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 Kentucky required separate schools, and also that no textbook would be issued to a black would ever be reissued or redistributed, they also prohibited interracial marriage.

The Kentucky General Assembly passes the Kentucky Civil Rights Act and Governor Edward T. Breahitt signs it into law on January 27, 1966. The Act prohibits discrimination in employment and public accommodations based on race, national origin, color, and religion. Kentucky becomes the first state in the South pass a civil rights law. It becomes the first in the south to establish enforcement powers over civil rights violations on a state level. The Kentucky Commission on Human Rights becomes the state enforcement authority of the Act.    The Kentucky Commission on Human Rights publishes "Negro Employment in Kentucky State Agencies" in February 1966, tracking for the first time African American employment statistics of the state government workforce. On August 26, 1966, the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights opens an office in Louisville, Ky., to “increase field service activities in the western half of the state, where some 70 percent of Kentucky’s Negroes live,” say state officials.

“All of the adults looked after all of the children. Everybody knew each other. Everybody helped each other.”

Oakwood was special from the beginning. When the 106-home subdivision opened in 1964, it was only the second development in Lexington where African-Americans could buy a new house. The first, St. Martins Village, had opened a few years earlier, about a mile down Georgetown Road.

Oakwood opened the same year that Congress passed landmark civil rights legislation that prohibited housing discrimination. Before that, such discrimination was not only legal but widely practiced.

Beginning in the late 19th century, women's clubs organized in the United States, and were critical in identifying the need for libraries, as well as organizing for their construction and long-term financial support through fundraising and lobbying government bodies.[1] Women's clubs were instrumental in the founding of 75-80 percent of the libraries in the United States.[2] Carnegie's grants were catalysts for library construction based on organizing by women's clubs.

Under segregation black people were generally denied access to public libraries in the Southern United States. Rather than insisting on his libraries being racially integrated, he funded separate libraries for African Americans. For example, at Houston he funded a separate Colored Carnegie Library because black people were prohibited from using the "white" Carnegie Library there.[4]

This coincided with the rise of women's clubs in the post-Civil War period, which were most responsible for organizing efforts to establish libraries, including long-term fundraising and lobbying within their communities to support operations and collections.[6] They led the establishment of 75-80 percent of the libraries in communities across the country.[7]