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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Courier-Journal Photo by Larry Spitzer MERV AUBESPIN Two Centuries of Black Louisville co-author Mervin Aubespin (left) at the entrance to historic Quinn Chapel at Ninth and Chestnut, and (above) Aubespin being frisked and arrested in 1961 at a Loew���s (Palace) Theater civil-rights demonstration. commercial development. Te same people who were drawn to the freshair cachet of Parkland and Shawnee now had the mobility to live even farther from their jobs in the city. So the beginning of ���white fight��� from west Louisville was not all about racial encroachment. T he course of demographic change west of downtown, historians say, was altered ��� and sometimes frozen ��� by a series of backto-back historical events: Prohibition, the Great Depression, the 1937 Flood (which inundated west Louisville in its entirety) and World War II, causing residents to hunker down and wait for things to clear. Te World War II emergence of Rubbertown in the southwest, however, would bring lots of jobs and increased homeownership to ofset the loss of many businesses during the Great Depression. In pre-Rubbertown 1940, the population of west Louisville, as determined from census-tract data, was 133,411 ��� more than twice that of 2010 ��� with 76.7 percent of its residents white. Urban renewal, though not yet given that name, had begun, with four public-housing projects in place ��� College Court and Clarksdale east of Ninth Street and Parkway Place and Beecher Terrace west. Ten years later, with the post-war Baby Boom under way, west Louisville���s population reached its peak: 147,839. Te decade between the end of the war and 1956 brought about major social upheaval in the public sphere, in large part because of pressure put on the city in the courts by the NAACP and Urban League and by the African-American newspapers the Louisville Leader (under publisher I. 34 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3.13 Willis Cole) and Louisville Defender (under Frank Stanley). After 30 years of blacks being relegated to Chickasaw Park only, a 1947 lawsuit forced frst one whites-only public park to integrate, and then all public parks, swimming pools and the Iroquois Park Amphitheater in 1955. Central High teacher Lyman Johnson sued the University of Kentucky to gain admittance to its graduate program and won in 1949, causing the repeal of the 46-year-old Day Law the next year. And when Brown v. Board of Education ordered all public schools to be integrated in 1954, a Louisville school desegregation plan ��� not a strong plan, but a plan ��� was implemented in 1956. According to Two Centuries, the Soviet Union was using American segregation for Cold War propaganda: ���Consequently, eliminating legal segregation was good foreign policy.��� De facto segregation in private-enterprise hiring and commerce remained a problem, however. Back in Reconstruction days, when the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 prohibited racial discrimination by hotels, restaurants, transit agencies and amusement parks, the law was mostly ignored and the post-Reconstruction Supreme Court found it unconstitutional. Tis would be a tough nut that would only grudgingly be cracked when the power of the black voting bloc coerced Mayor William O. Cowger to push through a 1963 ordinance prohibiting racial discrimination in employment and commerce. Te end of housing discrimination would take longer. ���When I got to Louisville in 1958,��� says Two Centuries co-author and former Courier-Journal associate editor Merv Aubespin, ���I couldn���t try on clothes in any store on Fourth Street. Couldn���t buy a hat because then I���d have to put it on my head. Black women could go in and pick out a dress, but they weren���t allowed to try it on. Tere wasn���t a single movie theater on Fourth I was welcome in. Tat���s the reception we got from Fourth Street businesses when it was the main artery of downtown.��� So, long before Aubespin arrived, the black community���s shopping and entertainment district became Walnut Street between Sixth and 13th streets (14th being north-south Pennsylvania Railroad tracks), including insurance companies, doctor and law ofces, theaters, newspapers, restaurants, grocers and nightclubs. Unfortunately, when Louisville voters approved a $5 million bond issue for urban renewal in 1957, that district, along with neighboring between Sixth and 13th, became an urban-renewal target. By the mid-1960s it was gone.

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