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New Book Release
Muhlenberg and Seven Contiguous Counties.
Source: Cartography by Richard A. Gilbreath,
as commissioned by Lee Durham Stone (2023).
ACROSS THE KENTUCKY COLOR LINE:
CULTURAL LANDSCAPES OF RACE
FROM THE LOST CAUSE TO INTEGRATION
This study examines Western Kentucky’s history of racial relations from 1865 to 1970, focusing on Muhlenberg County, its seven contiguous neighbors, and others in the region and the Bluegrass State. The author prefaces this book with his experience of a segregated school trip to see The Ten Commandments in 1957.
Topics include Kentucky’s post-Civil War racial strife, the Jim Crow era, Lost Cause politics, and a trial and 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 examines Black participation in the region’s coal mining, economy, and World Wars I and II. One section analyzes segregated town space in a novel approach to the region’s history. Another chapter details the mysterious suicide of a Black doctor in 1934. Additionally, two chapters feature the story of African American education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and local and regional school integration in the 1950s-1960s.
Furthermore, this searing account discusses new material on local segregationist resistance in the 1960s. Finally, this book outlines some hopeful events in the 1970s. The author uses many quotes from recognized scholars and cites all sources for those who want to investigate further.
