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

Book excerpt: In this sweeping history of racial interaction and violence from the post-Civil War to school integration in the 1960s, Lee Durham Stone, Ph.D., reframes the "idea of Kentucky." Through this searing lens, Dr. Stone shows how the institutional violence of enslavery rippled through each subsequent era in the Bluegrass State. Examined herein are a trial and "legal lynching" in 1907, the secretive Possum Hunters of 1914-1916 who terrorized the Western Kentucky coalfields, Jim Crow education, the strange case of a physician who drank poison before entering the courtroom (he died), the examination of small-town spatial segregation, and the local resistance to school integration in 1963. There is more, too, including Black businesses and African Americans in coal mining. This book cites all its sources, so it would be useful for students and other researchers.