A visual tour of some lesser-known sights

It is a trope of the Christmas season for local media to feature homes with outrageous displays — the guy who puts up 30,000 lights, for example. However, my respect goes to the people at the opposite end of that decorative spectrum. I reserve my admiration for places with the most straightforward Christmas displays. It is humbling to encounter such authenticity, lack of self-consciousness, and the absence of any social posturing. These modest setups serve as a counterpoint to the fake grandiosity and pretense that has become so widely accepted in our culture.

So, in the spirit of the year, that is 2020, I present a few choice Christmas scenes from the city of Louisville, Kentucky.

(This is an ongoing project for Christmas of 2020, so I will be adding to it until the end of the year. Check back for more.)

Christmas Displays in Louisville, Kentucky was originally published in Louisville, Kentucky on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Forgotten Confederate History of Louisville

On the bright summer day of July 30th, 1849, a crowd of thousands gathered on Louisville’s 3rd Street, near an area known as Millionaire’s Row. They were there to celebrate the official dedication of a 70-foot-tall Confederate monument with a soldier on top. The City of Louisville had declared an official half-day holiday to encourage everyone to attend this event. Louisville’s influential Courier-Journal newspaper had been preeminent in raising funds for the monument and urging citizens to participate in this event.

Located close to the University of Louisville’s Belknap Campus, the monument resulted from nearly a decade of fundraising by the Kentucky Women’s Confederate Monument Association (KWCMA). The official dedication was decidedly an all-Confederate event. A band played Dixie, followed by 200 ex-Confederate soldiers. A “Confederate choir” sang songs, and all speakers were ex-Confederates or with strong connections to the Confederacy.

The monument was an anachronism in the once heavily-Unionist Louisville for many reasons; Civil War had ended nearly three decades previously. As a border state, Kentucky had started neutral in the war but later joined the Union. Louisville had served as a central supply depot for the Union armies. During the Civil War, Kentucky contributed between 66,000 and 76,000 troops to the Union cause. But only half as many — 25,000 to 40,000 — joined the Confederate armies.

However, in the years after the Civil War, Kentuckians elected five governors who had fought for or had connections with the Confederacy. People of this Commonwealth celebrated in the streets when Federal troops left the South in 1877, ending all Reconstruction hopes. Kentuckians published sectional periodicals, participated in historical societies and veterans’ organizations, and produced literature that painted Kentucky as Confederate. In all, Kentucky raised 72 monuments to the Confederates and only 2 for the Union soldiers. The Commonwealth had decidedly taken a turn away from Union and towards Confederacy, but only after the war.

As the scholar E. Merton Coulter writes, Kentucky “waited until after the war to secede.”

Broken Promises:

When called upon by Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War to join the Union, Kentucky had stridently remained neutral. However, events during the conflict had forced the Commonwealth to join the Federal cause. Nevertheless, Kentucky had remained against the idea of the emancipation of enslaved people. Lincoln badly needed the Border State of Kentucky to stay on his side and not join the Confederacy. “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game,” Lincoln had written in 1861.

Kentucky was OK with the Union cause, but it was also committed to slavery. In an 1850 census, 385 Kentuckians, or 28% of white families, owned slaves. As appeasement, in July 1862, Lincoln had offered $300 to slaveowners of the state for each slave they freed. Perhaps because emancipation was not an original goal of the Civil War, Kentuckians came to see the Federal Government as an institution that would possibly protect the institution of slavery — as misguided as that may seem in retrospect.

In January 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Kentuckians had a rude awakening. Though the president had made the Commonwealth exempt for both Emancipation and Reconstruction, it was easy to see that the end of slavery was near. Kentuckians felt betrayed. Even to the committed Unionists of the state, it came as a shocking disappointment.

Worse still was that white Kentuckians were fast losing their enslaved labor force. By the summer of 1864, over 57 percent of military age black men from Kentucky enlisted in the Union army — far higher than any other state. Nearly seventy percent of Kentucky’s enslaved people ended their servitude by joining the U.S army or marrying someone who did. People of the state’s small towns found themselves guarded by armed African-American soldiers — people they had held as enslaved laborers only a few months ago.

However, this still left 70,000 enslaved people in a Twilight Zone of a state where slavery was neither dead nor alive.

A Confederate Louisville:

Some historians have painted Louisville’s postbellum shift to Confederacy as a purely economic decision. The argument goes that Louisville being a center of trade and business, wanted to capture the Southern markets. However, this argument is unable to account for Louisville’s dedicated passion for the Confederate cause. (As a counter-argument, one could wonder why Louisville ignored the Northern markets, which were just as ripe for capturing. )

As one example, one could look at the life of Henry Watterson, one of the notable Louisvillian of his time. He was an ex-Confederate who ran the enormously influential Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper, and he consistently promoted the Confederacy cause. Watterson coined the slogan for Louisville as being the “Gateway to the South.” The Courier-Journal had the largest circulation of any newspaper in the country outside of New York, and it was considered the paper of record for not just Kentucky, but all of South.

Louisville actively lobbied to invite numerous Confederate conventions to the city. No such love existed in Louisvillians’ heart for former Union soldiers.

The Confederacy’s value rose high in Kentucky, to a level not explicable by economic rationalizations. Military titles such as a Major or Colonel came back into vogue and were never assumed to be of Union origin. It became a requirement to have Confederate credentials to win nearly any election. Historian Lowell Harrison states, “If you wanted to be elected, it was by far best to be an ex-Confederate. If you had lost one or two limbs, for public display, you were almost a shoo-in.” Many Unionists got ahead, but only after disavowing their cause during the Civil War. According to the scholar Anne F. Marshall, “Men who were on the winning side of the war had become pariahs after the war, persecuted by those whom they had defeated on the battlefield.”

The Myth of “The Lost Cause”:

“The Lost Cause” is the term generally used to describe the revisionist southern memory of the Civil War and the attendant rituals created to further this memory. Central to this idea was promoting the so-called legality of secession and issues of states’ rights — and not slavery, to the onset of the Civil War. The Lost Cause celebrated the nobility of the Confederate soldiers and blamed the South’s defeat on nothing more than the overwhelming numbers of the Northern armies, and not see the surrender as a reflection on the moral superiority of the Southern cause, which yet awaited divine vindication in the future. The motto on the seal of the Confederate States of America is “Deo Vindici,” which translates roughly to “God is Our Vindicator” or “God Will Vindicate.”

The Lost Cause was pure propaganda and utterly ignored the overwhelming evidence that the root cause of the Civil War was Southern slavery. In furthering this revisionist view, Southerners conveniently ignored their secession documents. These spoke openly of the superiority of the white race, the central desire to retain the institution of slavery, and declared, “…that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

The myth of the Lost Cause has been so powerful and lasting that as late as 2011, 48 percent of Americans in a Pew Research center survey cited states’ rights as the reason for the Civil War, compared to 38 percent mentioning slavery.

In promoting the Lost Cause, white Southern women played a critical role through memorial construction, revisionist textbooks, and indoctrinating youth. Numerous organizations vied to keep the Lost Cause alive. United Daughters of Confederacy was one of the largest and the most active of these groups.

One of the Lost Cause’s manifestations was a large number of Confederate memorials, which started as bereavement commemorations in cemeteries and grew to large, imposing monuments in front of courthouses and civic plazas. In a telling sign of their purpose, organizations, such as the United Daughters of Confederacy, erected the largest number of monuments during the Jim Crow era, 45 years after the Civil War.

The Confederate Monument of Louisville:

In 1894, the Kentucky Woman’s’ Confederate Monument Association (KCMA) held a design competition for a monument to honor Louisville’s Confederate soldiers who had died in the Civil War. KCMA initially rewarded the commission to the notable local sculptor Enid Yandell, who had made a name for herself as a gifted artist despite being a woman in that era. However, after a heated controversy — some say it was because she was a woman, while others point to her mother’s position on the KCMA board — Muldoon Monuments of Louisville received the contract. (Muldoon Monuments is still in existence on East Broadway.) Yandell had to console herself with being able to design the wrought-iron lamp-holders placed around the monument.

Muldoon Monuments created the granite pillar, while Munich-based artist Ferdinand von Miller provided the ready-made bronze Confederate soldiers. Plaques on the north and south side carry inscriptions about the “Confederate Dead” and “Tribute to the rank and file to the Armies of the South…”. The monument’s design was generic and ready-made, one that Muldoon Monuments had provided to other locations around the country. A copy of Louisville’s monument still stands in front of the courthouse in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The timing of the official dedication of the monument coincided with some critical milestones in race relations. The year 1895 was three years after Kentucky created the separate coach law that brought Kentucky’s Jim Crow government in line with other southern states. It was also one year before the Supreme Court’s Plessy v Ferguson decision that made segregation legal as long as African-Americans’ facilities were equal — in essence, the basis for the “separate but equal” era.

Over the years, there were numerous discussions for the relocation of the monument, but only in the context of it being a traffic hazard. Even then, passions ran high. Attorney Charles Farnsley, commander of the Andrew Broaddus Camp №361 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who served from 1948–53 as one of Louisville’s most celebrated mayors, stood guard over the monument in 1948 carrying his rifle as the issue of the monument’s relocation was being discussed. In its April 5th, 1948 issue, Life magazine covered the event in a story titled “Louisville Gets A Strange New Mayor.”

Controversy:

The calls for removing the monument as an offensive symbol did not begin until as late as 1989 when it was part of a list of demands made by University of Louisville’s newly formed Black Student’s Alliance (BSA) to address racism on campus. National dialog concerning the display of Confederate monuments in public spaces first emerged in 1990, and then later in the early 2000s.

In October of 2002, the University of Louisville’s trustees decided to build a new dormitory and tear down some of the Victorian homes utilized by various fraternities and sororities. These homes were located adjacent to the monument in an area known as Confederate Place — later renamed Unity Place. The trustees envisioned a new community park around the space occupied by the Belknap Playhouse building. With lobbying from the Pan African Studies Department, the trustees decided that the park was to be named Freedom Park. This new park’s idea was to convey a message that would “counterbalance” that of the Confederate monument. This approach was referred to by the trustees as the “dual heritage strategy.” The design did not challenge the monument itself, or the mythologies it carried.

Reverend Louis Coleman, executive director of the Justice Resource Center (JRC), was the first to challenge the retention of the monument by the city. He expressed his views in a letter to Mayor Jerry Abramson, in February of 2005. He wrote, “A statue of this nature does not belong in the middle of a roadway that connects to a college that boasts on its diversity.” Until Rev. Coleman’s letter, the discussion regarding the monument had stayed polite and calm. But his call for the outright removal of the memorial provoked a quick and fiery backlash.

In response, Mayor Jerry Abramson stayed silent on the issue.

The Removal of Louisville’s Confederate Monument:

By 2008, the University of Louisville had raised the $2 million needed for the creation of Freedom Park. The park’s design took into account the co-existence of the Confederate monument. In 2008, despite a few calls for the monument’s removal, no one had yet foreseen the monument-removal movement’s passion and magnitude, which emerged after the 2015 mass killing of nine African-Americans at the Mother Immanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The shooter was a neo-Confederate and had sported symbols of Confederacy in his social media posts.

It was not until April of 2016 that Louisville’s Mayor Greg Fischer and U of L President James Ramsey announced the plans to relocate the Confederate monument. Immediately the arguments and counter-arguments began, including a temporary restraining order in place due to a lawsuit filed by the local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. After testimony in the Jefferson County Circuit Court, Judge Judith Mcdonald-Burkman lifted the order, clearing the way for the removal.

The committee appointed by Mayor Fischer considered numerous options for the relocation. In the end, the City of Brandenburg, Kentucky, was chosen. The move cost $400,000, most of which was paid by the University of Louisville Foundation.

On Memorial Day in 2017, the town of Brandenburg, Kentucky, officially unveiled the Confederate monument in Riverfront Park, witnessed by a crowd of 400 people. Some men dressed up as Confederate soldiers, and a band played Dixie, all in all not much different than 1895, except for the crowd’s size.

A woman asked Mayor Ronnie Joyner about how the African Americans of Brandenburg felt about the relocation. Joyner replied, “We don’t have an African American community as such.”

The Confederate Monument of Louisville, Kentucky was originally published in Louisville, Kentucky on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Louisville’s slave traders were the prime movers of American slavery

In 1838, Henry Bibb, an African American enslaved man, was being led through Louisville’s streets when he managed to escape his captors. As was typical for the time for any fugitive from bondage, Bibb was immediately pursued by mobs of angry, armed white men who banded together to pursue runaways, often for a reward of no more than a free drink of whiskey from the slave owners.

Bibb was born in 1815 to Mildred Jackson, an enslaved woman on a Shelby County, Kentucky, plantation. His father was James Bibb, a state senator for Kentucky. In 1850 Bibb detailed his Louisville escape in his autobiography Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself, a book that went on to become one of the best-known narratives of an enslaved man during the antebellum period. During his escape, the streets of Louisville held no refuge for Bibb. “To me,” he wrote, “it was like a person entering a wilderness among wolves and vipers, blindfolded.” He hid under a pile of wood during the day and could only move about in the dark of night.

Bibb was eventually caught near Lake Eerie, brought back to Louisville, and placed in the city’s workhouse, a place he described as “hell.” Prisoners were made to saw or break stones while dragging around massive logs chained to their feet at all times. Bibb endured this punishment for three months. He wrote that during his time at the workhouse, his wife Malinda was held at a “private house” where, according to him, the slave traders satisfied their “basest purposes.” At the workhouse, Bibb learned that his owner had sold him to one of the most notorious, cruel, and mean-tempered slave traders of Louisville, a man named Mathew Garrison.

At the end of his prison time in the workhouse, Bibb, along with other enslaved people, was “marched off to the river Ohio to take passage on board the steamboat Water Witch,” a name befitting the transport downriver to the slave marts and auction houses of New Orleans and Natchez.

The scholar Bridget Ford, in her 2016 book, Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, And Politics in A Civil War Borderland, writes, “White Kentuckians, and especially Louisville’s slave traders were the prime movers of American slavery.” The slave trade thrived in Louisville due mainly to satisfy the Deep South’s insatiable hunger for free labor for its cotton plantations. During the antebellum period, Kentucky’s traders sold an estimated seventy-seven thousand enslaved people out of state and into the Deep South. Being shipped south from Louisville on the Ohio River is the basis for the expression “sold down the river.”

The flourishing slave trade of Louisville, Kentucky, is one of the most overlooked and downplayed chapters in the narrative of the South’s enslavement of American Americans. It is instructive to look back at the history of slave trading in America and the rise of cotton in the South to understand how they fueled Louisville’s slave trade.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was the most massive forced deportation of humans in history. Over four-hundred years, 12.5 million Africans were enslaved and shipped across the Atlantic to provide free labor for tobacco, coffee, sugar, and cotton plantations located in the Americas. These high-value commodities were then sent to Europe and sold. The slave trade profits created the powerhouse economies of Denmark, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United States.

The 5,000-mile journey across the Atlantic, also known as the Middle Passage, was notorious for its horrors. The ships were tightly packed with not enough room for the Africans to sit up. The heat in the holding areas was unbearable. Oxygen levels would often become so low that the candles would not burn. Scholars write that between 15 and 25 percent of the enslaved blacks died aboard these ships.

The majority of the enslaved people’s destination was the colonies in the Caribbean, Brazil, and Jamaica. Although the United States only took in less than 4% of the entire volume of the Transatlantic Slave trade — an estimated 500,000, the reproduction rate in America was much higher than elsewhere. Thus, births to enslaved women soon outnumbered imports.

The first enslaved African Americans landed in Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619 via the cargo ships White Lion and Treasurer. They were transported to Jamestown and sold into servitude.

At first sight, it may appear odd that an emerging society so profoundly tied to its Christian roots may condone slavery. Early Americans often used tortured biblical interpretations to justify slavery. For example, Genesis 9:20–27 tells Noah and Ham’s story, resulting in Canaan’s curse, which marked all descendants as slaves. Furthermore, Genesis 17:12–13, 27, mentions servants bought and established as inheritable property. More than anything else, it seemed enough that the Bible takes the existence of slavery for granted. Many years later, when the Deep South had a large enslaved population, ministers would point out that the Hebrews, God’s chosen people, had owned slaves and that Christ had never condemned slavery.

The Rise of Cotton

The temperate climate of Kentucky and its relatively short growing season was ill-suited to extensive plantation-style agriculture. However, the spread of cotton cultivation in the Deep South created an intense demand for enslaved labor in the Gulf States. The textile industry’s extraordinary growth in Britain and New England between the 1800–1850s was responsible for the high demand for cotton. The invention of the cotton gin, which allowed for easy separation of the seeds, did not reduce the labor needed for cotton picking. The gin had the opposite effect and made cotton production extremely profitable for the first time, thereby increasing the need for enslaved workers. In 1808 international slave trade was banned in the United States. Hence, the domestic slave trade was the only option to meet this insatiable need.

The result was a flourishing business based on African Americans’ sale from the Upper South, where cotton could not be grown, to the Deep South, where cotton had become the prime crop. In effect, although Kentucky did not benefit as much directly from enslaved labor, the Commonwealth became wealthy from selling enslaved people to the Deep South. The period’s primary transportation routes were over water, and the Ohio River became a major route to move enslaved laborers downriver. Louisville’s location at the Ohio banks placed it in a prime spot for slave trading in the city. Through the 1850s, Louisville exported 2,500–4,000 enslaved African Americans a year to the Deep South.

Due to its long growing season, cotton was a labor-intensive crop. Enslaved workers plowed the land in March, dropped seeds into the ground in April, and continuously worked to clear away the surrounding grass once the plant grew. In between, they had to plant corn and peas to feed themselves. Once cotton ripened in August, the long four-month picking season began. Being sent to the Deep South’s cotton plantations was a fate all enslaved people dreaded, for it meant backbreaking labor, disease, malnutrition, and death.

The Economy of the South Versus the North

Before we get to the devastating effect Louisville’s slave trade had on African Americans, it is first useful to highlight just how critical enslaved labor had become to the Southern elite’s survival.

Many slavery apologists have downplayed the critical importance of slave labor in the Southern economy. However, slavery in the South was a colossal institution. By 1860, out of a total U.S. population of 12 million, the enslaved people numbered over 4 million. The money invested in buying enslaved people accounted for 20% of the entire national wealth. Slaveholding accounted for more national wealth in the U.S. than railroads and manufacturing combined. Whereas the investment in railroads and manufacturing totaled $2.2 billion, the wealth in the purchase cost of enslaved labor was $3 billion. A critical distinguishing fact highlighted by historians is that northerners invested in land, whereas southerners invested in enslaved people.

Wealthy Southerners were not interested in the way Northerners built their wealth. They looked down on it. “We have no cities — we don’t want them,” said U.S. Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas in 1861. “We want no manufacturers: we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes…As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want.”

One of the Southern-secession movement’s notable leader and proponent, William Lowndes Yancey, told a Louisville audience in October of 1860 that Lincoln’s election would spell the South’s end. He went on to say:

“Twenty-eight hundred millions of dollars are to be affected by the decision of this question. Four millions of people are to be affected by it — four millions of slaves. Not only that, but the social and domestic relations of the eight millions of whites of the South are of necessity more or less affected by the decision of this question.”

It was no surprise that the South was willing to go to war over the question of slavery. Their enormous wealth was all tied up in it.

The Slave “Trail of Tears”

Many are familiar with the Native American Trail of Tears when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Ultimately, thousands of Native Americans were forcibly relocated from the southeastern United States to the lands West of Mississippi River — a journey of 1,000 miles. As a result, 4,000 Cherokee men, women, and children died of exposure, disease, and starvation. The Cherokee Natives refer to this forced relocation as “Trail where they cried.”

However, few have heard of the “Slave Trail of Tears” or what is sometimes known as the Second Middle Passage.

In the 50 years before the Civil War, over a million enslaved blacks were forcibly moved from the Upper South states of Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky to the Deep South states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The rise of “King Cotton” in the South was directly responsible for this migration. To give an idea of this resettlement’s scope, the Smithsonian Institution states that it was 20 times larger than Andrew Jackson’s Native American removal of the 1830s. It was bigger than the 19th-century immigration of Jews to the United States when some 500,000 people arrived from Russia and Eastern Europe. It was larger than the famous wagon-train migration to the West, a vital part of the American story. This thousand-mile forced March of enslaved African Americans lasted longer and displaced more people than any other migration in North America before 1900.

Families were broken apart in this forced migration. In many cases, the slave traders separated children from their parents and wives from their husbands. “Tomorrow the negroes are to get off [to Kentucky],” a Virginian slave-owning woman wrote to a friend, “and I expect there will be great crying and moaning, with children leaving there mothers, mothers there children, and women there husband.”

Virginia was the most significant source for this deportation, with 450,000 people forcibly sent south between 1810 and 1860. In one year alone, 1857, the sale of enslaved people from Virginia amounted to $4 million — $440 million in today’s money.

The Slave Trail of Tears was many routes that led from the Upper South to the Deep South. In some instances, slaver traders marched enslaved blacks from Virginia or Maryland to Louisville, Kentucky. There they boarded steamboats that took them downriver to the booming slave markets of New Orleans or Natchez. There is a record of a steamer Hibernia, which arrived in Mississippi from Louisville in 1831. The enslaved passengers on the Hibernia all came from Albemarle County, Virginia. They had been force-marched in chains — a distance of nearly 500 miles to Louisville, where they had boarded the steamboat on the Ohio River to journey South.

The slave merchants moved the enslaved African Americans in “coffles” — a once-common word, which refers to a line of cattle or people fastened and driven along together. Bound by chains, often in groups as large as 200, they were sometimes accompanied by musicians to keep them “in good spirit.” They sometimes sang — mostly they were forced to, as they marched, but the songs were sad tales of separation and reunion only after death. But no matter. “The negroes are happy,” wrote William Waller, a trader who in 1847 walked from Virginia to Louisiana with his 20 enslaved workers — some as young as 8, all taken from their families and sold in the Deep South.

Slavery in Kentucky

In 1940, the historian J. Winston Coleman wrote a book titled Slavery in Kentucky. “Generally speaking,” he wrote, “the slaves [in Kentucky] were a happy, contented and carefree race; well-fed, as their looks testified, well-lodged and not overworked.” This assertion fits well with Kentucky’s lasting attempts to soft-pedal slavery’s role in its economy and culture. Coleman’s deeply-flawed perspective came to dominate the scholarly view of slavery in Kentucky for the next 50 years. Surprisingly, some anti-slavery activists also fell victim to this repeated assertion of the “mildness” of slavery in the Upper South state. Kentucky’s white people insisted on the idea that “slavery assumes its best aspect” in their Commonwealth.

Only in the last few decades, scholars like George C. Wright, J. Blaine Hudson, Gerald L. Smith, and Luther Adams have reevaluated African Americans’ history in Kentucky — and, more specifically, Louisville. These scholars’ work has provided ample evidence that this view of slavery being “mild” in Kentucky is entirely false. Buying, selling, leasing, insuring, and even borrowing against enslaved African Americans as commodities in Kentucky was a huge business.

It was only in the period following the Civil War that various organized and influential groups of Confederate veterans and their families began to rewrite the history of slavery and the reasons for the war. This effort came to be known as the Lost Cause. During this revisionist period, Kentuckians published textbooks, pamphlets, and periodicals that have affected and colored American slavery’s story right up to the modern era.

George C. Wright, currently a visiting professor of history at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, who has written numerous books on the history of African Americans in Louisville, describes the goal of his life’s work by saying:

“If I did nothing more than refute the assertion made by numerous scholars that, given the state’s proximity to the North, conditions were better for Kentucky blacks than for their southern counterparts, my work would have some value.”

The Business of Slavery in Louisville, Kentucky

Historians write that Louisville’s central business district “grew thick” with slave traders and slave pens through the antebellum period. It is impossible to overstate the scope of enslavement business in the River City. By 1860, with a total population of just 68,000, Louisville had some 300 firms purchasing and selling enslaved blacks.

There are heartrending accounts of hundreds of African-American “old gray-headed fathers & mothers” weeping at the open-air auctions of their enslaved offspring on Market Street. The children were to be shipped South and would never see their parents again. Karl Bernhard, a German traveler, described being a witness to the “revolting spectacle” of a pregnant mulatto woman auctioned off for $400 with her two children in a “coffee-house” of Louisville.

According to scholars, buying and selling of enslaved blacks was a normalized trade in Louisville. City directories of the time listed slave dealers with other respectable businesses such as lawyers and bankers, and newspapers ran advertisements for slave traders without any hesitation or reservations. Louisvillians saw the slave business, much like any other capitalist enterprise. Some of the more prominent traders in Louisville were W.F. Davis, William Kelly, John Clark, Thomas Powell, Jordan and Tarlton Arteburn, William F. Talbot, John Mattingly, and Mathew Garrison.

Buyers preferred enslaved people in their prime, ideally between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. In the early 1800’s one could expect to pay $350 to $450 for a female and between $400 and $700 for a male. In 2020 money, that translates to $7,200 to $9,200 for female and $8,200 to $14,400 for a male. Prices rose dramatically once the Southern trade heated up, and by 1860, prime enslaved people of both sexes brought in between $1,500 and $2,000, which roughly converts to $44,000 and $58,000 in 2020 dollars.

A lesser-known and an entirely separate category of enslaved African Americans consisted of what was known as the “fancy girls” trade. These were young, attractive, usually light-skinned, or mulatto females destined to be sex slaves or prostitutes. Buyers paid much higher prices for fancy girls — sometimes as high as 300% over the median prices, depending on their skin color, youthful appearance, and the beauty of their features. By the 1860s, their prices had risen as high as $2,000 ($58,000 in 2020) or more. There are records of men having paid over $5,000 ($157,000 in today’s money) for some fancy girls. The Kentucky Derby was a peak time for the fancy girls’ trade as wealthy men from around the country came to Louisville to bet on horse races.

In Louisville today, a historical marker on 2nd and Market Streets memorializes the slave trade. The last line on the marker states, “Slave traders were often social outcasts avoided by all but fellow traders.” Historians and researchers have long dismissed this view of slave traders as unsavory characters as pure propaganda. The city benefitted directly from the slave trade. By 1860 as much as 20% of Louisville’s revenue came from taxes on slaves.

The Life of Henry Bibb

After being shipped from Louisville to New Orleans, Bibb escaped once again. Relentlessly pursued by his captors, he was caught by them. Bibb’s life became a cycle of escapes and recaptures as he kept trying to get back to his family and take them to Canada.

Eventually, Bibb left for Canada without his family. He became a lecturer, abolitionist, author, and newspaperman. In 1851 Bibb set up the first black newspaper in Canada, The Voice of the Fugitive. He remained active in abolitionist causes to the end of his life.

On February 26th, 1851, Bibb penned an editorial in his newspaper titled “ANOTHER SOUL-DRIVER GONE.”

Bibb wrote:

“ANOTHER SOUL-DRIVER GONE

M. Garrison, of Louisville, Ky., whole life has been spent in making brothels, prostitutes, widows, and orphans, is at last dead and gone to his reward. In the fall of 1839, he bought and carried us, confined with irons in connection with other slaves, to the city of New Orleans and sold us. We have often witnessed his cruelty towards his victims, both male and female, when they were confined with heavy irons and could not help themselves. We have heard him say that he never felt happier than when he had a female confined and apply a scourge to her back –” ah! how he liked to hear them beg and scream.” He would often travel through the State of Kentucky to buy up the handsomest mulatto female slaves that he could find, without any regard to separating husbands and wives, and would take them to New Orleans, and sell them for the basest purposes. He kept a slave pen in the city of Louisville for several years. A fugitive, who has just arrived in Canada, from that city, informs us that Garrison had a falling out with one of his slave holding chums, who shot Garrison through the head with two balls from a revolver; which is the way such characters generally settle their difficulties, before they leave the world.”

In 1854, 16 years after he escaped from the slave traders of Louisville, Kentucky, Henry Bibb died in Canada at the age of 39.

Slave Traders of Louisville, Kentucky was originally published in Louisville, Kentucky on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Three women describe what it is like to work in gentlemen’s clubs of a southern city

Seventh Street runs north-south through the heart of downtown Louisville, Kentucky. The largest city in the state and the 39th most populous in the U.S, Louisville, is situated along the Ohio River banks, across the border from Indiana.

Starting at the river, Seventh Street makes its way south through high-rises and glass towers of the Central Business District of Louisville, a city best known for its annual hosting of the Kentucky Derby. At the edge of the town, just after crossing Algonquin Parkway, Seventh Street enters Shively, a suburb of Louisville. With a population of 15,137 and per capita income of only $21,000, Shively is a small city that hovers at the poverty line.

Once a whites-only neighborhood where African-Americans were unable to buy a home, Shively was known for its eight distilleries after the prohibition era ended. Taxes and changing tastes closed down all the distilleries in the 1960s, and budget surpluses quickly became shortfalls. Since then, corruption and scandals have plagued this tiny home rule-class enclave known as “Lively Shively” for its reputation for prostitution and other vices.

The area along Seventh Street, north of Dixie Highway in Shively, is best known for its adult entertainment businesses. Adult bookstores, bars, and strip joints mix in with commercial storage places, used car lots, mobile home parks, and Dollar Express stores.

Geography is the primary reason for this clustering of adult-related businesses along Seventh Street. Churchill Downs, home to the Kentucky Derby, and the Kentucky Exposition Center, a regular venue for the annual National Farm Machinery Show — a primarily male-attended event, are located only a five-minute drive away from the strip clubs. Down the street from the clubs on Seventh Street, the Expo Five Fairgrounds turns into a city of RVs and camper homes for all significant local events.

“Guys are traveling. They’re in town for a couple of nights. Do they want to go sit in a bar and have a conversation with some dude? Or would they like to be with a pretty lady? Come on!” said Suzie (names, places, and situations have been changed for privacy), a former dancer at strip clubs. A statuesque brunette, who retired after a 25-year career in strip clubs, Suzie still wears the look of the tough body-builder and fitness-competition winner that she was. Like many women, she found herself working in a strip club through another woman in the business. “I got married to escape an abusive childhood,” Suzie said. When the marriage turned physically violent, she looked for a way out. “I met a woman who showed me how to make money at these clubs,” she said. Suzie went on to have a successful two-and-a-half decades career as a dancer. “It taught me how to manage my money. I’ve owned and sold many homes, “Suzie said,” I’ve had multiple cars at the same time.”

On the opposite end of the experience spectrum from Suzie is Brandi. She worked at a strip club for eight months — her only time working as a stripper and left to work somewhere else. Brandi is a wild Mohawk-haircut type, who learned to project a softer image inside the clubs to make money. She comes from a religious family and found her way to the clubs through a female roommate’s help. “She worked at the clubs and showed me the ropes,” Brandi said. “I loved it. It was a blast.” Brandi often uses the word “genuine” to describe herself. “Even though we were in a strip club and that’s what the men were there for, I still wanted to make them feel like they’re a person and not just my ticket out of here,” Brandi said.

Unlike both Suzie and Brandi, Effie found her way to the strip clubs through her family legacy. “I am a third-generation dancer,” Effie said. “Both my mom and grandmother were club dancers in Vegas.” Effie is a petite, strong punk rocker, who maintained that image in the club with her grungy get up. Effie has worked nightly at a club for two years, which is a long time for a woman to perform consistently at a club. Most women go in and out of this work on a per need basis and rarely stay that long. Despite her family connections, Effie started dancing at the clubs through sheer desperation. “I was broke and running out of options,” Effie said. “I was living in a craphole apartment with six people. My mother was paying my bills, and I knew something needed to change.”

Inside the clubs

Strip clubs, like any other business, have their inner mechanics and daily rhythms. “Clubs open at 3 p.m., so we get there a few hours earlier to get ready in a large dressing room,” said Brandi. Some women spend hours getting their looks on, and the transformation can often be mind-boggling. “You have to get approved by a manager,” said Brandi. “It has to be an outfit. You can’t just wear a bra and underwear.”

After the manager’s approval, the women head down to the floor and give their name to the DJ, who creates a list for stage calls.

Stripper names are long overdue for a scholarly tome. Roxxy. Dina. Shadow. Cali. Danger. Ebony. Rain. Peaches. Taylor. Blaze. Kitty. Raven. London. Jade. Nina. Dream. Kenya. Jewlz. Asia. Ginger. Breeze. Kiki. Cherokee. Diamond. Baby Girl. Panda. Barbie. A stripper name is meant primarily for anonymity. Sometimes it is all about the hair color, like Raven for a brunette, or Ginger or Scarlett for a redhead. Occasionally, it reflects their ethnicity, like Ebony or Kenya, for an African-American woman. More often, it is all about creating an exotic image, like Jelwz or London or Paris. Rarely though, is a stripper name entirely without some insight into the dancer’s personality or look.

As the club comes alive, the DJ announces the name of each dancer for a stage call. “Each stage call is three three-minute songs, and you come on stage to dance,” said Effie. Each dancer’s goal is to attract the men to their dance area and create a connection. If patrons are sitting at the stage, then they are expected to tip. “We hold out our thongs for tips on stage, which are usually single-dollar bills,” said Brandi.

Private dances

The critical work for women working in the clubs happens offstage.

“In between stage calls, you go around and socialize with the men. Our main objective is to sell private dances,” said Effie. Onstage dances with their one-dollar tips don’t provide much income. The real key to making money is the private dances. “Each private dance costs $40,” said Suzie. “The club keeps $5. We keep $35.” Private dances are also quick. Each one lasts for the duration of a three-minute song. Women quickly learn that the way to make money in a club is to get men to continue to buy additional private dances once they have bought one.

“You have three minutes. You don’t put all your cards on the table in the first song,” said Suzie. “You leave them peaked out before the end of the song, so that way they want another song. You keep intensifying, intensifying, intensifying. It’s like a soap opera.”

Dancers learn that certain moves work better than others. Whispering into men’s ears seems to be an effective method for keeping the soap opera going. “I would tell them how turned on I was by them,” said Brandi. “That’s something all men wanted to hear.”

“Using hair is a big winner,” said Suzie. “Guys like hair. They just fall for hair.”

Emotional connection

“I’ve literally had guys propose to me,” Effie said. “I have had guys tell me, ‘Oh My God! I love you.’ I never say it back. I know they feel more comfortable saying things to me than they would to the average woman, so you just gotta roll with it.”

Feeling a strong emotional connection is common for women working in the clubs. “I would see men that I had a real emotional connection with,” Suzie said. “They became buds. They were safe to play with. Our fantasies clicked.” Brandi confesses to being aroused at times. “I’m a very sexual person, and it happens. I’m human. If that happened, I would be like, ‘Okay! This feels good,’” she said. Some dancers meet their patrons outside the clubs, a big no-no in the business, but generally, this is more for companionship and friendship than a sexual encounter.

Suzie said, “Sometimes, I developed enough of a relationship to where I trusted them, so I’d go to the track with them. I’d go to dinner with them. Sometimes they’d like to take me shopping. They wanted to take me out on New Year’s Eve. But it was never sexual.”

Outside the clubs

How the club work affects the lives of women seems to be a mixed blessing. The positives are many. Money is one that comes up first. Effie said, “Dancing has changed my entire life. I have a beautiful home. I’m financially stable. I remember having to steal food growing up. I just went and bought $400 worth of groceries. It felt so good.”

But beyond the money, women spoke of other benefits.

“I did learn to do a lot of things with my body at the club that my boyfriend was very happy about. He loved that his girlfriend was a stripper,” Brandi said. Other dancers develop a different way about them when it comes to men outside of the clubs.

“When I’m outside the club, men are not paying me. I’m not going to listen to their crap,” said Suzie. “I’m unapproachable to men outside the club.” Effie had a similar change. “I don’t pander to men’s emotions outside of the club,” she said, “They’re not paying me.”

Neither Suzie nor Effie see this behavior as a negative. They see it more as empowerment.

“Before I started dancing, if a man on the street was making me uncomfortable, I would feel like it was my fault,” said Effie,” I would feel like I’m doing something wrong, or that I’m not covering up enough, or I’m wearing too much makeup. I don’t do that anymore. Now I know it has nothing to do with me. It’s been an extremely empowering experience for me.”

Strippers in society

A common thread in women’s lives was the experience of society’s judgment on their profession, starting with their families. “My parents knew about it,” said Brandi, “They were very nervous about my safety, especially my mother. My dad was like, ‘Oh my little girl is showing off all her stuff,’ and that was weird for him. I had to keep it secret from my dad’s side of the family because they’re very Christian. There is such a stigma to it. It really makes me sad because it’s so much more than what it seems.”

Suzie sees the clubs as an opportunity for many women to better their lives.

“They’re all young girls in there for a reason. They don’t want to work at a fast-food joint,” Suzie said, “I don’t blame them. It’s not a living wage. They come from no education and nobody to take care of them. At least they’re smart enough to make a living working at the club. They can go in these clubs and feel pretty about themselves. They can make their own hours and support themselves. They gain self-esteem. These girls are fighters! If we don’t take the same path as other women, that doesn’t make us bad.”

Effie thinks society does not understand them.

“The way the society views us is harsh,” she said. “There are so many uninformed people who think that we all do full-service work, or that we’re all cheap dumb sluts, or that we’re never going to make anything of ourselves. There’s a lot of bad that comes with this work, but usually, the positives outweigh the negatives. And even when they don’t, this job makes you strong enough to fucking deal with it for sure.”

Gentlemen’s Clubs of Louisville, Kentucky was originally published in Louisville, Kentucky on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A closer look at three lives lost to homicides in Louisville, Kentucky

As of September 8th, 2020, the city of Louisville, Kentucky, has logged 108 homicides. With 118 killings, 2016 currently holds the record for the most violent year. Authorities in Louisville expect 2020 to break that record. Sixty-five cases from 2020 remain “open” or unsolved. The local-news cycle over these senseless deaths seems only to numb the city to this horrific and ongoing spiral of violence.

This article looks behind the headlines to bear witness to the human cost of three homicides.

Aaron Williams

December 6th, 1989 — January 20th, 2016

Wednesday, January 20th, 2016, was a cold and violent night in Louisville, Kentucky. An approaching snowstorm had brought two inches of snow, and the temperature was a chilly 23 degrees. Three people were murdered that night, hours apart, in unrelated incidents.

26-year old Aaron C. Williams was one of the victims that night. He was found dead in his car on Old Manslick Road, with multiple gunshot wounds.

Williams was a high-school basketball star who had broken numerous records. According to his family, Williams lived for his 2-year old daughter Aaryn Elise Williams.

There were 123 homicides in the Louisville area in 2016, breaking the previous record of 110, set 45 years earlier in 1971. The 2016 total was a 43 percent increase from 2015 and was over double the number of homicides in 2014.

The murder of Aaron Williams remains one of the 47 unsolved homicides from 2016.

Juanita Williams: Aaron Williams’ mother

“The day it happened my life changed forever. My life stopped. I was robbed. They robbed me of Aaron. I won’t get to see my son get married. I won’t get to see my son raise his daughter. My son can’t enjoy time with me when I get older.

When they took my son my whole life stopped.

His daughter Aaryn was robbed of her father. Whenever it rains my grandbaby thinks that it’s her dad crying because he misses her. She has bad days whenever it rains.

I visit my son three to four times a week because I make sure he won’t be at that graveyard by himself. I go there and make sure the grave is clean and not messy. I bring him fresh flowers. It’s my second home. It’s the only place where I find peace. I always go there every holiday. He loved all the holidays and was always with me. That’s my way of bonding with my son. I celebrate his life and I will continue to do that until the day that I can’t do it anymore.

The killers don’t realize how many lives they have destroyed. When they take one, they take everyone down that was associated with him. His brother, Tony, who was also a star basketball player, stopped playing when Aaron died. He never played again.

When Aaron died I was angry with God. I had to question God, because I felt I did everything that I was supposed to have done. So why did you have to take my child? I still tussle with that. I have met family members that say they forgave their children’s killers. I just don’t think that I could ever get there. So if God was judging me on that, then I guess I’m going go to hell and I wouldn’t go to heaven.

People say things like God’s got him. He’s in a better place. He’s with God. It was God’s will, and so on. I don’t believe in any of that. It’s harsh but true. God had no hand in that. People forget about the devil.”

Eric Price: Aaron’s father

“I played basketball through high school. I started here at the Parkland Boys and Girls Club. I was a standout player. Ended up playing in high school. I had a few division titles and two basketball scholarship offers.

I turned away the scholarship offers when Aaron was born. I decided to stay back and raise my son. I was working at the supermarket, bagging groceries when he was born.

Aaron was always fascinated with the basketball. Even before he was walking he was playing with the ball. Once he was able to walk, he started dribbling the basketball.

I taught him how to play basketball here at the Parkland Boys and Girls Club. I taught him the rules first. I figured that if he understood the rules of basketball then he would be better.

In high-school basketball Aaron stood out. In his senior he broke seven different records and was the MVP.

Now when I watch basketball and I see a player do something that I think Aaron would have done or used to do, that makes me think of him a lot. Chris Powell was one of Aaron’s favorite players. So for instance when Chris Powell does a move that I know Aaron would have liked, that reminds me of Aaron. When I see Steph Curry shoot six or seven three-pointers in a row. That makes me think of Aaron. That was something that Aaron thrived on himself.

It was snowing real hard the day Aaron died. It snowed so bad I don’t think we even came out in the next couple of days. The weather was so bad.

The way my life has changed is sort of bittersweet, because I have this feeling that, what’s the worst can happen to me? And then I also have a feeling of, well I want to live my best life.

These are the best days. I’m lucky to be alive. Aaron’s not here. I don’t really complain about anything because my thinking is, here’s a here’s a young man that only lived so little of his life, so what have I to complain about?”

Jamie Allen: Aaron Williams’ girlfriend and mother of their daughter, Aaryn Price Williams

“Aaron and I started coming to the Big Four Walking Bridge when I got pregnant with Baby Aaryn. We always talked about where we would live, how we would live, and how we would raise our daughter. I wanted Aaryn
to be a cheerleader and a dancer, like me, and Aaron wanted her to be a
basketball player, like him. It was a wonderful journey.

Aaron was in love with his daughter the very moment she was born. He loved being a dad. Loved it. Just loved it.

Aaron and Aaryn loved being together. They played games. They always watched TV together and they always ate fruit together. That was their nightly ritual, to eat fruit together.

It was snowing the night he died. It was freezing cold. My shoes were soaking wet from walking through the snow and standing outside at the crime scene. That night was surreal to me. I felt numb.

For the next few months, I remember the pain being physical. My chest would hurt really bad. It felt like something was literally clenching my heart. It was the worst physical and emotional pain that I had ever felt in my life.

It was the day after Aaron’s death when little Aaryn started crying for her dad. She was saying I want my daddy, I want my daddy. I literally did not know what to say.

I had to try to explain to a little two-year-old mind that daddy lives with Jesus now. He’s in heaven. He’s in the sky and we won’t be able to see him anymore. But we can still talk to him and he’ll always watch over us and keep us safe.

Now, sometimes we will be in the car and if it is raining and she will ask, mama, does that mean my daddy’s sad? And I will say, he may be a little sad. And she will say, I’m sad too. And I will ask, why are you sad? And she will say, I know he’s crying because he misses me and I miss him too.”

Mollie Michaela White

March 30th, 1994 — January 11th, 2018

In her photographs, Mollie “Michaela” White appears smaller than everyone around her. According to her mother, 23-year old White was petite at 4’10” and weighed 94 lbs.

The shooting happened in a house near Ballardsville Road and Worthington Place Drive in East Louisville. White died at a male friend’s home, where the killer arrived to settle a score with him. White’s male friend was injured but managed to escape. White tried to hide, but the suspect hunted for her and shot her dead. At the time of his arrest, the 19-year old suspect was on a 5-year probation for a 2016 robbery conviction. He stole $100 from the house.

White’s family and friends made a GoFundMe page to raise $5,000. The money went towards a commemorative bench placed in Beckley Creek Park in White’s honor.

Just a few months after her murder, her father, Michael White, committed suicide.

Jane White: Molly “Michaela” White’s mother.

“My daughter was in the wrong place at the wrong time. We used to call her moonchild. She loved the moon. She loved animals. She rescued cats and brought home three of them. I was never a pet person but my daughter turned me into one. Mollie was cremated. There is a bench that was made for her as a memorial at Beckley Station Park.

I live it everyday. You go through it everyday.

The murder suspect is behind bars. Bail is set at $1 million, cash. He is 19 and shows not the slightest remorse. In fact, he seems to be doing great. At first I kept going to all the hearings, but then I stopped. I suggest to other survivors not to go to court too often, unless absolutely necessary. You go in hopes of seeing the murder affect the murderer. But it never does. He seems happy and jovial with his life, waving and smiling at his family and friends in court. It’s heartbreaking.

Mollie’s father Mike had lots of mental health issues, which intensified after Molly’s death. He committed suicide just a few months after her death. Her father never got over the guilt. He felt that he should have protected her. That was unreasonable. You can’t protect them. That’s not how it works. You can’t keep them inside the house all their lives. I found Mike’s body in his garage after he killed himself. I had gone there with a friend to check on him. He sent texts saying he was leaving everything on the kitchen counter. He also sent the code for the garage.

My faith in Jesus has helped me. I don’t know how people without faith in something get through something like this. It does not matter if you are a Christian or Muslim or whatever, you still need that faith to get through.”

Brennan G. Davis

September 19th, 1985- December 11th, 2015

There were 84 homicides in Louisville in 2015, up 47 percent from the year before.

That year, over 75% of the fatalities were west of interstate 65. Nearly 70% of the victims were African American. More than 50% of the shootings in 2015 occurred in only seven communities: California, Chickasaw, Park Hill, Parkland, Portland, Russell, and Shawnee — all predominantly African American neighborhoods in the west end. Homicides occurred in 21 of Louisville’s 26 residential ZIP codes. However, 14 of the 84 people died in a single one, 40212, in the city’s northwest section.

Twice in 2015, three people were killed on a single day, and on average, there was one homicide every four days in Louisville that year — the city’s deadliest in 36 years.

Over 40 cases of homicide remain open from 2015. The murder of Brennan Davis is one of them.

Davis was killed over a weekend, which saw three separate homicides.
The shooting was reported on the night of Friday, December 11th, at South Fourth Street and Park Avenue, shortly after 10 p.m. When LMPD officers arrived, they found Davis, 30, on the sidewalk. Paramedics took Davis to the University of Louisville Hospital, where he was pronounced dead of multiple gunshot wounds at 10:50 p.m.

Davis was an army reservist who had served in Afghanistan and was working towards his masters at Sullivan University. He left behind a 6-year old son. Sullivan University has created a scholarship in his name, given to people who have overcome hardships to attend graduate school.

Lonnie Rashid: Brennan Davis’ mother.

“I remember the last message I received from Brennan the night before he was killed. He told me he loved me. He had just turned 30. Some people want details of how their loved ones died. Some don’t. I’m one that does not. I don’t want to be angry. I don’t care about who, what, when.

My son once told me he thought he had the best childhood. There’s no bigger compliment a parent can hear from his or her own child. That their efforts to do the right thing for their children were not in vain.

Whenever I go to his grave, I go alone. I want to be alone with my son. I still have all of his things. What am I going to do? I can’t throw them away. It’s as if I am saying, I have all your things, I am waiting for you to come back. My son’s favorite verse from the Bible was from Philippians 4:13- I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I have a part of it written on his grave marker.

Next to God’s love is a mother’s love. There will never be any other kind of love that will come in between. I don’t share my loss with a lot of people. I don’t want to be known as the grieving mother. I don’t want the label. I don’t want the attention.

Death is not easy. Death is complicated. Death has expenses and paperwork and phone calls. None of which I wanted to deal with. I couldn’t deal with anything. I threw away any piece of mail I got from insurance companies or from anyone else about his death. I could not deal with it for a long, long time.

I did everything right for my son. I protected him. I brought him up in the safest neighborhoods. Sent him to the right schools. I helped him through his teenage years. I thought I had the perfect formula. There is no perfect formula. You think these things happen to other people. They don’t. They can happen to anyone. These things just float around in the world, like something evil and just attach themselves to someone at random.”

Three Homicides in Louisville, Kentucky was originally published in Louisville, Kentucky on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Going west in Louisville, Kentucky, some street names change at South Thirty-first Street. What is the explanation behind this?

Driving west on Madison Street in Louisville, Kentucky, it is easy to miss the street name change at Thirty-first Street; it becomes Vermont Ave. Something similar happens to Chestnut Street, which changes to River Park, and Magazine Street becomes Del Park Terrace. Historically, Walnut Street (later renamed Mohammed Ali Blvd) became Michigan, and Jefferson Street became Lockwood, but shifts in Louisville’s street layout has erased these last two alterations. Why this name change at Thirty-first street? Is it something as innocuous as the whim of a city planner? Or does it represent something more?

Louisville takes pride in being seen as a city “progressive” in race relations. A few Google searches bear this out. Louisville’s self-perception may seem like a modern development, but this “progressive” view of itself dates back to the Civil War. However, a closer look at the city’s history belies this image — and quite dramatically. Once proudly proclaiming itself as the “Gateway to the South,” Louisville no longer uses that moniker. That does not mean the city has physically relocated itself. It more than likely represents the River City’s effort to distance itself from the American South, a place with a long history of racism and white supremacy. The change in street names is just one small reminder of the long and often-overlooked history of institutional racism in Louisville.

First, some historical background is needed to understand why these changes in street names at Thirty-first Street are a marker of Southern white racism, Louisville style.

A Short History Lesson:

Located on the border of Indiana and along the Ohio River banks, Louisville was founded in 1778 by George Rogers Clark and named after King Louis XVI of France. It is the largest city in the State of Kentucky. During the Civil War, Kentucky was one of the border states — along with Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri. Slave states that did not secede from the Union were known as border states, and as such, had a mixed and generally overlooked record of slavery and race relations. Border states have long considered themselves northern. Many Louisvillians like to think of themselves as “northerners.” Still, the fact remains that Kentucky is the Upper South — as opposed to the Deep South, and the state is very much defined by the Southern values when it comes to its history of racial politics.

Between 1860 and 1870, due mostly to a massive migration of rural African Americans, Louisville’s population grew by 120 percent, and it continued to grow for many decades. Such rapid growth created severe overcrowding and led to the creation of new African American neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were a patchwork of areas within the city — unlike today, where the west end is home to most African Americans living in Louisville. For example, the noteworthy African American neighborhoods to emerge after 1865 were: Smoketown, east of downtown Louisville and south of Broadway; Brownstown, near Magnolia in the area later developed as St. James Court; the California neighborhood, south along Fifteenth and adjacent streets; “Fort Hill” near Shelby and Burnett; “Little Africa” (west Parkland) in southwest Louisville; and the “Russell neighborhood,” expanding westward to Twenty-first Street (by 1914).

In some ways, one could call these neighborhoods “integrated” as African Americans lived side by side with whites. However, the disparity in income and living standards was far too significant between the races to be considered integration in any real sense. The living conditions of African Americans in these neighborhoods were appallingly primitive. Rich whites of Louisville found it convenient and merely tolerated their African American domestics living nearby. It was only after emancipation that Louisville whites sought to put distance between themselves and African Americans.

By 1914, Russell’s western edge was home for much of the thriving African American small business and professional class. Louisville’s population growth created pressures to extend this neighborhood westward, which was an exclusively white residential area. In 1914 white Louisvillians looked to stop this expansion with the passage of a residential segregation ordinance.

Louisville’s 1914 Residential Segregation Ordinance:

Louisville’s segregation ordinance was the brainchild of W.D. Binford, superintendent of the mechanical department at the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times. Binford brought up the idea on November 14, 1913, when speaking to fifty white businessmen at the Hotel Henry Watterson. The occasion was a luncheon of the Real Estate Exchange of Louisville. “There is no problem so grave, nor one fraught with so much danger to property values, as the gradual influx of the negro into blocks or squares where none but whites reside,” Binford said in his speech. He spoke of a “negro invasion” of white areas and “aggression” of African Americans who purchased homes to force out white owners. Binford warned, “It is not necessary for me to inform you that this menace has cost the city many thousands of dollars in taxes, to say nothing of the loss of property owners.”

Furthermore, Binford chided the real estate men for being complacent. Many others had felt similarly secure, he warned them, until “one morning they awoke to find that a Negro family had purchased and was snugly ensconced in a three-story residence in one of the best and most exclusive white squares in the city.” Binford suggested an ordinance to prevent this influx of African Americans into white areas. Despite some opposition by a few white businessmen, the idea caught on.

In 1913 residential segregation ordinances were a new phenomenon and had begun in border and southern cities, Baltimore being the first to introduce one in December of 1910. Baltimore’s statute was ruled unconstitutional, as were others passed in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Portsmouth, Virginia; Atlanta, Georgia; and other cities. Baltimore did not give up, though. The city tried three times, and each time its warmed-over ordinance was deemed unconstitutional. Aware of the fact that these segregation laws were being overturned, the legal writers of Louisville’s 1914 segregation ordinance carefully worded the code to avoid the flaws of the many others overturned by the courts. Ironically, Louisville tried to hide the racism of the ordinance by invoking the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of equal protection, thereby applying their measure equally to whites and African Americans. The law invoked peaceful race relations as its central goal. It read, in part:

“An ordinance to prevent conflict and ill-feeling between the white and colored races in the city of Louisville, and to preserve the public peace and promote the general welfare, by making reasonable provisions requiring, as far as practicable, the use of separate blocks for residences, places of abode and places of assembly by white and colored respectively.”

Despite fierce opposition by Louisville’s African Americans community, who saw through the ruse, the residential segregation ordinance was passed on March 17, 1914, by the City Council. The vote was 21–0.

NAACP’s Efforts in Louisville:

Defeated but not discouraged, the African American leaders of Louisville worked with the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to take on this segregation law and bring the issue to the United States Supreme court.

Newly-formed in 1909, the NAACP led the legal effort to defeat Louisville’s segregation ordinance. The lead on this issue was NAACP’s first full-time lawyer, J. Chapin Brinsmade.

Located on W.Chestnut Street, in Louisville, the Quinn Chapel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church has been the center of many critical civil rights struggles. The tradition of African Americans raising funds at churches to fight legal cases against segregation originated at Quinn Chapel AME, which was recently designated as a National Landmark. Many leading figures of the civil rights movement, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke here to create the groundswell for civil-rights activism.

Brinsmade was well aware of what the white Louisvillians were up to in their new law. At a June 1914 rally held in Quinn Chapel AME, Brinsmade said:

“It will not be easy to void the ordinance in the courts. Louisville has drawn its ordinance very carefully and the men who did the work had before them all the other similar ordinances and were able to profit by the defects. They believe that they have avoided all technical defects, and so all other cases will hinge on Louisville.”

Over $300 — equal to $7,709 in 2020, was raised at this rally for hiring a local attorney to try the case. To its everlasting credit and fame, NAACP created an unusual test case from scratch to challenge Louisville’s new law.

Preparing for a Legal Battle:

In November of 1914, William Warley, an African American member of the Louisville NAACP, purchased a lot from Charles Buchanan, a white real estate dealer, who opposed the segregation ordinance because of its implications for his business. Located at 37th and Pflanz Avenue, the lot in question was in an exclusively white neighborhood. The NAACP had carefully written up the legal text of the contract between the two men. In the agreement, Warley required the ability to live on the lot as a condition of the purchase, or else according to the contract, he did not have to pay.

Buchanan agreed to Warley’s terms. But when Warley refused to complete the transaction, Buchanan’s lawyer filed a lawsuit in Jefferson County, arguing that the ordinance should be rescinded for being unconstitutional. Warley countered that Louisville’s law prevented him from occupying the property, and thus, he did not have to pay. To avoid the appearance of collusion, Warley requested the City Attorney to represent him. In essence, Buchanan, a white man represented by NAACP, was calling for the ordinance’s removal. Whereas, an African American man, Warley, being represented by the city attorney, claimed to be fighting to uphold the regulation.

Buchanan v Warley is one of the landmark desegregation cases that landed at the Supreme Court’s doorstep and was ruled in favor of the NAACP and Louisville’s African American citizens. In one stroke, this decision not only overturned Louisville’s segregation law; it did so to all others being passed around the country as well. African Americans in Louisville, Baltimore, Richmond, and St. Louis celebrated by holding victory rallies.

The Legacy of Buchanan v Warley:

After such a clear and decisive ruling by the Supreme Court, it would be tempting to think the whites of Louisville might be agreeable to making room for African Americans. But that was not to be. In a pattern that was to repeat itself, Louisville’s white residents simply found workarounds, for example, by use of restrictive covenants in real estate conveyances or house deeds. Nevertheless, at least for now, the age of government-defined residential segregation seemed to be over.

White Louisvillians also found other ways to mark their territory and to keep out African Americans. The changing of the street names was one such method. By 1930, the African American community was concentrated in an area from Sixth on the east to Thirty-first on the west and from Broadway on the south to Jefferson on the north. Any further expansion west by African Americans was met with a determined resistance of an exclusively white neighborhood starting at Thirty-second street. In a move revealing of the whites’ attitude in Louisville at the time, ordinances were passed to change the names of the east-west streets that ran through both African American and white areas of West Louisville. Thirty-first Street became the boundary for this name change.

The clear demarcation of this racial boundary reflected the undying hostility of the white homeowners’ association. One white resident urged his neighbors to make “a Negro living on the West End…as uncomfortable as if he were living in Hell.” An editorial published in 1939 in the Louisville Leader — a leading African American weekly newspaper of its time — described Louisville as a city where “invisible signs were put up…which read ‘Negroes and Dogs not allowed.’ ”

Buchanan v Warley was one of the first major successes of the NAACP, and it made the organization a leader in protecting the rights of African Americans through legal challenges. The irony is that though the Supreme Court’s decision increased the amount of housing available for African-Americans, it did not lead to integrated neighborhoods. As African Americans moved westwards into the city, the whites left the area in droves — a move known as the white flight. Ultimately, Buchanan v Warley resulted in only expanding Louisville’s African American ghetto.

Today these streets with the changing names stand as a testament to the long history of residential segregation in Louisville, Kentucky.

The Racism Behind Street Names in Louisville, Kentucky was originally published in Louisville, Kentucky on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.