Across the Kentucky Color Line: Cultural Landscapes of Race from the Lost Cause to Integration - 7863

In Beloved, novelist Toni Morrison has her protagonist Sethe say that she thought she was “gonna die in wild onions on the bloody side of the Ohio River.” That violent side of the river was Kentucky, the subject of this book. This study examines Kentucky’s violent history of racial relations from 1865 to 1970, focusing on Muhlenberg County, its seven contiguous neighbors, and others in the Bluegrass State. The author prefaces the book with his experience of a segregated school trip to see The Ten Commandments in 1957. Historical topics include Kentucky’s post-Civil War racial strife, the Jim Crow era, Lost Cause politics, and a detailed examination of a trial and public “legal lynching” in 1907. Separate chapters treat Western Kentucky’s endemic violence and the secretive Possum Hunter reign of terror in the early twentieth century. In addition, this book features Black participation in the region’s economy, coal mining, and World Wars I and II. A chapter examines the mysterious suicide of a Black doctor in 1934. One section analyzes segregated town space in a new approach to the region’s history. Additionally, two chapters tell the story of African American education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and local and regional school integration in the 1950s-1960s. Furthermore, this meticulously researched account discusses new material on local segregationist resistance after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown ruling on school desegregation. Finally, it details some hopeful events in the 1970s. The author quotes from many recognized scholars and cites all sources for those who want to investigate further.
ASIN: B0CNPT26PN
VSKU: BVV.B0CNPT26PN.G
Condition: Good
Author/Artist:Stone Ph.D., Lee Durham
Binding: Hardcover