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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30 Key Dates Broadway, then east to today���s Shelby and Broadway, then northwest to Second Street at the river. By the time a city charter was put in place in 1828, two triangular annexations ��� one on each side ��� made the trapezoid rectangular and brought the boundaries out to about 21st Street on the west and Wenzel Street on the east. Tose boundaries wouldn���t change again until 1836. According to the recently published book Two Centuries of Black Louisville, written by the recently deceased historian and academic J. Blaine Hudson along with fellow African-American activists Mervin Aubespin and Kenneth Clay, the population of Louisville in 1810 stood at 1,357 residents, 36.5 percent of them (495) blacks, all but 11 slaves. Two decades later, a few years after the frst city charter was drawn, and with the Louisville and Portland Canal facilitating river trade between Pittsburgh and New Orleans, the overall population had risen to 10,341 ��� 2,638 of them African-American (25.5 percent), including 232 free blacks whose liberty had been purchased or granted. Tree examples noted in Two Centuries were Shelton Morris (1806-1889), whose freedom was granted in the will of his owner; Washington Spradling (1802-1868), slaves��� in-town mobility ��� the frst legislation, writes Lucas, required slaves departing their residences for more than four hours to carry a written pass ��� many Louisville bondsmen were not confned to one location. And at the risk of sugarcoating the awful African-American predicament that existed and would continue to exist through Jim Crow legislation here, more and more of them were fnding ways to gain their and their loved ones��� freedom in the antebellum world. In 1836, as more Louisvillians escaped the density of the downtown and moved to territory south of Broadway, the city (whose population would more than double between 1830 and 1840, to 21,210) made Kentucky Street its new southern boundary, picking up parts of what would become the California neighborhood, Old Louisville and Smoketown. By 1850, with the addition of a wave of Irish and German immigrants, the population had doubled again, to 43,194, and would hit 68,000 (10th among U.S. cities) in 1860, by which time the city had annexed Butchertown, Irish Hill, the Original Highlands and a land parcel that became its major cemetery, Cave Hill. Te free-black population had also jumped, from The stories of freed slaves Shelton Morris, Washington Spradling and Eliza Tevis, who all became ��nancially well off through their occupations and/or real-estate dealings, bring to light the extra-peculiarity of what had come to be called the South���s ���peculiar institution��� in 19th-century Louisville. who was purchased by his father, after which Spradling purchased the freedom of his fve children; and Eliza Curtis Hundley Tevis (1802-1880), who was eventually freed by her owner���s brother, who, when he died, left her $2,000 and some furniture. Te slave-to-free-black stories of the three, who all became fnancially well of through their occupations and/ or real-estate dealings, bring to light the extra-peculiarity of what had come to be called the South���s ���peculiar institution��� in 19th-century Louisville. Urban slaveholding here ��� whose loose-grip workings provide a key to how the city���s black neighborhoods were settled ��� didn���t involve large numbers of servants, as on Southern cotton plantations, but rather one or at most a few bondsmen (a euphemism for slaves) who tended to their owners��� needs and, as noted in several local histories, lived either somewhere in the owners��� homes or behind the homes along back alleyways. According to author Marion B. Lucas in A History of Blacks in Kentucky From Slavery to Segregation, owners often ���hired out��� their slaves to parties without slaves to raise cash, even going so far as to contractually lease them out for long periods while the owners tended to themselves without servants. (Lucas found in 1833 Louisville tax rolls that 20 percent of the city���s slave population was leased.) Some enterprising bondsmen in antebellum Louisville even made deals with their owners to drum up after-hours work elsewhere and return a portion of what they earned to the master. Eventually, the money the slave earned and was allowed to keep might help buy his freedom. Te point is, in an environment so unlike Deep South slaveholding ��� even with Kentucky���s restrictions on 619 in 1840 to 1,917 in 1860, and African-Americans continued homesteading, not only in Smoketown and far to the southeast in the Petersburg/Newburg community, but also in a four-block area in Russell bounded by Ninth, Chestnut, 11th and Walnut (today���s Muhammad Ali Boulevard) streets. Tis area, with fve adjoining blocks added in, housed 25 percent of Louisville���s free blacks, according to Lucas, who adds that records show half of the city���s free-black homes headed by two parents. A wonderful four-color map of Louisville in 1860 shows six skinny vertical wards in the center and, at the ends, the fat 1st and 8th, with the 1st Ward containing everything east of Hancock Street and the 8th holding everything west of 10th Street. Te westernmost street south of Broadway is today���s Dixie Highway. North of Broadway the western boundary is today���s 26th Street until, between Jeferson and Main streets, the grid extends to about 30th. So whereas a good part of Russell had been settled before the Civil War, very little of California had, and Algonquin, Park Hill, Park DuValle, Parkland, Chickasaw and Shawnee were still to emerge. T he Civil War, of course, changed everything, but to what extent the status and internal demographics of the African-American community changed in Louisville during and after the war has the complexity of a 1,000-piece puzzle. Before the confict began, the black population consisted of local slaves and free blacks along with transient runaway slaves trying to fnd their way across the Ohio to freedom, sometimes holing up within the black community until that could be accomplished. A pre-war complication and source of overall inse- in the History of West Louisville 1828 Under a new city charter, Louisville annexes a triangle of land extending along a line from 19th Street to the town of Shippingport. 1829 Louisville���s ��rst public school for white students opens. 1836 The city extends its southern border from Broadway to Kentucky Street. 1851 The city is divided into eight wards, with the 8th Ward including all land west of 10th Street. 1852 Louisville annexes Portland for the second time. 1857 The U.S. Supreme Court���s Dred Scott decision determines that anyone ���whose ancestors were . . . sold as slaves��� has no citizenship rights. 1865 The 13th (slavery abolished) Amendment is enacted, unrati��ed by Kentucky. 1868 The 14th (citizenship rights) Amendment is enacted. 1868-69 Louisville pushes its western boundary to 28th Street by annexation. 1870 The 15th (voting rights) Amendment is enacted. 1872 The U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands ��� called into Kentucky in 1866 to quell post13th Amendment antiblack violence ��� is discontinued. 1873 Louisville���s ��rst public school building exclusively for black students opens at Sixth and Kentucky streets. 1875 Federal Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in hotels, restaurants, public conveyances and continued on p. 33 3.13 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3 1

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