Central City native Lee Durham Stone has published his first book, a history of race in Western Kentucky, from the Lost Cause to integration. The book, titled “Across the Kentucky Color Line” is the first by Stone.
Stone held a book signing and spoke at the Thistle Cottage in Greenville, during the African American Read-In on Feb. 16.
Stone talked about his career, which spans from a stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica from 1979-1982, to teaching high school for 23 years in Mississippi, Florida and Kentucky. Stone has lived in Taiwan, and Costa Rica as well. He now lives in Franklin, Kentucky.
To track where Stone’s desire to write this history began, he said spending time in Jamaica with the Peace Corps was a pivotal experience. He was in a post-Colonial country with a largely Black population, teaching in a school where all of the students and faculty were also Black.
“Somebody once said, everybody should be a minority sometime in their life, to see what it’s like,” Stone said. “So I had that experience.”
Stone was quick to acknowledge that the experience did not compare to the experience of Black people in America, “But it was one of those epiphanies that changed my perspective.”
When he moved back to Kentucky in 2011, Stone began to study the state’s history. He noticed the gap in historical literature about Black history in Kentucky, especially in Western Kentucky. Most of the existing histories covered the Bluegrass region, the cities of Louisville and Lexington, and even some on Appalachia. The gap in history being told about Western Kentucky opened a door for Stone.
“I saw [the gap] and thought, maybe I could do something,” he said. A quote from novelist Toni Morrison inspired Stone to act. “If there’s a book you really want to read, but that book hasn’t been written yet, she said, you must write it.”
While working on his book for more than a decade, Stone was able to hear histories from many in the community, including Annie Bard, Rev. Otis Cunningham, Roger Frazier and Willie Parker. Stone said Larry Elliott, formerly of Greenville, gave him the reassurance he needed to move forward with a book about race. “It’s about time, it’s long overdue,” Stone remembered him saying.
There are histories of Black-owned businesses in the county, and accounts of blackface minstrel shows. There is a harrowing story of a 1907 execution in Greenville that went wrong, when a Black 16 year-old Harrison Alexander was hung in public, as a crowd of 600 gathered to watch. A miscalculation resulted in a 32-minute ordeal that played out as onlookers watched.
In his book, Stone comments that in the present day we are “commissioned to move beyond chastising past people for their cultural myopia, but instead we should comprehend past events and people in their contemporary cultural contexts.”
Amidst the retelling of violence and vigilante justice, there are also stories of resistance and change. Stone tells the story of school integration in 1963, and the push-back in local media, and elections of Black people to offices around the county in the 1970s. He also writes of a group of prominent White Central City men who made an unsuccessful appeal to the governor to commute the death sentence for Alexander back in 1907.
In the epilogue, Stone references the racialization of the local landscape with the erection of a historical marker on the courthouse lawn in Greenville honoring General Nathan Bedford Forrest. The decision to place the marker memorializing the Confederate hero, slave trader and first leader of the Klu Klux Klan, was perhaps not coincidentally made in the same year Muhlenberg County schools were integrated, he writes. The marker still stands today.
“We must remind ourselves that the Black experience is American history under a single, shared sky,” Stone writes, “Only then, at last, can the contours of the Promised Land of new beginnings be seen from the mountaintop.”
Stone said he plans to publish a second book this fall, covering slavery and the Civil War period, again focusing on Muhlenberg County and Western Kentucky.
