The Louisville region has a complex history of slavery and freedom.
The Ohio River that divides Kentucky and Indiana once marked the boundary between slavery and freedom. In the pre-Civil War era, Kentucky was officially part of the slaveholding South, while Indiana was nominally a “free state,” where chattel slavery had been outlawed. But that boundary was complicated.
In the 1800s, many formerly enslaved people crossed the river from Louisville, Kentucky, to New Albany, Indiana, traveling north along the network known as the Underground Railroad.
“The climate in New Albany wasn’t exactly sympathetic for those enslaved people who were trying to escape to freedom,” explained Jerry Finn. Finn leads tours of New Albany’s 1852 Town Clock Church, where congregation members assisted people trying to leave the Southern states.
Today, artists and activists, museum curators, and historians in both Kentucky and southern Indiana are exploring the history of the region and its river, working to unravel this 19th-century heritage and what its legacy means today, particularly after the 2020 killing of Breonna Taylor in her Louisville home and the widespread protests that followed this tragedy.
‘On the Banks of Freedom’
“In Kentucky and Louisville, the history of enslavement has really been downplayed,” said Josh Miller, co-founder of IDEAS xLab, an artist-run organization that uses storytelling and community collaboration to impact public health. “We focus on the bourbon. We focus on the [Kentucky] Derby. We focus on all these other things.”
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Miller and Hannah Drake, a Louisville artist, poet, and IDEAS xLab Chief Creative Officer, are working to change that narrative. They created the UnKnown Project to share stories of Black Kentucky residents, including those who were enslaved and whose history may not be known.
They spearheaded a 2021 public art installation along the Ohio River called “On the Banks of Freedom,” with two benches facing the water engraved with names of formerly enslaved Kentuckians. The benches sit on a platform with sandblasted footprints representing the journey across the river.
“This side of the river was on the wrong side of history,” Drake said. “We knew we wanted this project on the river because of the significance of the Ohio River,” as the boundary between freedom and slavery.
The Commonwealth: Divided We Fall
The UnKnown Project also collaborated with Louisville’s Frazier History Museum on The Commonwealth: Divided We Fall, a permanent exhibit that opened in June 2022, 230 years after Kentucky became the 15th U.S. state.
“Kentucky’s story is not this rich white’s guy story,” said curator Amanda Briede, who explained that the exhibition’s goal is to present “all of Kentucky’s history from the beginning of time into the early 1900s.”
“I wanted anyone who comes to the exhibit to be able to see themselves in Kentucky’s history, so we included as many diverse voices as we could. We have African Americans, Native Americans, women, LGBTQ+ figures, people with physical disabilities, people with mental health issues,” she added. Briede said that working with the UnKnown Project “allowed us to tell a more complete story of the African American experience in Kentucky.”
The exhibit includes work by Louisville glass artist Ché Rhodes, who made three-dimensional scans of objects owned by enslaved people, including a spoon and a bell, then crafted hundreds of glass versions, which are shown in an abstract version of a slave cabin. Visitors can also board a replica of an early 1800s riverboat, looking toward a clockface from New Albany’s Town Clock Church.
An Activist Indiana Congregation
That Indiana church, a restored brick structure with tall stained-glass windows, became known for the massive clock on its 150-foot-tall steeple, a landmark visible from the Ohio River. Its progressive, integrated congregation assisted enslaved people on their journeys north from the 1830s until after the Civil War.
“The fact that they did have Black members helped them with their work,” said Finn. “If a Black person were to come in the church’s front doors, it could have been a member, or it could have been somebody trying to get help and escape to freedom.”
According to local lore, the undercroft, in the church basement, sheltered fugitives and connected through a tunnel to a medical facility across the street. Finn noted that the historical evidence isn’t definitive, adding that the basement wouldn’t have been especially secure. “Even if they would have been hiding down under there, the congregation would have wanted to get them north as quickly as possible.”
Church member James Brooks, who was president of the New Albany-Salem Railroad, and conductor James Hines regularly helped formerly enslaved people onto northbound trains. “Articles in the papers talk about escapees who were chased by Louisville police to the trains,” said Finn, but Hines would not let them on board.
“Even though we tell kids that the Underground Railroad is not about tunnels, it’s not about trains,” said Finn, “the church has a connection to both.”
Not the Promised Land
“Some folks call the Ohio River ‘Jordan,’ because you’ve got to cross it to get to the Promised Land of the North,” explains a panel in the exhibit, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Courage: Men and Women of the Underground Railroad, at New Albany’s Carnegie Center for Art & History, down the street from the Town Clock Church. Attributed to Henson McIntosh, a Black resident of New Albany in the 1850s, the quotation continues, “They learn soon enough that New Albany isn’t any Promised Land. To be free, they’ve got to keep traveling North.”
Exploring the lives of Black and white Indiana residents who assisted formerly-enslaved people, the exhibit was developed from the 2001 book, The Underground Railroad in Floyd County, Indiana, where author Pam Peters reported, “Arrival on Indiana soil only meant a continuation of the struggle for freedom. Local, state, and federal laws worked against African Americans, both slave and free.”
Slavery was legal until Indiana became a state in 1816, but enslaved individuals were not emancipated even then. Fugitive Slave Laws decreed that Black people who were free could be captured and shipped back to their former enslavers. And an 1851 article of the Indiana state constitution, which became known as the “Exclusion Act,” prohibited Black people from settling within the state.
Protest to Progress
Back on the Louisville side of the river, another museum is also working to share a more in-depth history.
Lamont Collins, founder and CEO of Roots 101 African-American History Museum, described the museum he established as “an educational journey from Africa to America.”
“Black history is American history,” said Collins, a lifelong Louisville resident. “I want people to understand our contributions to this country.”
A particularly moving exhibit, Protest to Progress, traces activism from the 1960s Civil Rights movement through the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. After students from an area school asked Collins if they could contribute something to the museum, “These Black and white kids made a casket. They marched the casket to the museum and gave it to us.”
After installing the coffin next to a graphic of Breonna Taylor, Collins placed a mirror inside “so kids can see themselves in the country we live in now” and reflect on what they might do to fight injustice.
After Taylor’s death, when Hannah Drake and Josh Miller worked on On the Banks of Freedom, Drake said they were “trying to create something about racial healing and reconciliation. And on the other hand, you’re protesting and fighting because this Black woman, Breonna Taylor, was murdered in her home by the police. How does Louisville reconcile those two things?”
Their installation along the Ohio River “is a way to bring people together.”
“Water is supposed to reflect you back to you, right? Kentucky needs to use that river as something to reflect Kentucky back to Kentucky and tell the truth about Kentucky history.”