History of Education as Anti-Racist Activism in Lexington and Fayette County Kentucky
by Randolph Hollingsworth, Ph.D. (University of Kentucky)
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Education has a strong legacy in Lexington and Fayette County Kentucky, dating back to the beginning of its founding. This brief talk will offer a portrait of Lexington in its role as a cultural and financial center – as a place where dreams of a new citizen in a new Republic spanned all its inhabitants. As early as 1779, when Kentucky was still part of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson had proposed A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge. Jefferson proposed public support for secondary schools as well as scholarships for the best students to attend the College of William and Mary. Civic literacy was an essential component of Jefferson's plan. He believed that if the children of citizens were taught in a way that emphasized moral and civic virtues, this would enable the youth to know about and how to exercise not only their rights but also their future responsibilities as citizens.
About that same time, the forts in the Virginia frontier were drawing attention, and the fort at Lexington by the spring of 1782 was recognized as the seat of Fayette County. The county courthouse, a two-story log building on the northwest corner of Main Cross (Broadway) and Main Street, served as the center for both economic and political gatherings. Court Day was the one day of the month when the county court was held, and farmers – both black and white – came to the county seat to sell their produce and buy supplies. A census was taken of the town inhabitants in 1798 for a total of 1,475, nearly 25% identified as “Negroes” – but this might include anyone with dark skin, including Asian Indians or Amer-Indians. Compared to the county population of only 772, the city census numbers show the importance of this new urban center.
By the mid-‘80s Lexington was a thriving center of a hub of roads from the countryside to the rivers and from there on to the Mississippi. Stores, inns and taverns sprang up to meet the needs of an international population willing to gamble on the growth of a new town. Lexington was well on its way to becoming a new manufacturing center, and black labor was key to the success of the emerging town. Lexington was Kentucky’s first city. Its literate citizens both rural and urban were convinced that Lexington was a new Philadelphia, a cultural mecca of civilization at the heart of the new republic’s farmlands and mineral resources. African-Americans, both free and enslaved, were mail carriers, furniture makers, cobblers, blacksmiths, tobacconists, weavers, barbers, gardeners, chefs, butchers, healers, jockeys, preachers, musicians, and even lawyers. Slaves were hired out for domestic service as well as agricultural work, and they sometimes had a say in where they worked. The hemp industry’s ropewalks and bagging factories employed the greatest number of urban African-American workers – even young children. Some African-Americans in Lexington speculated in housing and even purchased their own slaves in an effort to make their fortunes.
Early Lexington and its environs became the epicenter of the Great Revivals in the nation’s Second Great Awakening – a time described by historians as a growth in democratic ideals.
David Rice, a Presbyterian educated at the College of New Jersey at Princeton, was one of the New Lights in this revolutionary time period. He spent a great deal of time working among slaves in Virginia before he was forced out in 1783 because of his anti-slavery ideas. He came to Kentucky where he organizing three of the first Presbyterian congregations, the Transylvania Presbytery by 1786, the Synod of Kentucky, and the Transylvania Seminary (which started as a grammar school in his home in 1787). Perhaps it was he who helped start the Sunday School for blacks in old Colonel Patterson’s home on High Street that was advertised in the Kentucky Gazette in October 1798. Rice also served as chairman of the board to handle the endowment coming from the 12,000 acres that Virginia’s legislature had deeded to Kentucky for the purpose of establishing a college for white men. A strong opponent of slavery, he joined in the efforts of the Kentucky Abolition Society, writing under the pseudonym “Philanthropos.” In 1792 Rice published his pamphlet “Slavery Inconsistent with Justice and Good Policy” – failing soon thereafter as a delegate to the Kentucky constitutional convention, to insert an article leading to the emancipation of slaves included in the state's first constitution. Keep in mind, though, Rice never freed his own slaves – nor did Kentucky as a state. It took federal troop occupation and a constitutional amendment to end slavery in Kentucky.
Even so, Kentucky blacks maintained as strong a commitment to their religious worship and education as the whites The first separate church for Blacks in Kentucky was organized in the early 1780s by Peter Duerett, a slave who migrated to Kentucky with the Rev. Joseph Craig, brother of Rev. Lewis Craig who brought “The Traveling Church” of Separate Baptists from Spotsylvania through the Cumberland Gap in the winter of 1781. By the fall of 1782 Craig established the South Elkhorn Baptist Church, and Duerett (“Old Captain”) and his wife created a Baptist church for Black converts at the “Head of Boone’s Creek” (off Todd’s Road near Clark County). They subsequently hired out the time of himself and wife from his owner and moved to Lexington, bought a cabin from John Maxwell and started what was then called the First African Church. The congregation, led by free blacks and slaves, bought its first property in 1815 (a cotton factory on High Street, next to the present Asbury Methodist Church) under the names of freedmen Rolla Blue, Wm. Gist, Solomon Walker and James Pullock. The next year they started a church school in a stone building behind the church on High Street.
Private academies flourished in Lexington and their students often attended the open lectures at the University. There were three schools for girls in Lexington before 1800. African-Americans had few opportunities for academic education even though, unlike most other slave states, Kentucky did not forbid teaching slaves to read and write. Private schools with both black and white teachers taught neighborhood black children during weekdays or nights. The free blacks of Lexington in the early 1800s established their own school by subscription for their children and hired as the school’s teacher a white man from Tennessee. Sunday afternoon schools led by whites taught basic literacy and some vocational skills to free blacks or those who were willing to leave and help colonize Liberia.
Churches of all denominations supported the American Colonization Society. ACS leaders advocated missionary work in local black communities, offering Sunday School lessons and enough training to be sent to the new Republic as teachers and missionaries. Kentucky white elites played a large role in establishing this process of removal: Robert Wickliffe and Presbyterian Rev. Robert J. Breckinridge were state presidents and Henry Clay served as the president at the national level. Many Lexingtonians believed that slavery was a natural part of their Republic and that those who were against slavery violated the general order of society. Many white Kentuckians like Cassius Clay who grew up in these times came to think of African-Americans as competing with white laborers for limited resources. Thomas R. Marshall, a professor of law at Transylvania University, believed that slavery was actually good for Blacks. He was trained in the science of the day, eugenics, which taught that Africans were of a flawed creation, and that the genesis in the Bible was describing the creation of white people. He thought of African-Americans as the children of heathens and barbarians -- they were naturally immoral and child-like in intelligence. He helped to put down abolitionists by saying public safety was more important that civil rights like the freedom of the press. As did many pro-slavery Lexingtonians, he wanted stricter governmental control of newspapers and voting.
However, in many ways Kentuckians were very progressive. Lexingtonians were the first to build a lunatic asylum in the West (an act of institutional benevolence of the time, the second in the nation), and it was open to both blacks and whites when it opened. Lexington was the site for an education convention in 1830 to design Kentucky Common School System. By 1838 Kentucky was the first in the new nation to offer school suffrage for female heads of household in rural areas – interestingly this included black women.
PAUSE & REFLECT:
How can a Kentuckian be anti-slavery but not anti-racist?
Racism is an system of ideas based on a belief that a particular group of people is superior or inferior to another, and that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics. This doctrine clarifies and defines group characteristics over individual qualities to justify non-equal treatment based on cultural, ethnic, caste or religious stereotypes. Racial separatism is the belief, usually based on racism or a reaction to racist actions, that different races should remain segregated and apart from one another.
Institutionalizing White Supremacy (Black Codes and using public resources for whites-only)
In 1792 Kentucky was the first state in the new country to be organized west of the Allegheny Mounties and the first state in the new nation to expressly protect the institution of slavery. When Kentucky became a state in 1792, the legislature banned interracial marriage with the assumption that the New Republic's experiment in democracy would be destroyed by amalgamation of the races. This anti-miscegenation law was not repealed as were many other states' similar laws in the 20th century but was finally overturned by the Supreme Court in 1967 by Loving v. Virginia. In 1798 Kentucky passed its first slave code that required slaves who were away from residences for longer than four hours to have a pass. Any African-American without proof of freedom, such as a certificate of emancipation or testimony of white friends, could be sold into slavery.
Free African-Americans possessed little more freedom than slaves, but it is likely that they kept their place in the community through the use of personal contacts with landed and professional class whites. Every month, in almost every monthly session of the Fayette County Court, a slave received his or her freedom. It was easier to emancipate a slave in Kentucky than in the deep South, and the Kentucky Court of Appeals tended to rule in favor of freedom during contested cases in these early days of Kentucky slavery. Few laws targeted free blacks specifically since color, rather than bondage, determined the type of regulation. For example, blacks could not own weapons, testify in court against whites (though there were some exceptions), or even be suspected of trying to fight against whites.
Lexington’s black communities thrived. Enough so that the Lexington Trustees passed a resolution on July 8, 1800, hiring a city streets patroller to watch for large numbers of blacks in Lexington, especially on Sundays, since the large gatherings had “become troublesome to the citizens.” In 1808 the state assembly had forbidden the migration of free blacks into Kentucky, yet Lexington and the surrounding villages of the Bluegrass served as home for a relatively large number of freemen. Unlike Louisville, where the small free black population lived in segregated enclaves, Lexington’s black population lived in homes scattered among white residences. In 1810 white Lexingtonians created havoc after hearing rumors of a slave uprising. Several slaves were tortured and jailed but no revolution transpired. Nevertheless, Lexington trustee George Trotter, Jr. ordered William Worsley, captain of the night watch, “not to disturb the white citizenry -- but to apprehend and secure all verry [sic] suspicious blacks who may be found on the streets in doubtful situations -- and keep them in custody -- until they can be delivered to the civil authority.”
In 1860 Lexington’s population was counted at 9,521, one half of the county population. Her slave population both hoped for and feared the coming war: everywhere panicky white citizens were seeing insubordination and insurrection in the slightest reaction from an African-American. The States Rights candidate and current Vice-President was a Lexingtonian, John C. Breckinridge. We venerate him today with a monument on Main Street. He was a popular moderate who campaigned on a pro-Union, pro-slavery ticket. Recruits for both armies began quietly leaving Lexington in groups of two and three. Lexington came under strict military rule.
Nevertheless, slave sales continued on Cheapside and on the surrounding farms. Periodically occupied by Confederate Army and the Union, the residents of Lexington and Fayette County – both free and slave – were subject to raids and to being turned in to authorities as part of petty neighbor squabbles. No one was allowed to leave the city without a pass from the Provost-Marshall and merchants who refused to give the oath of allegiance to the Union (or didn’t say it often enough for the military authorities) were shut down. In January 1863, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, and even though it did not legally affect any slave’s status in Kentucky, the state’s population was in flux. Lexington was filled with refugees from eastern Tennessee and many runaway slaves. Most regiments refused to keep the slaves, since it was against the law, but some, for example, the 22nd Wisconsin Volunteers would take them in. Local military forces could impress black labor whenever they were bold enough to do so. Many church groups and self-help associations started up by local black leaders offered help and supplies to black impressed soldiers coming through the city as well as the refugees and their families.