Lee Durham Stone’s Across the Kentucky Color Line: Cultural Landscapes from the Lost Cause to Integration takes its place with Jack Glazier’s Been Coming Through Some Hard Times: Race, History, and Memory in Western Kentucky (2012) by undertaking in depth examinations of race relations in selected western Kentucky communities. In contrast to Glazier’s largely sociological study of contemporary race patterns in Hopkinsville, Stone takes a more historical approach to white and black experiences primarily in his home Muhlenberg County over the century between the end of Reconstruction and the integration period ending in 1970 with desegregation of the county’s schools and enactment of federal and state public accommodation laws. He does an admirable job of recovering essential historical insights lost through decades of intentional overlooking by dominant white institutions of the black experience in the county. In so doing, he rightly contends that a fuller understanding of Muhlenberg County (and surrounding counties) can only be achieved by viewing the county’s history across the color line.
