KY women and civil rights history

These are the papers of W.H. and Lizzie B. Fouse, black civic leaders in Lexington, Ky., in the first half of the twentieth century. The collection includes expense ledgers containing records of Dunbar High School, correspondence relating to the Kentucky Negro Education Association and the Kentucky and National Associations of Colored Women, a scrapbook with clippings about racial issues, and personal materials. Much of the personal materials consist of letters of sympathy sent after the death of Lizzie B. Fouse's mother died in 1939. Other materials relate to the YWCA and to the WCTU. There are also miscellaneous photographs, including several of Mrs. Fouse.

These are the papers of high school principal William Henry Fouse and his wife, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beatrice Cooke Fouse. The papers reflect the Fouses efforts on behalf of black education in Lexington during the first half of the 20th century. Family letters, notebooks, printed materials, pamphlets, financial records, broadsides, receipts and mementos comprise a large portion of the collection. Correspondence relating to Dunbar High School and Dr. Fouse's other educational concerns are included, as is Mrs. Fouse's correspondence which reflects her involvement with educational, social, religious and temperance organizations. A journal contains records of various activities at Dunbar High School, including sports events. A ledger (dated 1910-1918) includes addresses and expense account records. There is also information on the Henry Hughes Educational Fund and a radio script by Dr. Fouse for a broadcast on WLAP radio (April 30, 1939) on the history of blacks in Lexington. There is a notebook containing clippings on a variety of topics, especially black education. A few photographs are among the papers.

The Fouses of Lexington, Ky. were actively involved in the education of blacks in the area.

“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.

une was a pioneering American educator and civil rights leader. Born Mary Jane McLeod on July 10, 1875, in Mayesville, South Carolina, the daughter of former slaves, Bethune won scholarships to attend Scotia Seminary in Concord, North Carolina (now Barber-Scotia College), and the Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago (now the Moody Bible Institute). In 1904, she moved to Daytona Beach, Florida, to found her own school. Her one-room school house became the Daytona Normal and Industrial School for Negro Girls before merging with Cookman Institute for Boys in 1923. The merged school later affiliated with the United Methodist Church and became the historically-black college named in her honor, Bethune-Cookman College (now Bethune-Cookman University). In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Bethune the director of the National Youth Administration's Division of Negro Affairs, making her the first black woman to head a federal agency. She also founded the National Council of Negro Women and was an active member of the National Association of Colored Women until her death in May 1955. Date Created Around 1905 Place North America > United States of America > Florida > Daytona Beach Time 1900 AD - 1949 AD Topic Social sciences > Political science > Civil & political rights Social sciences > Education > Schools & their activities; special education Additional Subjects African American girls ; African Americans--Segregation ; Bethune, Mary McLeod, 1875-1955 ; Women ; Women's history Type of Item Prints, Photographs Physical Description 1 negative: black and white; 4 x 5 inches Institution State Library and Archives of Florida External Resource http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.wdl/ftasa.4013

Mary McLeod Bethune was a pioneering American educator and civil rights leader.

In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Bethune the director of the National Youth Administration's Division of Negro Affairs, making her the first black woman to head a federal agency.

The city’s two daily newspapers, the Herald and the Leader, worked hand in hand with respected pillars of the community and decided to ignore the revolution. The press took their orders from the powerful and didn’t report one of the biggest news stories in American history. Lexington had demonstrations, sit-ins and other protests, but the papers didn’t acknowledge their complicity in telling a lie until earlier this month.

The white citizenry of Lexington decided that pretense was preferable to the truth and chose not to point out the elephant in the living room. “Good” white people like Fred Wachs, general manager and publisher of both newspapers, said they wanted change, but didn’t think that anyone demanding it was worthy of an expenditure of newsprint.

The godfathers of Lexington told people where they could and could not live, and could and could not work, and could and could not go to school and yet were not labeled rabble rousers. That honor fell on those who risked death, injury and loss of livelihood to demand a just society.

Instead, women formed missionary societies to address all manner of local and international needs, from the support of job training in their communities to funding for African American missionaries to Africa. They worked on urban ills, established reading groups, and advocated for better living conditions. They also wrote for religious periodicals, promoting quite traditional ideals of Victorian womanhood, respectability, and racial uplift. Women also continued work among their less fortunate counterparts in the rural South, in what continued to be an uneasy alliance. Like male religious leaders, too, they protested the creeping effects of Jim Crow laws and the systematic violence of lynching.

During the African-American Civil Rights Movement, it was the black churches that held the leadership role. Black churches were the main points of operations in regards to the Civil Rights Movement.

In fact, black women have long been regarded as the backbone of the black church. But their extensive and significant contributions are made as lay leaders, not as religious heads of churches.