News & Events

The library and campus will be closed on Monday January 20, 2025, to celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.   His leadership and oratory skills were grounded in a heritage of resistance to powerful economic and political forces.   Here are just a few recollections from leaders of their time.  Each quote is from a video.   Search by keyword Martin Luther King within the Films on Demand library for more content like this.  

"There's a great deal of difference between non-resistance to evil and non-violent resistance. Non-resistance leaves you in a state of stagnant passivity and deadening complacency, wherein non-violent resistance means that you do resist in a very strong and determined manner." - The WPA Film Library

 
“Each time that he was doing something important, there was an effort to discredit him.” - Testimony before the Church Committee Details FBI Plans to Intimidate Martin Luther King Jr. ca. 1975

 "Well, I don't think that Mr. Helms or the extreme right really speaks for the American people. Probably really speaks for the Republican Party on this issue. I believe that the filibuster will be broken and that we will commemorative Martin Luther King's birthday as it should be." – Edward Kennedy, Opposition to a Holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr.

“And we will be able to rise from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and this will be a great America. We will be the participants in making it so.”  – Last Speech at the Washington Cathedral, March 31 1968

On this day in 1847, Frederick Douglass began publishing The North Star.  As one of the leading voices for abolition, this speaker became the preeminent African American speaker of his day.   Here, actor Fred Morsell recreates the great dramatic work of Frederick Douglass, “The Lesson of the Hour,” in the original church where it was first spoken.   For all those who celebrate freedoms shared and cherished during this time of year, the words and context of this great speech will resonate.

The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on this day in 1886, upon Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor.  100 years later, in anticipation of her anniversary, the American industrial trades and the French artisans came together to restore Lady Liberty's shine.    They raised hundreds of millions of dollars over four years.  Teams went up and took apart her icon torch.   Workers welded, sanded, and restored the metal that had been exposed to saltwater damage for a century.  Along the way, workers explored the relationship between their two countries, the gift-giving of one culture, and the symbolism of another one.

In 1986, her shiny new visage was unveiled.

''Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.'' - Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors (1892)

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice honors the victims of lynching.  It opened in 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama, with sculpture displays representing those individuals hung, tortured, and killed by extra-judicial mobs in post-Civil War America.  It would not have been possible without the pioneering work of Ida B. Wells, a late nineteenth century journalist who watched the post-Reconstruction era United States devolve into lawlessness and revenge against the newly freed people.  Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) campaigned for universal suffrage and the public acknowledgement of lynching as an extra-judicial way to exert  control over the population.   Her birthday is July 16.

Remembering Ida, Ida Remembering: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Black Political Culture in Reconstruction-Era Mississippi

Historicizing White Supremacist Terrorism with Ida B. Wells

Very few people in American history inspire so much creative thought as Martin Luther King Jr.   Only a handful of politicians, statesmen, philosophers, and creatives are able to generate a fire of mind in the thoughts of writers.  King joins the ranks of John F. Kennedy, Emily Dickinson, and Pocahontas as individuals who continually inspire writers across the globe.    Here are a few ideas surrounding Martin Luther King Jr., as the nation remembers his life and legacy, calling on future generations to emulate his thoughtful philosophy of American life.

Bearing the Cross by David J. Garrow

Journeying Toward the Promised Land

A complete chronological timeline of King's life and works.

Power for the Powerless: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Late Theory of Civil Disobedience

This article examines the early reception of King’s  "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and the development of the liberal idea of civil disobedience it has become synonymous with to argue that its canonization coincided with, and displaced, the radicalization of King’s developing thinking about disobedience. It examines published and archival writings from 1965 through 1968 to reconstruct King’s power-oriented theory of “mass” civil disobedience as it developed in response to the dual challenges of white backlash and Black Power.

Critical Lessons About Leadership from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s brand of authentic leadership was disruptive. Disruptive leaders bring joy, hope, and a positive attitude to their companies and nations, primarily due to their ability to engender greater trust and engagement. Dr. King's innovative, groundbreaking leadership style disrupted civil inequity between the white majority and people of color. Nobody before Dr. King even fathomed the oxymoron of peaceful protest. He made white leaders look at their hypocrisy and ultimately agree to begin honoring the constitutional "all men are created equal."

"Where Do We Go From Here?": Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and Workers' Rights

This article chronicles Dr. King's alliances with labor activists as well as the tensions between organized labor and civil rights activism. This article also highlights how Dr. King's emphasis on labor activism informed his approach to fighting against segregation and on behalf of voting rights for African Americans. For Dr. King, true racial equality was inseparable from economic empowerment. Dr. King's insight that racial discrimination was linked to the economic subordination of workers followed a great tradition of political activism within the United States on behalf of racial equality and the rights of workers. This article argues that advocates for workers' rights and racial equality have been most successful when they worked together because race discrimination has been integrally connected to the exploitation of workers throughout our country's history. 

Surveillance, Spatial Compression, and Scale: The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1976, the Church Committee, a Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, came to the conclusion that Martin Luther King Jr “was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ‘neutralize’ him as an effective civil rights leader”. This paper explores how the FBI surveilled Martin Luther King Jr between September 1957 and Dr King's death in 1968 and how such surveillance relates to both spatial compression and scale. First, using FBI internal memos, government documents, social movement archives, mass-media accounts, and other sources, this history looks at how state surveillance—operating through the social mechanism of intimidation—compressed both the physical and tactical space that Dr King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference could comfortably inhabit. 

Guthrie was born July 14, 1912, in Okemah, a small town in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, and became one of the most significant figures in early American folk music.  Many of his original songs, like "This Land is Your Land," "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You," and "This Train Is Bound for Glory," have become American folk song standards, his lyrics set to older traditional melodies.  In 1943, he published a memoir, Bound for Glory, which described his life on the road, with everyone from Depression-era families seeking a better life to vagrants on the rails and roads of America.   His uncanny way of capturing the feel of America at the roots led to his veneration as a mighty folk singer.  During his life, he drifted from job to job, but as he lay dying from the detrimental effects of a long-term illness, younger singers approached him in the 50s and 60s to ask him how he made it.  

Even today, his work is felt.  Scientists open up dialogue with farmers and ranchers, instead of bullying them into new methods or techniques, by actively listening to (instead of talking at) their concerns on the changing landscape of the Great Plains that Guthrie roamed.  The Woody Sez columns showcased his ideas on political thought combining elements of Christian socialism, social banditry, populism, Jeffersonianism, collectivism, "commonism," and the ideology of the Communist Party.   Such political ideology is used years later in looking at the American populism from the perspective of the oppressed joining forces: "This country won’t ever git much better as long as it’s dog eat dog, ever’ man fer his own self, an’ ta hell with th’ rest of th’ world. We gotta all git together, dam it all."

On June 12, 1942, a young Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, receives a diary for her 13th birthday. A month later, she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis. For two years, her family and other families will be hid, fed and cared for by Gentile friends.  Her words and thoughts form the basis of an on-the-ground cultural interpreter of a horrific historical event, a small red-and-white checked remembrance of war and bigotry, and of the courage of families who sought a way out of the Nazi regime.  

Her name was Anne Frank.   She received her diary 93 years ago.  

In her first entry, Anne wrote to her diary as if it was a personal friend; “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.”  But she was also growing in maturity, and realizing that her parents' birthday present was a way to answer the call of the Dutch government-in-exile: tell us your stories.  For two years, the girl wrote in the diary, describing her most intimate thoughts and feelings, as well as documenting what it was like to live under German occupation and in hiding.  The adults around her and in far flung places begged their children to remember these times, and Anne wrote as a diarist with a mission: to preserve her thoughts and ideas as well as the actions of those around her.  Her hope was that she would survive to contribute the diary to a larger purpose.   Her horror is that she did not survive, but the diary did.   

Interpretations of the diary in the years after Otto Frank provided it as an example of Holocaust diarist writing abound.  Several plays completely dolled up his daughter into the perfect icongraphic dead Jewish girl whose death happens off-stage; at least one novel sexed her up, by speculating on her secret romance with a boy from another family.   Otto himself stands accused of tearing out pages that described unhappy marital relations with his wife.  It seems that Anne's writing changed perspective with the editors who were studying her life.  The runaway success of Anne Frank’s diary depended on playing down her Jewish identity: At least two direct references to Hanukkah were edited out of the diary when it was originally published.  As Dara Horn described it in her book People Love Dead Jews, her first entry in the original diary, for instance, begins with a long description of her birthday gifts (the blank diary being one of them), an entirely unself-conscious record by a 13-year-old girl.  Anne rewrote the diary; she edited and prepared it for revisions, a talented writer far from the public perception of a mindless girl documenting her life.   Horn writes:  "The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary—“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”—is often called “inspiring,” by which we mean that it flatters us. It makes us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. "

Over time various cultures have interpreted the text in different ways.  What the reception of Frank's text in Cambodia and North Korea suggests is that the way in which an account travels primarily indicates the text's usefulness in the contexts in which it's received.  Much has been written about teaching and learning about the Holocaust in social studies classrooms.  The redemptive power of Anne's story is seen as neglible to school children exposed to her diary in 8th grade or thereabouts; while the work is relatable to them, containing both arguments with parents and melodramatic declarations they may be akin to understand, it also presents a somewhat sanitized version of "the Holocaust."   They do not get to see Anne dying slowly in Bergen-Belsen, rather seeing only the girl who took off her shoes to avoid heel clatter and whose story ends at the window rather than the grave.

The diary remains a substantial artefact from the German occupation, its talented author a quintessential unknown in a Holocaust of her Jewish heritage, a voice cut short but living on in our collective memory.   And there, as they say, may her memory be a blessing.

November is National Native American Heritage Month.   In the history of the United States, those who were oppressed and subjugated often found themselves at the mercy of others who were equally as subjugated.   In the American expansionist history, white women became a leading driver of cultural influence of Indigenous affairs.  Here are three stories of how the image and power of the white woman influenced the history of Native American development.  

It's a statue in Edmond, Oklahoma full of life -- a woman in late nineteenth-century garb leaps from a train's front grill (the "cow catcher") with a flag in her hand.  The woman known as Nannita "Kentucky" Daisey -- she had taught school for brief time in Louisville -- became legendary during the land rush period of Oklahoma's history.  However, contemporary accounts of her own and a colleague's recollection pointed toward her actually lowering from the first car, calmly staking her claim, and then running to catch up with the train.  The state remembered it as Boomer Sooner --booms from the firing of guns and cannon as claims were made, and sooner folks who snuck secretly into the territory. Her admirers remembered the legend of Kentucky Daisey.  She land rushed three times in the "Unassigned Lands," once hiding a group of other white women in a low ravine waiting for their chance to drive their stakes into the ground.  But Kentucky Daisey's decades-old gendered stereotypes may seem at first blush unsurprising, yet the fact that it does so in the face of other decades-long efforts to make representations of the American West more multicultural in memory, including the 2007 push to create a statue of her in Edmond.   Rather than focusing on the culling of Native American lands promised to them in perpetuity, the town decided to erect a statue of one of the thousands of bloodthirsty people who claimed land in the "rush."  Edmond, Oklahoma citizens chose to elevate a woman who self admittedly didn't do the famous deed she was known for.   The statue's erection exposes issues of gender and commemoration in the American West.

"I have married a gentleman of Indian blood," writes one women in the Indian Service, and "I could help him."  The political ramifications of the "Indian problem" in the post-Civil War West were great, but a proposition by those who governed brought a possible solution to their needs: white women and Native men could form domestic relationships.   Much has been said of the white woman kidnapped and held in the Indigenous camp, but this proposal came from the newly emerged Indian Service: instead, remove the man from his homeland, educate him in white boarding schools, and allow him to form friendships, and eventually romances, with white women during their Indian Service work.  Thousands of white women were intentionally hired and paired with adult Indigenous men returning from eastern boarding schools.  Interracial relationships  "advocated amalgamation by marriage as a necessary and desirable part of the assimilation process" as noted by Richard Henry Platt, one of the Indian education proponents.  White women were historically seen as the moral centers of nineteenth century western civilization.  By harnessing the power of white domesticity, the government saw a way to assimilate the men who had been fighting the manifest expansion into their territories.

In 1910, the wealthy Gulicks ran an advertisement for the characteristics they intended to create at their girls' summer camp in Lake Sebago, Maine:  young white girls would experience the ideal out-of-doors Indian life, including jewelry making, storytelling, costuming, and learning myths and folklore.   By the 1920s, the "maidens" of Camp Fire Girls represented the twentieth century's answer to a toothless Indian: no longer a threat in the west, the Indian lifestyle became the picturesque and idyllic way to intone young white girls to become docile, beautiful, and servile.   Native women, as "mothers of the race," as seen by those who led the assimilation effort, served as the perfect role models for young women in another culture.   Camp Fire girls recorded their summer camp memories in a scrapbook called the "Hiawatha meter," created pageants with Pocahontas as the first American woman, and provided maiden feasts, where they would prepare and serve a meal.  They relinquished both markers for more masculine pursuits, such as the playing of lacrosse-style games that would have been common for native girls, and embraced white civilization's ideals, such as purity culture, as in rejecting fancy dress and keeping oneself as "pure as the mountain stream."  In doing so, they co-opted the colonial view of Native domesticity, scrubbing it of its domestic power in favor of a light wholesome version of cultures which had been destroyed.  By the 1930s, the Camp Fire Girls had also spread to the boarding schools that were further destroying culture, asking young Natives to bond with each other over a homogenized and bland representation of their peoples' history.

Elvis Costello and Jack White recall working with Lynn. Lynn writes songs about life experiences. "Don't Come Home a Drinkin' With Lovin' on Your Mind" and "Coal Miner's Daughter" become hits; "The Pill" is controversial.  -- Loretta Lynn, 1932-2022

In this BBC documentary, host Lucy Worsley takes a look at the history of the United States.  This segment discusses the Declaration of Independence, officially signed as of August 2, 1776.  (Hold on!  What about July 4?) The Declaration of Independence became a sacred text. Discarded drafts condemned King George III for the slave trade. Founding Fathers compromised on the document's wording.  Watch more of the series American History's Biggest Fibs.

Juneteenth celebrates when slaves in Texas learned that they were, in actuality, free after the lifelong work of abolitionists, war heroes, presidents, and civil rights leaders.  General Gordon Granger arrived in Texas to enforce Lincoln's proclamation more than two years after it was announced; that day, June 19, was remembered in slave narratives as a day when  "We all walked down the road singing and shouting to beat the band," recalled one Texas freedwoman, Molly Harrell, in The Slave Narratives of Texas, a book based on a thirties-era federal oral-history project. Said another, Lou Smith: "I ran off and hid in the plum orchard and said over `n' over, `I'se free, I'se free; I ain't never going back to Miss Jo.'" 

It arose from Texas.  At various times in the twentieth century, notably during both world wars, organized observances of Juneteenth were intermittent but always attracted throngs. In Dallas a 1936 gala at the state fairgrounds drew 200,000 visitors. Because segregation was a long-established policy, Juneteenth was often the only day blacks could enter many attractions; in Fort Worth, for example, they could visit the botanical gardens only on June 19. White merchants, however, cheerfully capitalized on the commercial opportunities. During the thirties, Foley's offered a special sale on "silk frocks" for the big day, Mrs. Baird's claimed its bread "goes mighty fine with barbecue," and railroads offered special rates for day trips.

Over time, the movement spread past the borders of Texas.  By the 1970s, politicians were making it a local and state-wide holiday in places like Atlanta and Charleston, SC.  But there was more to be done.  The "grandmother of the movement," Opal Lee, watched white rioters burn her home to the ground in 1939 while growing up in Marshall, Texas.   When she eventually made her home in Fort Worth, she watched a new generation take up the cause of the Juneteenth celebration as a way to celebrate the freedom so dearly won.   In 2016, she laced up her shoes and wrote a letter to then-President Obama: "You could save me a lot of shoe leather and a lot of wear and tear on an old body by saying how soon you can see me."  Then she began a 1,400 mile trek from her home to Washington DC.   Even though health concerns stopped her from completing the full journey, she continued to walk 2.5 miles -- symbolic of the 2.5 years when slaves in Texas were not told about the proclamation -- in every major city and at all major festivals.   When President Biden signed the national holiday into law, the grandmother of the movement was there -- shoes laced up and all.

Today, Juneteenth is celebrated with national and regional events, including

• a national music festival in Denver CO, a dynamic community event which annually attracts 50,000 people
• Affrilachian poetry at the Lyric Theater and Cultural Arts Center in Lexington, guest speakers Kentucky Poets Laureate Crystal Wilkinson and Frank X. Walker
• a cornbread competition in conjunction with the African American school and museum the Calfee Community Center and the Wilderness Road Museum, Pulaski, VA
• Juneteenth Jubilee Freedom Weekend, in Detroit MI, with a theme of economic development and empowerment

Through the library's film collection, you can find multiple video sources for the invasion of Ukraine by the former Soviet Union.    The most recent is The Long Breakup, discussing Ukraine's struggle to break from Russia, and the oldest is Russia: Ten Years After the Fall of the Soviet Union, a chilling account of Putin's consolidation of power.  

More articles about the Ukrainian response to Russian aggression:

'We Believe That They Can Win'

Why Ukraine's Undersized Military is Resisting Supposedly Superior Russian Forces  

Ukrainians are Now One of the Top Groups Resettled as Refugees in the U.S. under Trump Administration

Does Russia Suffer From "Paranoid Government Disorder"?

Let's look at some of the online streaming videos available through the library, in this walk-through of Women's History Month titles from Films on Demand.  Films on Demand is a free streaming service which provides great documentaries to our community.   To watch more films like these titles, check out Films on Demand.

Women First and Foremost:  Hosted by Academy Award-winner Rita Moreno and Dee Wallace Stone, Women First & Foremost offers shining examples of how generations of women have achieved their deserved place at the forefront of history.  Brief sketches of notable women, such as Phillis Wheatley, Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Fuller, and Ruth Hale, are presented as a means to view cultural and social contributions, reform work, and political activity.

Lives Together, Worlds Apart:  Drawing on case studies, this program exposes the "gender apartheid" that has led to the marginalization of women around the world through violence and poverty. Commentary by Kofi Annan, former secretary general of the UN; Festus Mogae, president of Botswana; and Margaret Jay, Britain’s minister for women, as well as by many grassroots leaders reveals the victimization that is occurring through educational neglect, unfair labor practices, spouse abuse, and inadequate reproductive healthcare. The positive effects of rural empowerment programs, battered women refuges, and free health and legal counseling are also presented—but will cuts in funding sweep away the good that these initiatives have done?

What I Want My Words to Do to You: In this classic program from the POV series, playwright Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues) leads 15 female inmates—most convicted of murder—through a series of exercises and intimate discussions, enabling them to delve into and expose their most terrifying realities as they grapple with the nature of their crimes and their own culpability. The documentary culminates in an emotionally charged prison performance of the inmates’ writings by acclaimed actors Mary Alice, Marisa Tomei, Glenn Close, Rosie Perez, and Hazelle Goodman.

The Kingdom of Women: In a remote corner of southwestern China are the Mosuo, arguably the best remaining example of a matrilineal society in the world today. In this program, anthropologist Chou Wah-Shan—one of few outside scholars who have lived and worked extensively with the Mosuo—and Mosuo villagers offer insights into what life is like in the 91 communities where women rule and husbands don’t exist.

Chile: From Drama to Hope:  This program examines Chile under martyred socialist President Salvador Allende, and the subsequent Pinochet regime that followed. Allende’s niece and novelist, Isabel Allende, exile Hortensia Bussi, Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriela Mistral, and others discuss women’s role in the eventual toppling of Pinochet, and the formation of the Latin American Federation of Associations of Families of Prisoners Missing Since 1981—a tracking organization that helps families discover the fate of relatives kidnapped during the Pinochet reign of terror.  The mothers, sisters, and daughters of "the disappeared" were instrumental in bringing the regime's horrors to international recognition.

The library database Black Life in America chronicles primary sources from colonial times to present day.    It also offers restriction by topic and by geography, two great tools for narrowing your search.    Here's a brief video on how to use this important database.

During Black History Month, the library showcases areas of the collection regarding the history of African Americans in Kentucky.  If you have any questions, please contact your library and we'll help you find more information.

I watched the white and billowy clouds
          That floated lazily
   With sun encircled edges through
          The purple tinted sky.
   I never knew a sweeter look
          Of Nature ever wearing,
   I never saw her more sublime,
          With more grand awesome bearing
   Than when among Big Sandy's "Breaks"
          October last upon
   That long-to-be-remembered day
          I spent with her alone.

Databases:

Notable Kentucky African Americans 

The Notable Kentucky African Americans (NKAA) was originally a website with a series of individual web pages listing approximately 200 biographical entries on African Americans in and from the state of Kentucky. The site went live in September 2003. It consisted of one entry for each person arranged under the profession or activity in which they were notable, with references to sources of additional information.

Kentucky Center for African American History: Women in History

KCAAH’s goals are to enhance the public’s knowledge about the history, heritage and cultural contributions of African Americans in Kentucky, and in the African Diaspora. This exhibit highlights figures such as Effie Waller Smith, Helen Humes, and Nancy Green.

While the world has reeled in the wake of the global pandemic, you might be interested in reading a few educational materials related to the COVID 19 disease, understanding it, and how it has changed our culture.   If you have questions about these e-book titles or any other book in our Gale Virtual Reference Library, please contact the librarians at Big Sandy.