Across The Kentucky Color Line: Cultural Landscapes Of Race From The Lost Cause To Integration, by Lee Durham Stone

[Note: This book was provided free of charges from Reedsy Discovery in exchange for an honest review.]

If this book is not, properly speaking, a book of history, it at least contains some of the raw materials from which a more competent writer could construct a historical work. Frequently in the pages of this short account, the author notes that facts are thin on the ground concerning various matters, including the suicide of a local reputed abortionist during the Great Depression as well as the enigmatic behavior of socialist and also racist “Possum Hunters” during the 1910s whose crusade against mining officers also blended with the usual anarchical violence against local blacks that is customary of the lawlessness of the Jim Crow era. The author even engages in some memoir writing in discussing his memories of the banishing of black students to the balcony to watch The Ten Commandments in a Central City movie theater while white students watched on the main floor [1]. The book is not a sustained historical narrative but is rather a series of historical vignettes about a neglected region of Western Kentucky based around Muhlenberg County and its immediate neighbors, and focusing on Central City itself as the main subject of interest, though the author turns his attention to larger trends within the South as a whole.

This book is, as a whole, a bit more than 200 pages, although less than 150 pages of this is core text. The book begins with figures, maps, acknowledgements, and an introduction. There are thirteen numbered chapters of the book organized in generally chronological order, with the first chapter introducing the subject of place, memory, and geography for the racial experience of blacks in seven counties in Western Kentucky (1). This is followed by a discussion of Kentucky’s odd place in Jim Crow and the “lost cause” myth by which the state forgot its largely Unionist place in the Civil War (2). The author then picks anecdotes to tell out of the “silent archives” of the history of the late 1800s and early 1900s (3). This is followed by a discussion of different aspects of black work in the area of Western Kentucky, including work on the steamboats (4). An entire chapter is spent on the sensational case of Harrison Alexander, a legally lynched teenage black who had been accused of raping a mentally troubled white girl (5), which is followed by a chapter on the endemic violence of the area (6), and another chapter on a mysterious secret group of labor activists known as the “Possum Killers” (7). A short chapter is devoted to the theatrical suicide of a black dentist accused of murdering the unborn child of a white woman during the Great Depression (8), after which the author discusses the experience of black soldiers from the area during the World Wars and their search for double-victory against fascism abroad and racism at home (9), which is followed by a chapter on racialized spaces (10). The last three chapters of the book then focus on the experience of Jim Crow education (11), the slowness of integration in Muhlenberg County, which was slow even by the standards of Western Kentucky (12), and resistance and change resulting from the slow integration, which included the loss of black teachers from the integrated school districts of the region and state (13). The book ends with an epilogue, notes, information about the author, and an index.

One of the striking elements to this book is the way that so many of the elements of the stories included in this work are demonstrative of the postbellum and Reconstruction shift of Kentucky from being a Unionist border state to being the northern part of the South, even though properly speaking Kentucky did not suffer through Reconstruction as a conquered state like the ten states of the Confederacy that had to endure Radical Reconstruction. At least in the author’s telling, Western Kentucky, and especially Muhlenberg County, lagged behind the rest of the state in racial egalitarianism, which makes the author’s account of a region that has largely been ignored by contemporary research about race in Kentucky timely, even though fragmentary. There are definitely areas where future researchers would be able to improve upon this work, especially if they are able to provide more data and less editorializing, as well as the use of better, non-racist writing styles that demonstrate parity between the treatment of white and black within the text as far as capitalization is concerned. Nevertheless, this book certainly has some raw materials for later writers to incorporate that are unlikely to be duplicated anywhere else as of yet, and this book represents a trailblazing effort in discussing the history of the black community and its experiences–including its educational triumphs during the segregation age–during the entire Jim Crow era.

[1] This story, the opening chapter of the book, reminded me of an experience in my youth where as a high school student I was asked by the black high school students who sat in the back of the bus by choice to sit in the small seat on the back row near them, for the stated reason that I served as “air conditioning” for them. Much depends, of course, on whether some chooses certain seats for whatever reason rather than being denied that choice.