Copyrighted in 2023 and now available via Amazon Books, Lee Durham Stone’s Across the Color Line: Cultural Landscapes of Race from the Lost Cause to Integration is an in-depth look at many aspects of race relations and the history and culture of those relations and people in a contiguous eight-county area in Kentucky, focusing primarily on Muhlenberg County.
Stone’s discussions also include Logan, Todd, Christian, Muhlenberg, Ohio, Hopkins, Butler, and McLean Counties. With a background teaching history and Advanced Placement (AP) Human Geography for 23 years in Kentucky and Mississippi, Dr. Stone, who holds a Ph.D. in geography education as well as several other master’s degrees, was born in Lebanon, Kentucky, has close family connections in Muhlenberg County, and currently makes his home in Franklin, Kentucky. His father, the late Larry L. Stone, was editor of the Central City Times-Argus for many years, a newspaper Dr. Stone’s youngest brother now edits. Of note to Todd Countians is that Dr. Stone substituted at TCCHS in the latter 2010s.
In this detailed and deeply researched historical narrative, Dr. Stone, a 1970 graduate of the University of Kentucky, reinforces a concept shared by the late John F. Kennedy, who penned, “A knowledge of history is, above all, a means of responsibility to the past and of responsibility to the future.” Early in his book, Stone recalls an incident in his youth in the 1950s when he and students from two Central City schools headed off to see Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments at a local vaudeville-era theater. Dr. Stone explains the white students waited on the “spacious front sidewalk” while their Black counterparts lined up in single file before a “narrow unmarked door in a grimy side alley.” Once inside, the white children enjoyed the movie from the main floor while the Black children were consigned to the “dark second-class balcony.” This anecdote sets the book’s tone.
Stone’s historical narrative covers an array of topics, including a discussion of Jim Crowism and the need for individuals of all generations to reinterpret continually “bygone eras through fresh eyes and renewed rationales.” He also emphasizes “people of the present must use the past to go forward.” Those familiar with Jim Crowism will share that the concept includes the creation of laws and customs that produced a system of discrimination and racial division throughout the nation, especially in former slave states. Stone also points out the scarcity of materials documenting Black heritage and insight into Black lives in rural areas and notes their near non-existence in the period’s media unless it was deemed sensational news.
A detailed discussion of Black workers’ impact on several industries in the area includes their work on steamboats as performers and, more often, as servers and workers completing menial tasks. Stone also illuminates the influence of Black business owners in the downtowns of Muhlenberg County, including doctors, hairdressers, taxi-cab owners, barbers, restauranteurs, pool hall operators, and others. Of note as well was Stone’s discussion of the impact Blacks had on the coal mining industry. He writes in the decade after 1900, Muhlenberg’s Black population increased by 34 percent, with many Blacks migrating to the county to work in mining. Sadly, Stone also points out in many instances Black women became the “mules of the world,” working long hours completing menial housekeeping tasks.
One of the most illuminating and heart-wrenching chapters in Stone’s narrative includes a discussion regarding the trial and execution of Harrison Alexander, a Black 16-year-old found guilty of raping a white woman, one who had been confined several times in what is now Western State Hospital in Hopkinsville. Sadly, the young Black man’s story and trial once more reveal the stark realities of the racial implications of the “color line” that exists between Blacks and whites. Another heartbreaking account Stone documents is of the life and death of Dr. R.T. Bailey of Muhlenberg County. Dr. Bailey’s dramatic courtroom suicide again reinforces the horrors resulting because of economic problems and the efforts a Black doctor took to ease the burdens of a pregnant white woman. Sadly, this event led to Bailey’s courtroom suicide.
Stone also provides a discussion of “endemic violence,” the “Possum Hunter” terror (1914-1916), and a commentary on the many violent atrocities in the decades following the Civil War. He also documents the contributions of Blacks during World War I and World War II. Of note to all readers is his in-depth discussion of segregation in terms of education. As evidenced by his many notations and documentation of resources, Dr. Stone provides a much-needed historical study of the “color line” in Western Kentucky that has been so evident in the nation’s history and our own locale. Reading Across the Color Line: Cultural Landscapes of Race from the Lost Cause to Integration will awaken the need for all people to ponder critically our role in helping to destroy the “color line” that is sadly so often existent in our lives today.
~ Article by Carolyn L. Wells
February 26, 2024
