DID YOU KNOW

Kentucky African American Achievement

Russell Neighborhood
Named for influential resident Harvey C. Russell, this section of Louisville which ran along Walnut St. (now Muhammad Ali Blvd.) was home to a number of aggressive Civil Rights innovators. Many accomplishments of the neighborhood’s residents accelerated the area’s Civil Rights movement years before it gained national steam. The Kentucky Center for African American Heritage now stands in the heart of this neighborhood, appropriately enough.

Harvey C. Russell
Russell, along with the help of his wife, established two of Kentucky’s first extra-curricular organizations, the parent teacher association, which is now commonly recognized as the P.T.A. and the Inter-High School Sports Associations, which evolved into modern day intra-mural sports programs. To honor his outstanding accomplishments, the City named the area in which the Center is located in his honor.

TIMELINE OF EVENTS

1870s
Nearly a century before Rosa Parks was removed from a bus for her famous sit-in, Russell neighborhood native and protester Mary Cunningham Smith was expelled from a Louisville public trolley after refusing to move from the “Whites Only” section. Mrs. Smith sub-sequentially filed and won a lawsuit, desegregating Louisville public transportation before the turn of the 20th century.

1908
Our Nation’s first “colored” library opens in West Louisville, at 10th and Chestnut. The West Branch Library was the first U.S. library operated by African American Management, and laid the foundation for future African American Librarians. It was the only Louisville library open to African Americans in the days before the Civil Rights movement.

1917
Louisville native William Warley and the NAACP win a monumental U.S. Supreme Court decision on desegregation, giving African Americans the right to choose where they live. Warley, who served as editor of The Louisville News, a black newspaper of the time, was one of the first to challenge segregation nationwide.