Reference
The Kentucky African American Encyclopedia
Gerald L. Smith, Karen Cotton McDaniel, John A. Hardin
A reference work brings together people, institutions, and events in Black Kentucky history.
Reading list
Classrooms of Change
Schools, teachers, and families who insisted on the right to learn.
Put James D. Anderson’s institutional history alongside Heather Andrea Williams’s account of literacy under slavery and after emancipation. Read Teaching to Transgress as a later intervention about classroom power. Compare the questions each work asks with the local schools and educators documented by the Lyric.
Visit the related Lyric pageContinue the story
Recommended reading
History
The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935
James D. Anderson
A study of who built, financed, and contested Black education across the post-emancipation South.
Essays
The Souls of Black Folk
W. E. B. Du Bois
Du Bois explores emancipation’s aftermath, segregated education, and the experience he calls double consciousness.
History
Self-Taught
Heather Andrea Williams
The book follows Black people’s pursuit of reading and schooling before, during, and after the Civil War.
Essays
Teaching to Transgress
bell hooks
hooks brings classroom experience to questions about freedom, authority, and participation in education.
Oral history
Freedom on the Border
Catherine Fosl, Tracy E. K'Meyer
Kentuckians’ oral histories illuminate the work of challenging segregation across the state.
Memoir
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Douglass describes enslavement, his pursuit of literacy, and his emergence as an abolitionist.
Memoir
Up from Slavery
Booker T. Washington
Washington recounts his path from enslavement to leadership at Tuskegee and sets out his educational philosophy.
Essays
The Mis-Education of the Negro
Carter G. Woodson
Woodson asks what schooling teaches Black students to believe about themselves and their history.
History
Schooling the Freed People
Ronald E. Butchart
A history of the teachers and institutions that helped build schools in the first decades after emancipation.
Literary criticism
Free Within Ourselves
Rudine Sims Bishop
A study of Black children’s literature follows its publishing history, creators, and evolving traditions.