carolina, Palmer gave an emphatic yes.
“I have always felt like my calling to Black communities was sacred,” he says.
YMI Cultural Center – called the Young Men’s Institute at its 1892 founding – is a remnant of Asheville’s Black business district, which has been largely lost to gentrification. In Wilmington, Palmer remains supply pastor of Chestnut Street Presbyterian Church, a congregation with roots in the mid-19th century. Starting with an assistant directorship at Duke’s Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture, Palmer has made African American cultural centers his career. They’re “little Wakandas,” he says, referring to the Afrofuturist utopia of “Black Panther” fame. Community members are as likely to lay their burdens down in a cultural center, as he has seen, as in a church.
In Palmer’s experience, the Black church and community center are two sides of the same coin. The life he has lived, as defined by the highest highs and the lowest lows, as defined by selfless grace and intense hardship alike, helps him see their value – and their potential.
“I have had the best of everything before, and I’ve had the least of everything,” Palmer says.
“I have seen wealth in extremes, and I have seen poverty in extremes.”
Palmer was born to a teenaged mother and a deeply traumatized Vietnam veteran in Columbia, South Carolina. For his first 12 years, however, Palmer and his brother were raised by their foster grandparents, who were well-educated, moderately affluent pillars of their church and community. They gave him stability and structure. At Second Calvary Baptist Church in downtown Columbia, young Palmer felt safe. He felt loved.
“They never got to see the fruition of their generosity,” Palmer says.
When he was in middle school, Palmer’s foster grandparents died within months of each other. Life turned hard. Palmer went back to his mother, with whom he lived in a storage shed at one point. He was also supported by his mother’s family – a grandmother who took him in; an uncle and aunt who took him fishing and to choir practice – who returned consistency to Palmer’s life and ensured he got an education.
It wasn’t until college that Palmer began to unpack his upbringing. For years, he was ashamed of the hard parts. At Macalester College in Minnesota, Palmer was one of a handful of Black students. He simply put his head down and studied. Then he sought his first master’s at Clark Atlanta University, where the HBCU environment put him at ease. Finally, at Duke, Palmer found the Mary Lou Williams Center. In 2011, divinity degree in hand, Palmer stuck around as its assistant director.
“I went to the Black cultural center at Duke and never looked back,” he says.
Palmer felt the same sacred magnetism from YMI. The building’s chestnut and mahogany wood, lovingly worked by African American hands, is a tangible reminder of its humanity. A cultural center is a place to heal, gather and learn – a place to celebrate birthdays and graduations and undo injustice, Palmer says.
Yet community members the most in need of a cultural center’s gifts often see learning about one’s identity as a luxury, not a mandate, Palmer admits. Someone whose family’s house and land are threatened by gentrification may not immediately see the value of a cultural center.
Palmer gets it. He knows pain. He bears actual scars from his childhood. He knows chaos and instability. And he knows that the Black church and its cousin the cultural center brought him solace and purpose. “You need community more when you are going through hell,” Palmer says. “You need somebody to remind you that this is not the end. You need people to point to the possibilities of life.”