Charles H. Parrish, Jr. Freedom Park

Settlement: Side 1

Between 1750 and 1840, British colonists and later United States citizens acquired and settled the millions of square miles between the Appalachians Mountains and the Mississippi River.  The Ohio River bisects this vast region, flowing 981 miles from Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh) to the Mississippi River with only one natural break in navigation at the rapids misnamed “the Falls of the Ohio.”

To the north, in the “Old Northwest,” dozens of Native American societies coexisted with thinly scattered French fur trappers and traders.  Far to the south, the “Five Civilized Indian Nations”—the Choctaws, Cherokees, Chickasaw, Creeks and Seminoles—occupied most of the modern southern states.

Kentucky was the crucial middle ground, the first American “west,” settled after the French and Indian War (1754-1763) by explorers and land-hungry pioneers primarily from Virginia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.  However, because Kentucky was an extension of Virginia, the state with largest slave population in the nation, Kentucky was settled both by slaveholders and those in search of what Daniel Boone called “a good poor man’s country.”  Thus, the search for freedom and prosperity for some meant displacement and enslavement for others.

Settlement was not without its challenges.  The Iroquois Confederacy, the Shawnee, the Delaware, the Chickasaws and the Cherokees all claimed some portion of the region and resisted settlement by launching frequent raids well into the 1780s—one of which cost the life of Abraham Lincoln, grandfather of the future president, at Long Run Park near Louisville on May 19, 1786

Notwithstanding the dangers, the “Buzzel . . . about Kentuck . . . as a new found Paradise” attracted thousands of hopeful settlers from the east.

Settlement: Side 2

In 1778, General George Washington issued secret orders to Lieutenant Colonel George Rogers Clark to raise an army, descend the Ohio River and attack British strongholds in the Northwest Territory.  Clark mustered roughly 150 men and, with several families of settlers, the Falls of the Ohio on May 27, 1778, landing on Corn Island offshore from modern downtown Louisville.  On June 26, 1778, with a portentous full solar eclipse in progress, Clark departed for Kaskaskia and later Vincennes where he won decisively and secured American ownership of the Northwest. In the spring of 1779, the settlers moved ashore and, at a public meeting on April 17, 1779, established the town of Louisville in honor of Louis XVI of France.

The history of Louisville, from the beginning, has been many interlocking histories.  British colonists and European immigrants, poor frontiersmen and members of the Virginia gentry with political and family connections that led to massive land-grants—all crossed the Appalachians seeking opportunities unavailable to them in the east.  Although the Falls determined the location of Louisville, the geography of the Ohio Valley near the Falls determined for two generations the overall patterns of settlement in Jefferson County.Early settlements in the county radiated from a network of partially fortified “stations.”  Settlers lived in or near such stations, in which they sought refuge when threatened by Native American raiding parties.

Steamboats appeared on the Ohio River in 1811 and, by 1830, a canal coiled around the Falls of the Ohio, and Louisville evolved from a frontier outpost into the key city on the border between North and South.  By 1850, Louisville was the tenth largest city in the nation—a thriving urban, mercantile and industrial city in a largely rural and agricultural state.

Selected Sources

Aron, Stephen.  How the West was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996): 48.

Bakeless, John.  Background to Glory:  The Life of George Rogers Clark (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1957): 54-60, 119, 234-235.

Clark, Thomas D.  A History of Kentucky (Ashland, KY: The Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1988): 19-77.

Durrett, Reuben T.  The Centenary of Louisville (Louisville: John P. Morton and Company, 1893): 44-46

Filson, John.  The Discovery, Settlement and Present of Kentucke (Wilmington, Delaware, 1784).

Hammon, Neal 0.  “Early Louisville and the Beargrass Stations.”  Filson Club History Quarterly, 52(1978): 147-165.

Harrison, Lowell H., and Klotter, James C.  A New History of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997).

Henderson, A. Gwynn.  Kentuckians before Boone (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992).

History of the Ohio Falls Cities and their Counties, Vol. I (Cleveland: L. A. Williams, 1882): 15-20.

Hurt, R. Douglas.  The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720-1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

McMurtrie, Henry.  Sketches of Louisville (Louisville:  S. Penn, 1819): 171-180

Pirtle, Alfred.  James Chenoweth:  The Story of the Earliest Boys of Louisville and Where Louisville Started (Louisville: Standard Printing Company, 1921).

Tapp, Hambleton.  A Sesqui-centennial History of Kentucky (Louisville: Historical Record Association, 1945).

Waldman, Carl.  Atlas of the North American Indians (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1985).

07/19/10

Slavery: Side 1

In late August 1619, the first Africans brought to British North America were sold at Jamestown, Virginia, more than a century after slave trade and slavery began in the Caribbean and Latin America.  Although the institution of slavery was defined legally by the 1660s, indentured servants from Europe were the principal labor force employed in the early colonies until Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676.  Thereafter, slavery grew rapidly, particularly in the southern colonies—with the black population increasing from under 50,000 in 1700 to over 1,000,000 in 1800, and eventually to over 4,400,000 in 1860.

Slavery crossed the Appalachians with the early setters of Kentucky.  Although some objected strongly to the institution on moral or religious grounds, the land- and slave-holding interests of the transplanted Virginia gentry prevailed and were protected by the first Kentucky constitution in 1792.  Anti-slavery efforts in later years were largely symbolic, conservative and committed to the goal of colonization, i.e., the removal of free African Americans.

The invention of the Cotton Gin (1793) made cotton cultivation immensely profitable, but Kentucky’s temperate climate and comparatively short growing season would not support the large plantations and large slave-holdings that became common in the Gulf States after the War of 1812.  As a result, only an estimated 20 percent of Kentucky families owned slave property and those who did owned an average of only 4.3 bondspersons per slaveholding family, both much smaller averages than in the deep South.  By 1860, African Americans were more than 20 percent of the state population, compared to slave majorities in Mississippi and South Carolina, and near majorities in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana.

Paradoxically, Kentucky need not have been a slave state, since slavery was marginal to its core economy.  However, once slavery took root, its roots in Kentucky society and life-ways went deep indeed.

Slavery: Side 2

At least two African Americans were present at the founding of Louisville.  One was Cato (Watts), the semi-legendary enslaved African American fiddler who was later executed for killing his owner.  Another was Caesar (1758-1836), who accompanied George Rogers Clark on the campaigns against Kaskaskia and Vincennes.  Other settlers recalled the presence of “Negroes in the cabins,” although precise numbers remain elusive.

As Louisville grew into a major urban center, slavery declined in importance and the percentage of enslaved African Americans in the city shrank from 36.5 percent in 1810 to 10.0 percent in 1860.  Still, declining numbers did not translate into better conditions.  Enslaved African Americans worked primarily as laborers and domestic servants.  Urban slave quarters were often out buildings or backrooms.  Clothing was coarse and limited in variety.  Less and lower quality food was available.  The lash was applied liberally, although less often publicly, and enslaved African Americans were sometimes executed for stealing a few dollars’ worth of goods.  At least one slave conspiracy was discovered in the area in 1812, for which an enslaved African American named Reubin was executed, and there were many other conspiracy “scares.”  And, on May 14, 1857, one African American committed suicide and three others were lynched after being acquitted of killing the Joyce family in December 1856.

Perhaps the most controversial feature of Kentucky slavery was the domestic slave trade—which shifted thousands of enslaved African Americans each year from the upper South to the cotton-growing regions of the lower South.  By the 1840s, numerous domestic slave trade businesses could be found in Louisville as well—with slave pens located in the old downtown area of the city.

Slavery was both an economic and social institution, a way of life in which the myth of black inferiority was used to rationalize the inherent evils of human bondage.  Essential to this necessary fiction in Kentucky was the popular belief that slavery was mild and that relations between blacks and whites were good.  However, there is no evidence to support this belief and certainly no testimony from African Americans to corroborate it.

Selected Sources

Bancroft, Frederic.  Slave-Trading in the Old South (Baltimore: J. H. Furst Company, 1931).

Coleman, J. Winston, Jr.  Slavery Times in Kentucky (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1940).

Eslinger, Ellen.  “The Shape of Slavery on the Kentucky Frontier, 1775-1800.”  The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 92(1994): 1-23.

Hudson, J. Blaine.  “References to Slavery in the Public Records of Early Louisville and Jefferson County, 1780 - 1812.”  The Filson History Quarterly, 73, 4(1999): 325-354.

Hudson, J. Blaine.  “Slavery in Early Louisville and Jefferson County, 1780 – 1812.”  The Filson History Quarterly, 73, 3(1999): 249-283.

O’Brien, Margaret.  “Slavery in Louisville during the Antebellum Period: 1820-1860,” unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Louisville, 1979.

Stafford, Hanford D.  “Slavery in a Border City:  Louisville, 1790-1860,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kentucky, 1987.

U. S. Bureau of the Census.  Historical Statistics of the United States:  Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1960):  8-15.

Wade, Richard C.  Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820‑1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).

Yater, George H.  Two Hundred Years at the Falls of the Ohio:  A History of Louisville and Jefferson County (Louisville: The Filson Club, 1987): 2-6.

Young, Amy L., and Hudson, J. Blaine.  “Slavery at Oxmoor.”  The Filson History Quarterly, 74(Summer 2000):  195-199.

The Free Black Community of Louisville: Side 1

Through the colonial period, a small minority of the African American population was nominally free.  This minority grew dramatically when, consistent with the stated principles of the American Revolution, slavery was abolished in New England and the mid-Atlantic states between 1777 and the 1820s.  At the same time, the more southerly states, while contemplating the end of slavery in the 1780s, became its hostage after the invention of the Cotton Gin revitalized the peculiar institution.  By 1830, there were nearly 2,700,000 African Americans in the United States—13.7 percent of whom were free.

Although not enslaved, free people of color were treated as outcasts throughout much of the north and west, banned in most of the lower south and tolerated grudgingly as an alien element in the border and upper south.  Frequent mob violence often reduced the struggle for equal black citizenship to a desperate search for a safe place to live—ideally, with the possibility of land ownership, work for decent wages or the opportunity to practice a trade.  Intense racial prejudice, both north and south, scattered free African Americans throughout the border-states, the north and the western frontier in towns, cities and rural enclaves where opportunities were greatest and resistance was least.

Free people of color were usually considered subjects, not citizens, of the United States—with few rights and little legal protection.  However, unlike enslaved African Americans, free people of color were persons, not property, under the law.  Their births and deaths were recorded.  They could marry legally, own property and enter into contracts.  And, because enslaved African Americans were too small a minority to overthrow slavery from within, free people of color played a central role in establishing black communities, founding black institutions and as the backbone of the anti-slavery movement.

The Free Black Community of Louisville: Side 2

Between 1830 and 1860, the free African American population of Louisville increased from 232 to 1,917, or by 726 percent and Louisville became home to the largest concentration of free people of color both in Kentucky and in the upper South—west of Baltimore.  Locally, free people of color did not live in segregated neighborhoods, per se, but were clustered in alleys, or on certain blocks or parts of certain streets.  They were disproportionately young and female.  Most were desperately poor, with the of owning and operating businesses blocked by laws enacted to prevent competition with whites and their employment opportunities limited to labor and domestic service.  Still, work was plentiful and a handful of more fortunate free blacks worked as clerks, musicians, teachers, teamsters, blacksmiths, barbers and on the steamboats that plied the river.

Louisville was a decidedly hostile environment and weaving a few hundred free people of color into a community depended on astute leadership.  In the 1830s, three individuals emerged as the principal architects of black Louisville.  One, Shelton Morris, founded the first black business in Louisville in 1832, a barbershop and bathhouse under the old Galt House.  Another, Washington Spradling, speculated in real estate and, by the 1860s, became the first African American in Kentucky worth more than $100,000.  Together, as brothers-in-law, Spradling and Morris once owned much of the eastern Russell Area in the 1830s.  Yet another, Eliza Curtis Hundley Tevis, became the only significant free black land-owner in the surrounding county when she purchased the land that developed into the Newburg/Petersburg community.  By the 1850s, through their leadership and institution-building efforts, there were eight independent black churches in Louisville, most of which also sponsored small schools, in or near the old downtown area.

The establishment of a free black community in the midst of slavery was a defining moment in the struggle for freedom in Louisville.  If the history of African Americans in Louisville begins with slavery, the history of the black community of Louisville begins with this free black community.

Selected Sources

Bigham, Darrel E.  On Jordan’s Banks:  Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006): 13-32.

Curry, Leonard P.  The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

Gibson, William H., Sr.  Historical Sketches of the Progress of the Colored Race in Louisville, Kentucky (Louisville: n. p., 1897).

Graham, Ruth Morris.  The Saga of the Morris Family (Columbus, GA: Brentwood Christian Communications, 1984).

Hudson, J. Blaine.  “African American Religion in Antebellum Louisville, Kentucky.”  The Griot:  Journal of the Southern Conference on African American Studies, 17, 2(1998):  43-54.

Hudson, J. Blaine.  “Upon this Rock—The Free African American Community of Antebellum Louisville, Kentucky.”  Presentation, “Land, River and Peoples:  Louisville before the Civil War” Conference, University of Louisville, May 29, 2009.

“Local Evils.” Louisville Public Advertiser, November 30, 1835.

Simmons, Reverend William J.  Men of Mark:  Eminent, Progressive and Rising (New York: Arno Press, 1968; first published in 1887).

Wickendon, Henry C.  “History of the Churches of Louisville with Special Reference to Slavery.”  Master’s thesis, University of Louisville, 1921.

Wilson, George D.  A Century of Negro Education in Louisville, Kentucky (Louisville: Louisville Municipal College, 1941).

The Underground Railroad: Side 1

Enslaved African Americans could not free themselves under American law.  They might be set free by their owners, or might be emancipated by governmental action, neither of which was likely.  Alternatively, enslaved African Americans might seize freedom through revolt or flight.  Being outnumbered by two-to-one even in the slave states, revolt was ultimately suicidal.  Consequently, fleeing slavery, despite its obvious dangers and the probability of recapture, was the best alternative available to those African Americans determined to be free.

After the American Revolution, slavery ended in the northern states but became even more deeply entrenched in the south, thus creating a border within the United States, with slavery legal on one side and illegal on the other.  The goal of slaveholders and slave-catchers was to defend that border.  The goal of fugitive slaves was to reach and cross it and, if need be, the border with Canada or Mexico or the Caribbean as well.

Driven by the hunger for freedom, thousands of enslaved African Americans chose this path—from a trickle in the 1600s to a steady stream of over three thousand per year by the 1850s to a floodtide of hundreds of thousands during the Civil War.  Most escaped without any help and depended entirely on their ingenuity and courage.  Those who received assistance did so from free people of color, sometimes Native Americans and white Americans opposed to slavery who comprised a loosely organized conspiracy of conscience known as the Underground Railroad—with its shadowy hosts of agents, conductors and station-keepers.

Because the 1793 and later 1850 Fugitive Slave Acts criminalized any assistance to fugitive slaves, true “friends of the fugitive” stood not only for freedom but risked their lives and livelihoods for the possibility of multiracial democracy in the United States.  For these reasons, the Underground Railroad stands, even today, as one of the most powerful and sustained multiracial human rights movements in American and world history—and the courage of fugitive slaves stands as a testament to power of the human spirit and the meaning of freedom.

Resistance and the Underground Railroad: Side 2

Given the geography of American slavery, Kentucky became central to the Underground Railroad as the key border state in the trans-Appalachian west,—and the Ohio River became a veritable “River Jordan” for black freedom seekers.  As slave population and cotton cultivation shifted steadily to the southwest after 1815, escape from Kentucky became more common and escape through Kentucky became the best route available to fugitive slaves from Tennessee and points south.

For the same reasons, Louisville became one of the busiest fugitive slave “stations” and crossing points in the country.  With the largest free black community in Kentucky and with smaller free black settlements in southern Indiana, fugitive slaves could find both refuge from slave-catchers and help in crossing the river.  Although clandestine river crossings were possible at or near the numerous ferries and small settlements along the river, by the 1850s, the most important crossing point in the greater Louisville area was located west of the Portland neighborhood—leading from Louisville across the Ohio River to New Albany, Indiana.  After negotiating a river crossing, fugitive slaves could then follow several routes leading northward with the assistance of free blacks and white friends of the fugitive, many of whom were Quakers.  By the 1850s, local newspapers reported an average of one slave escape per day from Louisville alone.

Of necessity, the Underground Railroad in a slave state was truly underground and few of its white leaders have ever been identified.  Far better documented are the roles played by many leaders of the free black community of Louisville.  Among them, James C. Cunningham, a local black orchestra leader, worked on riverboats and smuggled abolitionist literature into the city by hiding it in his sheet music.  Washington Spradling was remembered as “a shrewd Negro” and the key local leader by former fugitive slaves in the 1890s.  Shelton Morris, after moving to Cincinnati, worked with Levi Coffin in the 1850s and was considered “the most careful operator” in the free black community of Cincinnati and was involved in efforts to help Margaret Garner, the fugitive slave woman who, in 1856, killed her own child rather than see it returned to slavery.

Selected Sources

Bibb, Henry.  Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (New York: The Author, 1849).

Cockrum, Col. William M.  History of the Underground Railroad, As It Was Conducted by the Anti-Slavery League (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969; first published in 1915).

Gibson, William H., Sr.  Historical Sketches of the Progress of the Colored Race in Louisville, Kentucky (Louisville: n. p., 1897).

Hudson, J. Blaine.  “Crossing the Dark Line:  Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in Louisville and North Central Kentucky.”  The Filson History Quarterly, 75(2001):  33-84.

Hudson, J. Blaine.  Encyclopedia of the Underground Railroad (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Publishers, 2006).

Hudson, J. Blaine.  Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in the Kentucky Borderland (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Publishers, 2002).

Peters, Pamela.  The Underground Railroad in Floyd County, Indiana (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company Publishers, 2001).

Siebert, Wilbur H.  The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Russell and Russell, 1967; first published 1898).

The Civil War: Side 1

The American Civil War brought two opposing views of freedom into direct and violent conflict—and nowhere moreso than in Kentucky.  Kentucky was deeply divided over the issues of slavery and secession.  Confederate sentiments were as strong in some regions of the state as were Union sentiments in others, dividing communities and even families.  In Louisville, the wealthiest merchants supported the Confederate cause while the professional class, small-business owners, and common laborers tended to support the Union.  Still, after flirting with a policy of neutrality, Kentucky ultimately remained in the Union and contributed between 90,000 and 100,000 men to the Union Army, and between 25,000 and 40,000 to the Confederacy.

Because of its location on the Ohio River and as the northern terminus of the L&N Railroad, Louisville became a central base of Union operations for the western theater of the war and as many as 100,000 Union troops were stationed in or near the city at one time or another.  For the same strategic reasons, the Confederates attempted to invade Kentucky, destroy the railroad and capture Louisville several times in the first year of the war.  However, after the Battle of Perryville, fought October 8, 1862 near Danville, the Confederate Army never threatened Kentucky again.

As a Union slave state, the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) did not apply to Kentucky.  However, once the military strategy of ending slavery in the Confederate states became the national policy of abolishing slavery altogether.  The steady stream of fugitive slaves flowing into the state became a raging flood—and the authority of the army, when exercised to protect these fugitives, undermined the authority of slave-owners and the institution of slavery slowly melted away in Kentucky.  For example, in 1860, the value of enslaved African Americans in Kentucky was $107.5 million; by 1865, the value of those who remained enslaved was only $7.2 million.

For many white Kentuckians opposed to emancipation, this policy shift regarding slavery created a dilemma without an exit and left great bitterness in its wake—which explains the familiar observation that “Kentucky did not join the Confederacy until after the Civil War.”

The Civil War: Side 2

Despite divisions among whites, African Americans in Kentucky were clearly not divided in their sympathies during the Civil War.  In the early months of the conflict, African Americans in Louisville were treated roughly by the Home Guard and free black schools and churches were closed.  Many free people of color fled the city to avoid being pressed into labor gangs building defensive fortifications and performing other menial tasks.

As Union troops streamed into the Louisville, African Americans found protection from an authority higher than that of local leaders.  Thereafter, thousands of fugitive slaves fled to the city and, by July 1864, over one hundred blacks were enlisting in the Union Army each day at the Taylor Barracks at 3rd and Oak streets.  These men became the backbone of several regiments of U. S. Colored Troops:  the 107th, 108th, 109th, 122nd, 123rd and 125th U. S. Colored Infantry.  Their families and other freedmen were housed in a ten-acre refugee camp located at 18th and Broadway, then the outskirts of the city, and, beginning in 1864, under the supervision of the Rev. Thomas James, an African American minister from Rochester, New York.  In all, roughly 24,000 black Kentuckians served in the Union Army—in harm’s way both on the battlefield and from hostile whites and Confederate guerillas throughout Kentucky.

The presence of a large contingent of black soldiers and refugees, and a pre-existing free black community made the Civil War experience in Louisville both complex and unique.  In this unusual setting, local black churches organized soldier’s aid societies and free blacks in New Albany, Indiana, even established the Hospital d’Afrique to minister to the sick and wounded.  As a definitive expression of the sentiments of Louisville African Americans, in January 1865, twenty-two year old Mary Lewis presented a battle flag, sewn by the Louisville Colored Ladies Soldier’s Aid Society, to the 123rd United States Colored Infantry—and stated proudly:  “Soldiers of the 123rd Regiment—You have enlisted in the service of a cause which is that of freedom, not only in this country, but throughout the world . . . The freedom of your race no less depends upon the endurance of the Republic than the rights and liberties of other races.  Its cause, therefore, is your own.”

Selected Sources

American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission Interviews.  National Archives Microfilm Publications, 1863, 1864.

Baker, Robert M.; Downey, Timothy; and the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, Kentucky Division: The Forgotten Kentucky Regiments: United States Colored Troops from Kentucky (Ancestry.com, 2000-2009).

Berlin, Ira; Reidy, Joseph P.; and Rowland, Leslie S.  Eds.  Freedom:  A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, Selected from the Holdings of the National Archives of the United States, 3 volumes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Bigham, Darrel E.  On Jordan’s Banks:  Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006).

Bush, Bryan S.  Louisville and the Civil War:  A History and Guide (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2008)

Clark, Thomas D.  Kentucky:  Land of Contrasts (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).

Gibson, William H., Sr.  Historical Sketches of the Progress of the Colored Race in Louisville, Kentucky (Louisville: n. p., 1897).

Harrison, Lowell H.  The Civil War in Kentucky (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1988).

Howard, Victor B.  Black Liberation in Kentucky:  Emancipation and Freedom, 1862-1884 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983).

James, Thomas.  “The Autobiography of Rev. Thomas James,” Rochester History, XXXVII(1975): 1-32.

Louisville Daily Union Press, January 20, 1865.

Lucas, Marion B.  A History of Blacks in Kentucky, Volume 1:  From Slavery to Segregation, 1760-1891 (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1992).

Marrs, Elijah P.  Life and History of the Reverend Elijah P. Marrs (Louisville, 1885); Simmons, 1887

McDowell, Robert E.  City of Conflict: Louisville in the Civil War, 1861-1865 (Louisville: Civil War Roundtable, 1962).

Messmer, Charles.  “City in Conflict:  A History of Louisville, Kentucky, 1860-1865.”  Master’s thesis, University of Louisville, 1953.

Weeden, Henry C.  Weeden’s History of the Colored People of Louisville (Louisville: H. C. Weeden, 1897).

Wilson, George D.  A Century of Negro Education in Louisville, Kentucky (Louisville: Louisville Municipal College, 1941).

Yater, George H.  Two Hundred Years at the Falls of the Ohio:  A History of Louisville and Jefferson County (Louisville: The Filson Club, 1987).

Reconstruction/Readjustment: Side 1

The United States faced two fundamental tasks during the Reconstruction period (1865-1877).  One was the need to redefine and renormalize relations between the former Confederate states and the rest of the nation.  The other was to redefine the role of race, the meaning of freedom and the place of African Americans in a society in which slavery was no longer legal and in which those formerly enslaved were presumably free and equal.  Kentucky was often at odds with national policy during this tumultuous time.

Nearly as soon as slavery ended, Kentucky attempted to limit the meaning of black freedom by prohibiting African Americans from testifying in court, serving on juries and voting.  Miscegenation was outlawed.  Schools were segregated, if there were schools at all.  Tax rolls, schools and marriage and other public records were separated by race.  Blacks were subject to more severe penalties for various crimes than were whites.  Economic opportunities available to African Americans were restricted to menial, domestic or agricultural labor.  Lynching was widespread, particularly in the Bluegrass region and there was sufficient racial violence and social turmoil to warrant placing Kentucky under the jurisdiction of the Freedmen’s Bureau in January 1866—making Kentucky the only non-Confederate state to earn that dubious distinction.  Ultimately, civil rights for African Americans were secured through the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, but the ability to exercise those rights was constrained by the continuing opposition of white Kentuckians.

The Civil War also disrupted normal political alliances within the state and created a vacuum in which competing interests strove for dominance.  The result was a triumphant Democratic party comprised of conservatives and former Confederates who, failing to conquer Kentucky by the bullet, did so by the ballot.  By 1877, Kentucky was viewed as Southern in thought and sympathies—and the promise of freedom for all Kentuckians had been betrayed.

Reconstruction/Readjustment: Side 2

The end of the Civil War brought tremendous energy and optimism to African Americans throughout the United States.  In Louisville, African Americans celebrated and paraded well into the summer of 1865.  Black population increased by 120 percent between 1860 and 1870, and by another 40 percent between 1870 and 1880 as thousands of dispossessed African Americans from rural Kentucky converged on the city in search of work, safety and community.  Rapid population growth produced extreme crowding and prompted the evolution of new black neighborhoods in the city and new black hamlets elsewhere in Jefferson County, each of which soon became home to at least one school and at least one church.

Greater numbers, a pre-existing black community structure and the continued presence of some federal troops enabled Louisville African Americans to lead the state in the struggle for freedom and empowerment.  In December 1868, Horace Morris was appointed one of the few black cashiers of the Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Bank and served until the bank closed in 1874.  “Freedom rides” were organized through Quinn Chapel A.M.E. church to challenge segregation on local streetcars as early as 1870.  In October 1870, petitions and protests resulted in the first public schools for African Americans in the city and, by 1873, the opening of Central Colored School at 6th and Kentucky Streets.  Also, on November 25, 1879, the Kentucky Normal and Theological Institute opened at 7th and Kentucky streets, later renamed State University in 1882 and Simmons University in 1919.

A new leadership class emerged that ministers, teachers, small business owners and.  Nathaniel R. Harper, the first black attorney in Kentucky, and Dr. Henry Fitzbutler, the first physician in the state.  Some allied with influential whites and encouraged African Americans to better themselves within the constraints of segregation.  Others championed the cause of racial equality and justice, and often demanded a larger role within the Republican Party.

By the end of Reconstruction, Louisville African Americans had expanded and strengthened their community and, although still embattled, remained guardedly optimistic.

Selected Sources

Berlin, Ira; Reidy, Joseph P.; and Rowland, Leslie S.  Eds.  Freedom:  A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, Selected from the Holdings of the National Archives of the United States, 3 volumes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Channing, Steven A.  Kentucky: A Bicentennial History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1977).

Clark, Thomas D.  A History of Kentucky (Ashland, Kentucky: The Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1988).

Coulter, E. Merton.  The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1966).

DuBois, W. E. B.  Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York: MacMillan, 1992; first published in 1935).

Gibson, William H., Sr.  Historical Sketches of the Progress of the Colored Race in Louisville, Kentucky (Louisville: n. p., 1897).

Harrison, Lowell H. ed.  Kentucky’s Governors (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004).

Harrison, Lowell H. and Klotter, James C.  A New History of Kentucky (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997).

Howard, Victor B.  Black Liberation in Kentucky:  Emancipation and Freedom, 1862-1884 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983).

Kleber, John E., ed.  The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1992).

Kleber, John E. ed, The Encyclopedia of Louisville (Lexington: The University of Louisville, 2001).

Lucas, Marion B.  A History of Blacks in Kentucky, Volume 1 From Slavery to Segregation, 1760-1891 (Frankfort, Kentucky: The Kentucky Historical Society, 1992).

Nieman, Donald G.  The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Freedom (New York: Garland Publishers, 1994).

Tapp, Hambleton and Klotter, James C.  Kentucky: Decades of Discord 1865-1900 (Frankfort, Kentucky: The Kentucky Historical Society, 1977).

Webb, Ross A.  Kentucky in the Reconstruction Era (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1979).

Weeden, H.C.  Weeden’s History of the Colored People of Louisville (Louisville: H.C. Weeden, 1897).

Wilson, George D.  A Century of Negro Education in Louisville, Kentucky (Louisville: Louisville Municipal College, 1941).

Wright, George C.  Life Behind a Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865-1930 (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1985).

Segregation to 1900: Side 1

Between the end of Reconstruction and 1900, the cause of freedom suffered two landmark defeats:  the first, in 1883, when the U. S. Supreme Court declared the public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional; the second, in 1896, when the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling made “separate but equal” the law of the land.  These decisions opened the floodgates to a host of state segregation statutes and left African Americans, in the words of President James Garfield (1881) on “the middle ground between slavery and freedom.”

Although Kentucky accepted black freedom, neither the leadership nor the masses of white Kentuckians were willing to concede black equality.  Segregation was imposed one law at a time and, within a few years, Kentucky law required segregation in accommodations, theaters, ball parks, race tracks, and public transportation—social domains that, unlike schools, had not always been segregated before.  African Americans across the state united to oppose the 1892 separate coach law, but, after the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the controversial statute in 1900, civil rights for Kentucky African Americans had, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist. The only crucial exception was the franchise and Kentucky African Americans, largely because their numbers were too small to represent a threat to white domination, never lost the ability to exercise their right to vote.

By 1900, the color line had been drawn through all walks of American life, a line that barred blacks from all places and spaces in which there might even be the appearance of equality with whites.  These laws became a new and seldom questioned standard for race relations in Kentucky and throughout the nation—and African Americans had reached what historian Rayford Logan termed the nadir, the lowest point, in African America history.

Segregation to 1900: Side 2

By trial and error, imitation and invention, Louisville’s black leadership developed a two-pronged strategy to meet the daunting challenges of the post-Reconstruction era:  first, to make separate as “equal” as possible; and, second, when possible, to attack and breach the walls of segregation.  Black Louisvillians had several key assets in executing this strategy.

By 1900, Louisville had gained a reputation as city in which racial compromise was sometimes possible.  African Americans represented nearly 20 percent of the total population of Louisville and were the 7th largest black community in the nation.  Being at the bottom of a wealthy local economy was more advantageous than being at the top of a poor one—and, hence, most African Americans were employed and some were moderately prosperous.  Equally important, the size of Louisville’s black population made the black vote significantly more meaningful than in other sections of the state.  And, finally, a new generation of outstanding black leaders— most notably William H. Steward, Reverend Charles H. Parrish, Sr., and Albert Ernest Meyzeek—learned to leverage these assets to wrest concessions from local white leaders.

As a testament to their efforts, by 1900, Central Colored High School was, perhaps, the largest black public school in the United States.  The percentage of African American homeowners was higher in Louisville than in any other American city.  There were sixty-six churches, sixty-seven fraternal organizations boasting 7,500 total members, twelve black women’s clubs, thirteen physicians, eight attorneys, fifty-nine ministers, a Colored Old Folks Home, a YMCA, and more than one hundred teachers in the city.  State University offered liberal arts, theological, medical and legal education.

Life in segregated Louisville was not idyllic.  Poverty and poor housing were commonplace.  Violence, crime and police brutality were widespread.  But separate was more equal than in most other black communities in the state and nation—and that in itself was an impressive achievement.

Selected Sources

Channing, Steven A.  Kentucky: A Bicentennial History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1977).

Clark, Thomas D.  A History of Kentucky (Ashland, Kentucky: The Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1988).

Cummings, Scott, and Price, Michael.  Race Relations in Louisville:  Southern Racial Traditions and Northern Class Dynamics (Louisville: University of Louisville College of Urban and Public Affairs, 1990).

Doyle, Ruby Wilkins.  Recalling the Record:  A Documentary History of the African-American Experience within the Louisville Public School System of Kentucky (1870-1975) (Chapel Hill, NC: Professional Press, 2005).

Gibson, William H., Sr.  Historical Sketches of the Progress of the Colored Race in Louisville, Kentucky (Louisville: n. p., 1897).

Harrison, Lowell H. ed.  Kentucky’s Governors (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004).

Harrison, Lowell H. and Klotter, James C.  A New History of Kentucky (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997).

Kentucky Commission on Human Rights.  Kentucky's Black Heritage (Frankfort: Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, 1971).

Kleber, John E., ed.  The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1992).

Kleber, John E. ed, The Encyclopedia of Louisville (Lexington: The University of Louisville, 2001).

Lucas, Marion B.  A History of Blacks in Kentucky, Volume 1 From Slavery to Segregation, 1760-1891 (Frankfort, Kentucky: The Kentucky Historical Society, 1992).

Tapp, Hambleton and Klotter, James C.  Kentucky: Decades of Discord 1865-1900 (Frankfort, Kentucky: The Kentucky Historical Society, 1977).

Weeden, H.C.  Weeden’s History of the Colored People of Louisville (Louisville: H.C. Weeden, 1897).

Wilson, George D.  A Century of Negro Education in Louisville, Kentucky (Louisville: Louisville Municipal College, 1941).

Wright, George C.  A History of Blacks in Kentucky, Volume 2 In Pursuit of Equality, 1890-1980 (Frankfort, Kentucky: The Kentucky Historical Society, 1992).

Wright, George C.  Life Behind a Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865-1930 (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1985).

Resistance in the Era of Segregation, 1900-1945: Side 1

As the lines of segregation hardened, black leaders and their white allies responded by coming together in reform organizations, the most famous of which was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which began in the early years of the century a legal campaign to defend the civil rights of black defendants and to challenge the most blatant forms of discrimination and disenfranchisement.  World War I triggered the Great Migration, the movement of African Americans from the rural to urban South and onward to northern and Midwestern cities, a process that over the next few decades would fundamentally reshape the African American role in American politics and culture.  In the wake of the war two new currents of activism joined the freedom struggle.  The Marcus Garvey movement promoted black nationalism, appealing primarily but not exclusively to urban blacks and emphasizing economic self-reliance.  Meanwhile black and white leaders came together in new interracial initiatives to promote cooperation, communication and better conditions.

The national emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II caused new economic and personal hardships for African Americans.  Although parts of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” caused negative consequences for blacks, the economic support provided by relief agencies funneled benefits to them.  The administration also included some blacks in government posts which combined with Franklin Roosevelt’s reputed love for common people and the association of his wife Eleanor with the civil rights cause turned black voters en masse away from the party of Lincoln to the Democratic Party coalition.  During the war, black participation in the armed services and in the defense industry, coupled with an NAACP-led campaign that connected the fight against Nazi fascism with the battles against racism and segregation at home laid the ground work for an expansion of the freedom struggle in the postwar years.

Resistance in the Era of Segregation, 1900-1945: Side 1

In Louisville, the turning point in the struggle for freedom was the founding of the local NAACP in 1914.   The branch’s first major victory was the Buchanan v. Warley case, which struck an early blow against legal segregation.  In that 1917 ruling, the U. S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a Louisville ordinance requiring housing segregation, effectively turning the tide on enshrining segregation into law.

While court action laid a foundation for later successes, more often in this period black citizens used their voting power to challenge restrictions against them and to demand equal access to civic resources.  In 1921, disgruntled with both major political parties, a group of black leaders formed the Lincoln Independent Party (LIP) and ran for election to a number of offices.  Although they suffered personal harassment and failed to win at the polls, the LIP succeeded in pressuring the Republican administration to open both police and fire department jobs to blacks.  In 1925 black leaders again marshaled political power to win a promise of more funding for higher education for local African Americans.  In 1931 that promise was fulfilled when the Louisville Municipal College (LMC), a branch of the University of Louisville for black students, opened its doors on the grounds of the former Simmons University.  During its brief, two-decade existence, LMC provided training for the next generation of black leaders and a social and cultural community resource.    Black voting power in the Depression decade led to the election of Charles Anderson in 1935 to represent the 42nd district in the Kentucky General Assembly, the first black elected state representative in the South since Reconstruction.  The Depression decade mobilized many, black and white, to pull together and act against widespread economic suffering. With the coming of World War II, black leaders associated the struggle against fascism abroad with the fight for interracial democracy at home, and stepped up their public pressure against discrimination in employment and education.

Selected Sources

Dunnigan, Alice Allison.  The Fascinating Story of Black Kentuckians: Their Heritage and

Traditions.  Washington, DC: Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, Inc., 1982.

Frazier, E. Franklin.  Negro Youth at the Crossways: Their Personality Development in the

Middle States.  American Council on Education, 1967 ed.

Hardin, John.  Fifty Years of Segregation: Black Higher Education in Kentucky, 1904-1954.

Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.

Harrison, Lowell H., and James C. Klotter. New History of Kentucky. Lexington: University

Press of Kentucky, 1997.

Kentucky=s Black Heritage.  Frankfort: Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, 1971.

Lehmann, Nicholas, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed

America (New York: Vintage, 1992)

Siktoff, Harvard, A New Deal For Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue:

the Depression Decade (New York: Ocford, 2009)

Sitkoff, Harvard. “Racial Militancy and Interracial Violence in the Second World War,” Journal

of American History 58 (1971) 1: 661-81.

Sosna, Morton.  In Search of the Silent South: Southern Liberals and the Race issue.  New York:

Columbia University Press, 1977.

Sullivan, Patricia, Life Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement.

New York: New Press, 2010.

Wright, George C.  A History of Blacks in Kentucky, Volume II: In Pursuit of Equality, 1890-

1980.  Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1992.

Wright, George C.  Life Behind a Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865-1930.  Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

The Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1970: Side 1

The fight against Hitler’s fascism inspired a vigorous new postwar struggle against racism and discrimination at home.   The NAACP legal battle began to bear fruit with Supreme Court decisions against segregation in transportation and restrictive covenants in housing, and most famously with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling against discrimination in public education.  At the same time black leaders rallied grassroots communities to press for the end of Jim Crow in all public and private facilities, a drive that climaxed in the early 1960s sit-ins and passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.  In the mid and late 1960s the movement became more multi-pronged, turning to attack discrimination in jobs and housing, to empower the poor through community organizing, and to promote the embrace of African American culture and identity.

In Louisville the first targets of this postwar movement were city-operated facilities such as parks and libraries, both of which were integrated gradually in the decade after World War II.  Local activists also worked with like-minded citizens around the Commonwealth in an Interracial Hospital Movement for the opening of publicly-funded medical facilities to African Americans, which was achieved in 1952.  The height of this phase of the local movement was the 1956 peaceful integration of the Louisville public schools.  Although in many respects a token step toward true equality in education, the successful break-down of segregation in schools emboldened local people to make a broader attack on racism.

The Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1970: Side 2

The local movement grew in the 1960s, beginning when mass sit-ins by Louisville teenagers in Spring 1961 created a community crisis that helped to unseat the Board of Alderman.  Two more years of demonstrations and negotiations pushed the city finally in May 1963 to adopt a civil rights ordinance forbidding discrimination by race in public accommodations, the first such law in a southern state.  Riding on the momentum of that victory, the Louisville Board of Aldermen adopted an ordinance forbidding discrimination in employment in 1965.  The movement against residential segregation was met with more resistance, when in Spring 1967 mobs of whites verbally and physically attacked nightly demonstrations for equal opportunity in housing.  Despite the vocal opposition, civil rights advocates used the vote to elect a new Board of Aldermen, who in December 1967 adopted a fair housing ordinance.  This triumph in policy outlawed housing discrimination, but did not end its practice.

Disillusioned with the inadequate enforcement of civil rights laws and the persistent violence met by mass nonviolent direct action, young African American Louisvillians turned their attention to community empowerment and embraced the Black Power movement.  In the mid-1960s local activists used community organizing through the War on Poverty to unite black and poor neighborhoods to fight their powerlessness and demand equal access to resources.   Many black power organizations saw the promotion of black history, arts and culture as means for both fostering interracial understanding and empowering the African American community through self-knowledge and self-respect.  The most important examples of that emphasis were the local black arts movement and the Black Student Union at the University of Louisville.  In 1969 the latter presented a series of demands for increased black faculty, courses, mentoring, and outreach to the community.  When the University administration failed to respond to these demands, the BSU launched a sit-in “takeover” of the administration building.  In the short term, the confrontation led to the expulsion of some leaders of the BSU, but in the long run it laid the seeds for enhanced scholarly attention at the University to the history, culture, and needs of African Americans and the eventual founding of the Pan African Studies Department.

Selected Sources

Braden, Anne.  The Wall Between.  Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, reprint edition

1999.

Carmichael, Omer, and Weldon James.  The Louisville Story.  New York: Simon and Schuster,

1957.

Fosl, Catherine.  Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the

Cold War South.  New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002.

Fosl, Catherine, and Tracy E. K’Meyer. Freedom on the Border: An Oral History of the Civil

Rights Movement in Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009)

Hall, Wade H.  The Rest of the Dream: the Black Odyssey of Lyman Johnson.  Lexington:

University Press of Kentucky, 1988.

Hardin, John.  Fifty Years of Segregation: Black Higher Education in Kentucky, 1904-1954I.

Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.

Harrison, Lowell H., and James C. Klotter. New History of Kentucky. Lexington: University

Press of Kentucky, 1997.

Kentucky’s Black Heritage.  Frankfort: Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, 1971.

Kerns, J. Harvey.  A Survey of the Economic and Cultural Conditions of the Negro Population of

Louisville, Kentucky. Department of Research and Community Projects, National Urban

League, 1948.

Kesselman, Louis C.  ANegro Voting in a Border Community: Louisville, Kentucky.@  Journal of

Negro Education 26 (Summer 1957): 273-80.

K’Meyer, Tracy E. Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky, 1945-1980

(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009).

K’Meyer, Tracy E. AThe Louisville Civil Rights Movement=s Response to the Southern Red

Scare.@  Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 104 (Spring 2006): 217-248.

Wright, George C.  A History of Blacks in Kentucky, Volume II: In Pursuit of Equality, 1890-

1980.  Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1992.

Wright, George C.  Life Behind a Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865-1930.  Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

The Ongoing Struggle: Side 1

After 1970 the freedom struggle operated in a changing and in many ways increasingly hostile environment.  White resistance to further government action for racial equality ignited grassroots campaigns against the growing black presence in the work place and schools.  The focus of such protest was on court-ordered busing for school integration.  Conservative politicians tapped into that widespread white discontent to pursue a broader anti-government and anti-reform agenda.  Worsening economic times reinforced this conservative trend.  At the same time, however, black leaders persevered in their quest for the enforcement of equal opportunity through Affirmative Action, improvement in police-community relations, and the strengthening of black political power.  Other groups who had likewise lacked social power—Latinos, women, disabled people, gays and lesbians—adopted the ideas and methods of the civil rights era for their own struggles.  The result was, in some respects, a broader freedom movement, but one that was on the defensive in an increasingly conservative political climate-- and thus subject to frequent misunderstandings among those who might wish to be allies

The Ongoing Struggle: Side 2

By the 1980s, African Americans were visibly integrated into Louisville’s public life even as dramatic racial inequities persisted.  Campaigns for African American equality continued well after the passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s.  Yet when it came to enforcement of those laws, the issues struck uncomfortably close to home for many white Louisvillians.  True equity and power in jobs, housing, schools, and electoral politics generated more controversy than had the simple and direct plea for seats at a lunch counter.  When more than a decade of school desegregation failed to achieve equal access for African Americans, Louisville-Jefferson County became in 1975 one of many school districts nationally in which courts ordered widespread busing in search of racial fairness.  White mobs and a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan resulted, but a biracial coalition of activists, moderates, and elected officials steadily built support for busing, and the school plan continued past the expiration of the busing order and into the 21st century with widespread community support.  Experts assessed the local schools as the nation’s most desegregated in 2003, but further court actions in 2007 curtailed the use of pupil assignment to achieve racial integration.

The civil rights movement of the post-WWII era gave rise to many other social justice movements in the final third of the twentieth century.  New movements adopted its tactics of nonviolent direct action and mass protest, and hundreds of young people who had gained organizing skills while demanding an end to racial segregation then applied their know-how to issues such as gender equality, disability rights and ending many other forms of discrimination.   In the 1990s, a local movement called “Fairness” drew together strands of the older civil rights community to end discrimination based on sexuality as part of a wider vision of social and racial freedom.  Meanwhile, leaders like Rev. Louis Coleman—an outspoken African American minister--  kept racial fairness in the public spotlight into the 21st century, agitating and mobilizing rallies for an end to police violence and environmental racism and for the equitable hiring of minorities by the state.

Selected Sources

Chalmers, David.  And the Crooked Places Made Straight: The Struggle for Social Change in the

1960s.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Cummings, Scott, and Michael Price.  Race Relations in Louisville: Southern Racial

Traditions and Northern Class Dynamics.@  Louisville, KY: Urban Research

Institute Policy Paper Series, June 1990.

Durr, Kenneth.  Behind the Backlash: White Working Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-

1. 1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Formisano, Ronald P.  Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s

and 1970s.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd.  The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the

Past.  Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1233-63.

K’Meyer, Tracy E. Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky, 1945-

1980 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009).

Lynne, Jack.  Schoolhouse Dreams Deferred: Decay, Hope and Desegregation in a Core-

City School System.  Phi Deltap kappa International, 1998.

Maclean, Nancy.  Freedom in Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace.

New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006.

Minchin, Timothy J.  From Rights to Economics: The Ongoing Struggle for Black

Equality in the US South.  Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.

Rosen, Ruth.  The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America.

New York:  Penguin revised, 2006.