Louisville Magazine

MAR 2013

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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The once-grand Colonial Revival mansion of west Louisville tobacco, banking and real-estate baron Basil Doerhoefer, built in 1902 at 4432 W. Broadway. Doerhoefer owned and subdivided much of the land that became the Shawnee and Chickasaw neighborhoods. The former home of his son, Peter Doerhoefer, stands on the same block. curity: the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott Decision rejecting both slaves and free blacks as U.S. citizens with rights protected by the Constitution. Ten, in the midst of the war, came the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves in Confederate states but not in slaveholding Union states like Kentucky. Two Centuries refers to ���a raging food��� of Southern fugitive slaves ��� freed by decree but now the objects of white anger, and still living under the cloud of Dred Scott ��� fowing into Kentucky headed North, even as slaves here remained the property of local slave owners. Te proclamation, though, had another element: It allowed newly emancipated blacks to enlist in the Union military, and when a Union soldier shortage became acute in mid-1864, an exemption agreement between Lincoln and Kentucky Gov. Tomas Bramlette crumbled. Union commanders began signing up commonwealth slave recruits. ���A 10-acre refugee camp for their families was located at 18th and Broadway, then the outskirts of town,��� notes Blaine Hudson in the Encyclopedia of Louisville. When, between Appomattox in April and ratifcation of the 13th Amendment in December 1865, Kentucky refused to free its slaves, Union Maj. Gen. John Palmer used his military authority under martial law to do it, writes Lucas, ���granting Louisville blacks, including slaves, the right to move freely within the Commonwealth or across the Ohio.��� Louisville���s black population, which had receded to 6,820 by 1860, grew to just under 15,000 by 1870 and would reach almost 40,000 at the turn of the century, when Louisville ranked seventh among U.S. cities in number of African-Americans. By then, according to Yater, ���California on the west and Smoketown on the east were essentially all-black neighborhoods,��� and white-populated Shawnee and Parkland ��� whose southwestern section, known as ���Little Africa,��� was solidly black ��� were on the rise. Broadway, the border between the California and Russell neighborhoods, fgured heavily in the aftermath of the Civil War, when the federal Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (aka the Freedmen���s Bureau) was forced to set up temporary camp in Louisville to help restore order in the chaotic social structure and attempt to breed goodwill among both African-Americans intent on gaining civil rights and whites who had been stripped of their ���property.��� Yater���s Two Hundred Years says that a ���Freedmen���s and Refugees Home was set up at 18th and Broadway to provide temporary housing and the Army���s Crittenden General Hospital at 14th and Broadway was turned over to the Bureau to provide medical care for the ill.��� And it would be the Freedmen���s Bureau that, when the black 32 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3.13 community unsuccessfully pleaded for educational help from the city in the early post-war years, created the teacher-training Ely Normal School at 14th and Broadway in 1868 for the African-American population. Amid staunch racial segregation, schooling for black children before and immediately after the war had been handled by Louisville���s strong cadre of African-American churches, including Fifth Street Baptist (under the Rev. Henry Adams), Quinn Chapel African Methodist Episcopal (under teacher William H. Gibson), Fourth Street Methodist (later Asbury Chapel), Jackson Street Methodist (under Henry Miller) and St. Mark���s Episcopal (under D.A Straker). By 1870, Two Centuries notes, there were 15 private black schools serving 1,500 students. Securing city-funded public schools for blacks, as well as other signs of acceptance by a segregation-minded white community that restricted African-Americans from, for example, acquiring government jobs, was difcult, especially after the 1866 Kentucky General Assembly passed measures that were mere revisions of the state���s 1798 Slave Code. Two Centuries lays out some of the stipulations: ���African-Americans were prohibited from testifying in court, from serving on juries and from voting. Tax rolls were divided by race. Schools were segregated by race. Marriage records were separated based on race. Miscegenation was prohibited. Blacks were subject to more severe penalties for various crimes than were whites.��� Tat same year, the federal Civil Rights Act of 1866 negated several of the anti-equality Kentucky measures, followed by the ratifcation of the 14th Amendment in 1868. In the early 1870s, the city built the frst public school building for blacks, Central Colored School at Sixth and Kentucky streets, which opened in 1873 and grew into today���s Central High School on Chestnut Street between 11th and 12th. Te next year saw three other black public schools open, and in 1879 State University for African-Americans (later renamed Simmons University and now Simmons College) opened at Seventh and Kentucky streets. Tose pieces of progress aside, separation of the races remained essential to the white community. An 1891 Kentucky Constitution revision, in anticipation of the U.S. Supreme Court���s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ���separate but equal��� decision, legalized segregated public education. At the time, the number of enrolled pupils at black schools stood at 5,000, according to Lucas. In 1904, Kentucky���s Day Law would require schools, public and private, to be segregated. One shred of silver lining in Louisville���s Jim Crow prejudicial cloud,

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