Episode 6: Lost Cause

Season One | Episode 6

Episode Six: Lost Cause
Hosted by Dan Gediman. With George Wright, Anne Marshall, Kidada Williams, Patrick Lewis, Ricky Jones, Michael Morrow, and Russ Bowlds, and featuring Louis Robert Thompson, Keith McGill, Mark Forman, Susan Linville, and Erin Jones.

In the years that followed the Civil War, many Kentuckians embraced the Lost Cause ideology, even if they had fought for the Union. And some joined armed vigilante groups that used violence and terror to keep Black Kentuckians away from power and prosperity. Episode Transcript

share

Guests

George C. Wright

George C. Wright is an historian, noted author, and distinguished university scholar and senior faculty fellow for Institutional Diversity at the University of Kentucky.

George C. Wright is an historian, noted author, and distinguished university scholar and senior faculty fellow for Institutional Diversity at the University of Kentucky. Wright is involved in special assignments at both the administrative level and in the university’s College of Arts and Sciences.

Wright received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art in 1972 and 1974, respectively, from UK, both in history, and a doctoral degree in history from Duke University. He became the seventh president of Prairie View A&M University in 2003 and served in the role until 2017, when he was named Prairie View A&M University President Emeritus.

A native Kentuckian, Dr. George Wright is the author of “A History of Blacks in Kentucky: In Pursuit of Equality, 1890-1980, Volume II; Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865-1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule and “Legal Lynchings,” and Life Behind a Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865-1930.

Anne Marshall

Anne Marshall is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University.

Anne E. Marshall is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Centre College of Kentucky and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2004. She has worked at Mississippi State University since 2006, and teaches numerous graduate level courses, as well as undergraduate courses including Jacksonian American (1825-1850); History of the Old South; and the History of Southern Women.

She is the author of Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2010). She has also published numerous journal articles and essays, two of which have won prizes for best article for the year of publication (Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 2000 and Journal of the Civil War Era, 2011). Marshall has presented numerous papers and commented on panels at conferences including the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association, and the Society of Civil War Historians. Her current book project looks nineteenth century anti-slavery politics through the life of the colorful Kentucky emancipationist Cassius M. Clay.

Kidada Williams

Kidada E. Williams is an author and associate professor of History at Wayne State University.

Kidada E. Williams is a historian and author who researches the history of African American survivors of racist violence. She is the author of They Left Great Marks on Me and co-editor of Charleston Syllabus. She is finishing I Saw Death Coming, a book about African American families held captive by the Klan during Reconstruction. She lives, works, and plays in Detroit.

Dr. Patrick Lewis

Patrick Lewis is Scholar in Residence at the Filson Historical Society and is co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal, Ohio Valley History.

Patrick Lewis is Scholar in Residence at the Filson Historical Society and is co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal, Ohio Valley History. A Trigg County, Kentucky, native, Lewis graduated from Transylvania University and holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Kentucky. He has worked for the National Park Service and the Kentucky Historical Society, and has won digital history grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Lewis is author of For Slavery and Union: Benjamin Buckner and Kentucky Loyalties in the Civil War (2015). He tweets about public history at @KyPLewis.

Dr. Ricky L. Jones

Dr. Ricky L. Jones is Professor and Chair of the University of Louisville’s Department of Pan-African Studies.

Dr. Ricky L. Jones is Professor and Chair of the University of Louisville’s Department of Pan-African Studies. A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Jones was educated as an undergraduate at the U.S. Naval Academy, Morehouse College (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s alma mater). He was only the second African-American to receive a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Kentucky where he specialized in Political Philosophy and Comparative Politics. His books include: two editions of “Black Haze: Violence, Sacrifice, and Manhood in Black Greek-Letter Fraternities” and “What’s Wrong with Obamamania?: Black America, Black Leadership, and the Death of Political Imagination.”

He is currently co-authoring a new book with attorney and award-winning cartoonist Marc Murphy titled, “Kaepernick, Confederates, and Con-Artists.” He has written hundreds of scholarly and magazine articles, book chapters and opinion columns.

Dr. Jones has served as a local, national, and international social and political analyst across various media including appearances on HBO, CNN, Fox News, ESPN, the Travel Channel, a variety of NPR and PBS programs, the BBC, E! Entertainment, the Katie (Couric) Show, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, and many others. He is the host of the “Erasing History’ Podcast and the “Ricky Jones Show” from iHeart Media. The “Ricky Jones Show” was named Best of Louisville’s 2017 “Best Radio Show.”

He is a contributing opinion columnist for the Courier-Journal and USA Today Network for which he was named 2018 “best editorial/opinion columnist” by the Society of Professional Journalists.

Among many other honors, Jones has been named one of Louisville’s 25 Future Leaders by Louisville Magazine and was also recognized as one of DIVERSE Issues in Higher Education’s “25 to Watch in Academia.” He is a life-member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc.

Visit him at: www.rickyljones.com

Follow on Twitter: @DrRickyLJones

Michael Morrow

Michael Morrow is the director of the SEEK Museum in Russellville, Kentucky.

Michael Morrow is the curator and director of the SEEK Museum. SEEK Museum, formerly known as the West Kentucky African American Heritage Center, is comprised of six historic buildings on two sites in Russellville, Kentucky. SEEK tells the history of the Struggles for Emancipation and Equality in Kentucky beginning with the enslavement of over 100 people at the Bibb House on West 8th Street in Russellville, followed by the emancipation of 99 people between 1832 and 1839 at that site. The story continues at the West Kentucky African American Heritage Center on East 6th Street with exhibits addressing the segregation and mob violence that followed the Civil War, the cultural heritage that developed in the Black Bottom National Register Historic District and the struggle for civil rights, including a park area dedicated to civil rights which features a bronze statue of Alice Allison Dunnigan, a Russellville native and civil rights pioneer.

Tours of either or both museum sites are available Wednesday – Saturday: 10 am – 4 pm, with prior email notification requested. Group Tours (including curriculum-based school tours) are available by appointment, with reduced fees for groups of 10 or more.

Episode Bibliography

Learn more about slavery and its lasting effects in America by exploring the source materials referenced in The Reckoning. Our bibliography contains many items that are available to read or download for free. If you choose to purchase any of the books through the links provided, as an Amazon Associate, our non-profit organization Reckoning, Inc. earns commissions from qualifying purchases.

1871 Testimony of Colored citizens of Frankfort, KY.

Bailey, Fred Arthur. “The Textbooks of the ‘Lost Cause’: Censorship and the Creation of Southern State Histories”. The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Fall 1991, Vol. 75, No. 3 (Fall 1991), pp. 507- 533 (http://www.jstor.com/stable/40582363)

Huffman, Greg. “Twisted Sources: How Confederate Propaganda Ended Up In The South’s Schoolbooks”, Facing South, April 10, 2019

Lewis, Patrick. (paid link) For Slavery and Union: Benjamin Buckner and Kentucky Loyalties in the Civil War. University Press of Kentucky, Mar 9, 2015

Marshall, Anne (paid link) Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State. (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2010).

Pollard, Edward Alfred. The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. United States: E. B. Treat, 1867.

United Daughters of the Confederacy.
The UDC Catechism for Children, Galveston, TX: “United Daughters of the Confederacy”, Veuve Jefferson Davis Chapter No. 17, 1904.1904

Williams, Kidada E. (paid link) They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I. New York: NYU Press, 2012.

Wright, George C. (paid link) A History of Blacks in Kentucky: In Pursuit of Equality, 1890-1980 (Kentucky Historical Society).

Wright, George C. (paid link) Life Behind a Veil. Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865-1930 Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

Wright, George C. (paid link) Racial Violence in Kentucky 1865-1940 : Lynchings, Mob Rule, and Legal Lynchings.” Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1996.‌

How to Subscribe to The Reckoning Podcast

You can subscribe to our podcast by following these links to Apple Podcasts (for iPhones or iPads), Google Podcasts (for Android phones and tablets), and Spotify. For any other podcasting services (Stitcher, Amazon Music, etc.), search for The Reckoning: Facing the Legacy of Slavery in America or paste this RSS feed in the app: https://feed.podbean.com/reckoningradio/feed.xml. You can also listen to all episodes of the series on the Podcast page of our website, as well as on our YouTube channel.