For any driver coming up Exit 3A, off N.C. 147, the eight-mile artery connecting the Research Triangle Park to central Durham, one building stands out.
Located at the corner of Fayetteville Street and East Lakewood Avenue, across from a smattering of homes and beside a duo of hair studios, the red brick shoulders of the Hayti Heritage Center transmit a sturdy gravitas to a neighborhood that has seen more turmoil than any other in Durham.
This is the view that Tarryn Henry, the Hayti Heritage Center’s new executive director, has in mind when she thinks to three years from now, when the multisport 2029 FISU World University Games—which will see more than 7,000 international athletes and officials and a projected 600,000 spectators—will take place in the Triangle, with the nearby North Carolina Central University campus slated to house student-athletes.
“How are we welcoming people to Durham when they come off 147 and pass through the Hayti District to get to NCCU?” Henry said. “What does investment in our area look like? What do we need to do now to get ready for 2029? None of these things happen overnight.”
Last year, the center celebrated its golden anniversary—50 years since it was established as a nonprofit arts and education center. Since then, it has been a place people seek out for culture—to see jazz greats, from Dexter Gordon to Branford Marsalis, and attend annual events like Jambalaya Soul Slam and the Hayti Heritage Film Festival. Each year, its seasonal programming blends local and national talent.
“The role that we play is to, yes, highlight the history of Hayti and Black brilliance in Durham and in North Carolina,” said Monèt Marshall, the center’s artistic director, “but then also to be a space where Black artists, thinkers, and culture workers can make the history today that we’re looking back on in 50 years.”
Henry was appointed interim director in February, following the departure of longtime executive director Angela Lee in May 2025; when I spoke with her in July, right after her new role officially began, the nonprofit was about to announce its new season.
Programming was on her mind, then, but also she was thinking about the future—about what an event like the World University Games could mean for Hayti, and what role the nonprofit has in leading conversations about those changes.
John Kornegay.
“The center and the church—if we go back to 1891, into 1920, into 1950—we have always been a convener,” said Henry. “We have been a gathering place for the community to come and to have discussions about anything related to us. We still see ourselves as that convening place.”
While the center’s official origin dates to 1975, its history goes deeper—all the way back to 1868, when the land it sits on was purchased by Edian Markham, a formerly enslaved person and AME missionary, who then formed a congregation and erected an open-air “brush arbor” as its first worship site. In 1891, the foundation of St. Joseph’s AME was laid.
The building then bore witness to decades of change: reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement; the rise of a prosperous “Black Wall Street;” and destruction of that prosperity when N.C. 147 was constructed through the heart of Hayti in 1968, cutting the neighborhood off from downtown and displacing over 4,000 families and 500 businesses.
“The center and the church—if we go back to 1891, into 1920, into 1950—we have always been a convener. We still see ourselves as that convening place.”
tarryn henry, executive director, hayti heritage center
Across decades, residents have waited for the structural wrongs of the past to be righted, watching as various stakeholder groups have advocated for the neighborhood’s economic revitalization and development proposals (such as the controversial Heritage Square shopping center rezoning last year) have come and gone. In 2024, the city allotted $10 million to the long-planned Fayetteville Street Corridor project with money earmarked for things like street improvements and historic preservation.
References to N.C. 147 are not offhand—the freeway is deeply symbolic, and its history is in the background as the nonprofit thinks ahead to the World University Games, an event with a potential local impact that has been compared, at a scaled-down level, to that of the 1996 Olympics on Atlanta.
“Are we, as an institution, capitalizing on the investment that’s coming from corporate, from the city, from the county, from the state, to make sure that even after the games are gone, our residents are still able to feel and have access to the investment that’s here?” Henry said. “What needs to happen with our streets, our sidewalks? What needs to happen with the lighting from [N.C.] Central all the way to downtown?”
“We’re not just a place of preserving what was but also preserving what is, right? How do we support the next Ernie Barnes? How do we support the next Baba Chuck?”
Monèt Marshall, artistic director,
hayti heritage center
Cultural memory looms large in Hayti. Community elders can still remember back to a time when the neighborhood was a lodestar that drew in national leaders and nurtured musicians, doctors, and lawyers.
The center plans to have programming during the 2029 games, Henry said, that “provides a comprehensive entry point for the visiting athletes, their families, and fans.” She draws a connection between sports and the arts in Durham, noting that Ernie Barnes, one of the most famous figures to come from Hayti, was the official artist for the 1984 Olympics.
“We’re not just a place of preserving what was but also preserving what is, right?” she continued. “How do we support the next Ernie Barnes? How do we support the next Baba Chuck?”
In the present moment, though, there’s plenty to keep Henry and her colleagues at the center busy.
On August 19, the season informally launched with an event featuring National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates. The talk sold out a month and a half in advance. Attendees, dressed up for the night, packed the pews on the main floor and filled the balcony. While speaking about his latest book, The Message—whose longest essay recounts a trip to the West Bank and compares Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to Jim Crow segregation—Coates said he felt at home in Hayti, comfortable enough to speak hard truths.
In response, Ajamu Dillahunt-Holloway, one of the evening’s moderators and an assistant professor of African American History and Public History at NC State University, told Coates it was no surprise he felt at home, noting that Durham in 2018 became the first U.S. city to end police training with Israeli forces.
“It’s a legacy of people fighting here,” Dillahunt-Holloway said.
Such events are in keeping with Durham’s reputation for drawing in Black changemakers, over the years, to cultural spaces like the Ar-Razzaq Islamic Center, NorthStar Church of the Arts, and the Hayti Heritage Center.
“Everyone made a point to stop in Durham and to stop, specifically, in Hayti,” Henry said, listing off such luminaries as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Zora Neale Hurston, and W.E.B. Du Bois. “Sometimes it was White Rock Baptist Church, right across the street, and sometimes it was at St. Joseph’s.”
In this next season audiences can expect other household names, like Deesha Philyaw and Phonte Coleman, alongside programming that includes a four-part jazz and poetry series, a live recording of the popular podcast Our Ancestors Were Messy, and the Aggie Eagle Gospel Classic, a gospel showcase in which NCCU and North Carolina A&T face off. (Henry and Marshall are graduates of each school, respectively—“Tarryn and I are a house divided,” Marshall jokes.”)
Then there’s Steps@Hayti, a free event held Thursday nights in September, in which the center’s parking lot will transform into an outdoor dance hall featuring tutorials from across the African diaspora. The season’s programming is themed around the idea of “cross-pollination,” Henry said, and this blending—local and national, pedigreed and parking lot—reflects that.
“This is the way that we exist in the Black community. We have people from all over the world who have moved to the United States, whether it was 50 or five years ago” said Henry, who herself moved to the U.S. from Antigua when she was 7 years old. “We want that to be reflective, not just in the programming, but also in the ways that we communicate out to the community—the ways that we invite people in, the ways that we treat them when they’re here.”
Marshall said that the programming is also reflective of how the nonprofit seeks to ensure it’s “living and breathing … not just a place that people talk about in a past tense.”
A multidisciplinary artist, Marshall has lived in Durham for more than a decade and knows firsthand the challenges that cultural workers face in trying to make a living. This background has fed into the center’s Artist Membership program, launched last spring. It offers amenities like workshops and ticket discounts, but its primary facet is access to work space—something increasingly hard to come by—at a sliding scale of $10-$35 a month.
“Our city has changed so much,” Marshall said. “A big challenge is knowing where we can go. We’ve lost so many theaters and spaces. I think the major challenge is like, where do we make our work now?”
Marshall is on the creative engagement team for the Durham Cultural Roadmap, a city initiative to help shape future arts funding and programming. She says the need for more arts funding—alongside promotion opportunities and space to both work and perform—has come up consistently.
With new arts spaces like Boardinghouse Arts and Skin and Bones Theater slated to open this fall, the tide may be turning.
The real story, Marshall emphasizes, is that these changes come from within.
“These are artists making artist spaces,” Marshall said. “It’s folks who have been here for 10, 15, 20 years or more who are tired of having the same conversations. Many of us have stayed and been like, ‘I’m actually really invested in this place.’”
“We are very excited about our world neighbors that will come for the games,” she added. “I’m also thinking about our day-to-day neighbors.”
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