HIS 351/AAS 400 - Black Environmental Freedom Struggles in U.S. History: Leadership and Justice

The Katherine H. Gowdy papers (dated 1909-1968, undated; 0.9 cubic feet; 2 boxes) comprise letters, notebooks, diaries, photographs, short stories, and speeches that document the life of Katherine Gowdy, an African-American woman, in Springfield, Kentucky in the first half of the twentieth century. The letters discuss daily life of friends and family, making payments on taxes, requests for support from prisoners, as well as two letters to Louis Goatley who worked on Gowdy's farm from a spurned lover. The notebooks include account books, farm ledgers, and school work from Gowdy and people in the community she supported.

The Samuel A. Oldham papers (dated 1833-1892; 0.1 cubic feet; 2 folders) consist of the legal and personal papers of Samuel A. Oldham, a freedman from Lexington, Kentucky. The collection includes indentures for property; including his daughter Fanny, and the apprenticeship of Henry Mitchell. Instruments granting the power of attorney to Oldham from Lucy Price and Reuben Burnley are included as is the will of Richard Morrison. Several receipts and a letter of introduction from Mayor O.F. Payne are also included.

This project focuses on founders and participants of the Affrilachian Symposium. The Affrilachian Symposium, held to honor the historical contributions of African Americans to Appalachian regional heritage, took place March 9-10, 2011 at the University of Kentucky Student Center in Lexington, Kentucky. Frank X Walker, Kathy Y. Wilson, and Ashley Bourgeois discuss organizing the symposium, Affrilachian poetry, Walker's coining of Affrilachian as a term, the geographic limitations of Appalachian identity, historical continuities between slavery and present-day racism, and writing.

Black church leaders throughout Kentucky discuss the history of the black church in the state, its role in the community, and lined hymns.

The Appalachian region stretches from Mississippi to New York, encompassing rural areas as well as cities from Birmingham to Pittsburgh. Though Appalachia's people are as diverse as its terrain, few other regions in America are as burdened with stereotypes. Author Frank X Walker coined the term "Affrilachia" to give identity and voice to people of African descent from this region and to highlight Appalachia's multicultural identity. This act inspired a group of gifted artists, the Affrilachian Poets, to begin working together and using their writing to defy persistent stereotypes of Appalachia as a racially and culturally homogenized region. After years of growth, honors, and accomplishments, the group is acknowledging its silver anniversary with Black Bone. Edited by two newer members of the Affrilachian Poets, Bianca Lynne Spriggs and Jeremy Paden, Black Bone is a beautiful collection of both new and classic work and features submissions from Frank X Walker, Nikky Finney, Gerald Coleman, Crystal Wilkinson, Kelly Norman Ellis, and many others. This illuminating and powerful collection is a testament to a groundbreaking group and its enduring legacy.

George Washington Carver (ca. 1864-1943) is at once one of the most familiar and misunderstood figures in American history. In My Work Is That of Conservation, Mark D. Hersey reveals the life and work of this fascinating man who is widely-and reductively-known as the African American scientist who developed a wide variety of uses for the peanut.

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice, exposing how systemic racial and class inequalities reinforced during the Jim Crow era played out in these intense contemporary social movements.

Black Nature is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated. Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry-anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild.