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Nina Simone’s N.C. home a ‘National Treasure.’
TRYON – The childhood home of music and civil rights icon Nina Simone, a vacant three-room property that has fallen into a disrepair in recent years, will see a second life.
The 88-year-old home was designated Tuesday as a “National Treasure” by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The organization plans to develop and implement a plan to use the property it calls “deteriorating yet nationally significant.”
The home is where Simone, born Eunice Waymon in 1933, grew up as the sixth of eight children to parents Mary Kate Waymon and the Rev. John Devan Waymon. While living there, Simone taught herself to play piano at age 3 and performed in public for the first time at the Methodist church where her mother preached.
Stephanie Meeks, president and CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said Tuesday that Simone’s “distinctive voice and social critique in the mid-20th century was unlike anything America had ever heard before.”
“And while her musical and social justice burns bright, her childhood home has been neglected,” Meeks said.
The organization plans to work with the property’s four owners — well-regarded black artists Adam Pendleton, Rashid Johnson, Ellen Gallagher and Julie Mehretu — to “chart a new future for the property” that will honor Simone’s contributions to society, she said.
Its National Treasures program uses the organization’s resources to protect a portfolio of at-risk buildings, neighborhoods, communities and landscapes deemed historically significant.
The campaign to rehab and preserve the home will be taken on by the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, an initiative with the Ford Foundation and actress Phylicia Rashad.
Pendleton, a conceptual artist and painter, said he and his fellow artists last year felt “an urgent need” to rescue Simone’s childhood home.
“A figure like Nina Simone — an African American woman from a small town in North Carolina who became the musical voice of the civil rights movement — is extraordinarily relevant to artists working today,” he said. “She constantly expressed her commitment to the democratic values our country espouses by demanding we live up to them.”
Simone died in 2003 at age 70 after a bout with breast cancer.