The Southeast Kentucky African-American Museum and Cultural Center is celebrating Juneteenth with community events this weekend to educate on Black Appalachian history.
The online museum is a nonprofit that works to highlight the stories of Eastern Kentucky’s Black community. Emily Hudson, a pastor and poet, is the founder and executive director. Hudson said she knew there were a lot of stories to be told about the Black folks in her hometown of Hazard when she started the museum.
“There's a narrative out there that says that there's no Black folks that exist or live in the mountains, and I wanted to show them that we have a rich history here,” Hudson said.
Her organization is having an art exhibition to celebrate Juneteenth called The Roots: Black Art and Life In These Hills. The gallery is set up at Hazard Coffee Company and features the work of locals and those with roots in the community.
The museum and cultural center is also hosting sessions with the Community Scholars Program, part of the Kentucky Folklife Program at Western Kentucky University. Friday events include a History Speaks Summer Camp, featuring Aristotle Jones, also known as the Appalachian Soul Man. There will also be a gallery reception.
“In the beginning, we just had the thing on Juneteenth, but we thought it would be nice to have a lot of things that went on to leading up to it, and really getting the people excited and giving them things to be involved in,” Hudson said.
Juneteenth commemorates the1865 date enslaved individuals in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free under the Emancipation Proclamation. Hudson said Black Americans are still fighting for freedom.
“That's why the history is important,” Hudson said. “We can tell the history of how our folks: They were teachers, they were lawyers and doctors and inventors. Knowing all that history is saying, ‘We are somebody and we are free.’”
The museum offers an internship program for students to learn about Black history and how to record and preserve it.
Jadrian Wells is a former intern and the assistant summer program coordinator. He got involved on the recommendation of a teacher.
“Once I got into it, I instantly knew I loved it,” Wells said. “I learned so much about myself, like just personally. I learned about the community. I see things differently now.”
He said he’s always been interested in history, but didn’t know much about the legacy of Black Appalachia. Wells said there’s not a lot of knowledge about the local Black history as community elders pass and it’s part of the museum’s job to preserve that knowledge.
As an intern, Wells helped with record-keeping efforts, like research at cemeteries and the History Speaks program. Now, he helps new interns do that work.
“I feel like it's good to see so many events going on, because it shows what we're doing is really working, it's hitting home to people,” Wells said.
In addition to the out-of-town crowd the museum’s Juneteenth events will draw, a floating reunion event, Back Home Together, kicks off Friday in Hazard. It’s a series of fellowship events to celebrate the Black experience in Southeast Kentucky, organized by a group of the same name.
Back Home Together includes a children’s market, scholarship awards and a Saturday night dance party.
Black cultural preservation efforts in Hazard
Well ahead of launching the online museum, Hudson started interviewing community elders in the 1980s to preserve the area’s Black history. She’s now working to make these old recordings available online in tandem with her efforts to open a brick-and-mortar space in the future.
“If we don't tell their stories, then what's going on today will win,” Hudson said. “Today, they're trying to erase our history and trying to pretend that we never existed, so if we don't tell those stories, it would be like we would disappear.”
Black Appalachians are not necessarily congregated in specific, historic neighborhoods as they are in larger cities. Instead, Hudson said they're scattered throughout the mountains.
“When urban renewal came, and also integration, it just changed the whole scene of things,” Hudson said.
However, Hazard did have a Black neighborhood before urban renewal. There was also a Black high school, known as Liberty High School, as well as businesses and a Black church. Before Liberty, Higgins High School in the community of Vicco served as an all-Black institution.
When the museum is up and running, Hudson says she’s planning to have a “Legacy of Liberty” exhibit to showcase historically Black schools in Perry County.
“We're trying to show, ‘this is the way it was, this is how it was, this is where families lived,’” Hudson said.
The Black community in Hazard coalesced largely due to opportunities to work in the coal and railroad industries, she said.
Throughout the year, Hudson works to collect stories and artifacts from the Black community. There’s also a program called Stories Behind the Quilt, a future museum exhibit. Each year, the museum has a series of workshops where participants help make a quilt. High-resolution photos of the previous year’s quilts are included in the Juneteenth gallery.
Hudson plans to have additional exhibits on the effects of urban renewal and integration on Black Southeastern Kentucky, as well as a library with books on Black, African and Appalachian history.
