Most scholarship on the civil rights movement has focused on the Deep South, even though border states like Kentucky also had segregation laws and a history of racialized violence. African American Kentuckians challenged racial segregation, too, but they adapted their approaches as needed, from familiar protest models in the state’s larger cities to more unique strategies in isolated rural communities, where they constituted only a tiny fraction of the population.
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In Freedom on the Border, 103 civil rights activists recall their struggles to dismantle legal segregation in Kentucky. Their stories, introduced and contextualized by two historians, vividly describe pivotal moments such as the 1964 March on Frankfort, led by Martin Luther King Jr. In addition, they unearth less familiar episodes that challenge official narratives of the movement. This book enlarges southern civil rights movement history and suggests that the battle for black equality was not just a series of mass demonstrations and campaigns. It was the sum of countless individual acts of resistance stretching past the borders of the former Confederacy and throughout, even beyond, the twentieth century.
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