Kentucky as a Case Study, 1890-1920"
Patricia Hagler Minter
Department of History
Western Kentucky University
From the end of Reconstruction in 1877 until the turn of the century, white Southern Democrats slowly reversed the Reconstruction-era policies of equal protection. One by one, the former Confederate states and Kentucky enacted separate coach laws between 1881 and 1900; most often these statutes were enacted prior to the formal disfranchisement of black voters. My paper on the codification of Jim Crow in Kentucky, however, will show that legalized racial separation on railroad passenger cars did not go uncontested at any point. Organizing opposition before passage of the segregated coach law, black Kentuckians fought back afterwards and staged a test case that abrogated the state’s Jim Crow law until Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Later, a segregated housing ordinance in Louisville, the state’s largest city, was also met with mobilization to stage a test case, Buchanan v. Warley, which the Supreme Court decided in 1917. This paper will examine the struggle to defeat the effects of Plessy and of codification of Jim Crow in Kentucky, from separate coaches to segregated housing, and the structural racism that underpinned public policy and legal culture. It will examine both black and white political activities across the state, including local grass-roots activities against railroads, cases alleging unfair treatment, and lobbying efforts both for and against the separate coach bill and the housing ordinance to better understand the structural underpinnings of the process by which white Southerners enacted Jim Crow laws that came to rule the South.