CITY STREETS / LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY
The Racism Behind Street Names in Louisville, Kentucky
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.
