The Eastern Kentucky Social Club

[Music] at the close of the u.s civil war the black population in the kentucky counties of bell harlan lecher floyd and pike averaged 2.34 percent at the turn of the century those numbers would change significantly with the rapid development of the region's coal fields if you look at that period late 1800s early 1900s there basically were three types of coal communities they're the coal camps which were pretty rough areas and the owners of the coal mines were not too concerned about the housing for their labor these might be considered just shacks then you've got coal towns a town where the manager the owner of the mine really tried to develop a community it was not quite at the level of these large corporations who came in and put in what we described as these model towns benjamin lynch there's wheel right inland steel was the operator of that the lnn railroad ran a spur up to what is now cumberland kentucky and immediately wisconsin steel came in and started building a town eventually this town was a as we call it a model town in a sense that it had all of the buildings and items that you would expect to find in a mature town probably about fix five or six hundred houses initially there were schools there was a hospital ymca company store of course they put in the infrastructure necessary for coal mining with wash houses and tipples and so on about seven years later in 1917 u.s steel had purchased property further up looney creek u.s steel started building a town which became known as lynch kentucky lynch was a much larger town lynch had close to 2000 residents these were complete communities there were doctors and nurses at the hospital there were very well qualified teachers in the schools why build a model town why go to that expense and there are several reasons for this number one build a place that will attract and keep miners the companies wanted to prevent unionization so if you made the place as nice as you could and as attractive as you could you wouldn't lose the social control that they prized so much the late 1800s and early 1900s there were huge strikes all across the united states a strike means no production no production means lost profit if they can prevent unions and attract workers two points the whole point of the town was production and profit and if you could create a system and these towns were systems that would keep production flowing and profits up was not only good for your pocketbook but for your career in the company in terms of recruitment the companies had what was called a judicious mixture in which they tried to get equal numbers of european immigrants of blacks from from the south and of native whites from from the local area and by doing this they felt that they could also prevent unionization because they could pit these groups against one another and these were what you would call captured mines because everything that came out of the mines was then sent to either chicago for wisconsin steel or for us steel and pittsburgh our book is called african-american miners and migrants and so the question comes why did african americans come to these little towns back in the mountains that were hard to get to and why did they leave their home places and and come on what tom and i have called the above ground railroad most black folks who were living in those coal towns working as miners were not born or raised there and the majority of those men were recruited from alabama and that was for a very specific reason because there were coal mines in alabama and many of the companies that were setting up shop in harlan county owned mines in alabama so they knew exactly where to get the labor they also knew that most of the black coal mining labor in alabama was being sourced from convict leasing because of of very racist behaviors blacks were often rounded up and and falsely imprisoned put on chain gangs and then rented out for the sheriff's profit as labor so it was very easy and attractive to lure potential laborers to migrate to eastern kentucky it's the early 1900s alabama was a wretched environment in terms of just racial violence so it wasn't just easy to get up and decide to migrate so the companies sent labor agents to go get men for example in lynch there was this guy named limehouse white guy they say that he was skinny and he used to wear a straw hat he drove a truck that carried watermelon and sugar cane and corn things like that and men and he would smuggle black men from alabama sometimes in the middle of the night and bring them to lynch once they'd work off whatever agreement they had with limehouse limehouse would then agree to go back and get their wives and their children so that's how many of the early families got there well in 41 my dad was working at steel mills hike shop in birmingham for u.s steel and he left there and come up here to work in the mines and later on he brought his son up there he was had a wife and three kids and so we came up here when i was 13 years old it was long in the car on an old narrow road 35 40 miles an hour we left in the morning in birmingham about seven eight o'clock and got here about nine or ten at night and drove into the city well into cumberland and brennaman lynch all of them combined and all the lights and everything looked so pretty got up the next morning and looked out couldn't see nothing but mountains so i cried for about a week i didn't like it i'm originally from everetts kentucky i live in cleveland ohio now it's a small coal mining area where my dad worked in the coal mines there and my mother worked as a housekeeper my dad he was born in georgia and his family moved to kentucky and that's where he married my mother my mother was from pennington gap virginia and they had eight children and that's where we live until like 1954. went to an all-black school from kindergarten to the eighth grade i went to everett's black school my kids they couldn't phantom a one-room schoolhouse so one year we took our kids to kentucky and they saw the one-room schoolhouse and my kids said this ain't nothing but a little box but see it wasn't that many children you you had one teacher taught one through the eighth grade and after you got to high school in ninth grade you went to harlan roosevelt high school that's where all the black kids from the different coal mining camps like everett's verdia high splint clover splint all of those little small coal mining camps fed into one high school well this building that we're sitting in right now originally was the lynch colored school this is where all the blacks went to this school lynch color school and like i say even benham kentucky they're blacks went here see u.s still owned the school they brought the teachers in they built the building and the kids didn't have anything else to do but go to school they had a training officer they would come down to these schools and checked the list of the ones didn't show up and about 8 30 to 9 o'clock they were at your house checking on see why the kids didn't go to school this building we're sitting there now for where i started first grade education was paramount our parents our teachers our clergy just insisted that we make education the number one issue in our lives my name is edgar james moss and i was born and reared in venom i now live in newington connecticut i am one of 13 children born to my parents mr and mrs greene and aina moss who were both born in alabama and i attended the east venum school under the principalship of mr joseph alexander matthews and his wife mrs ruth matthews and at that time grades one through six were on the first floor of the building grades seven through 12 were on the second floor of the building i don't i forget what it was i did something and professor matthews was going to kick me out of school and i knew that that would not go over with mr green moss so i begged and i pleaded with fess everybody called him fess not to kick me out of school so every window in our school i had to wash those windows inside and out to keep from being kicked out of school we're in fleming kentucky and this is the church corinth baptist church now elkhorn coal company back in the early 20s they built the whole camp and they built a schoolhouse for the black kids white schools at neon and the black school was here in fleming they had teachers the first teachers were the nuns from over at jenkins they taught school here in this building my mom she was from canton mississippi and then they moved up to a place called haman kentucky my granddad he worked coal mines and then when he started preaching then he didn't work in coal mines anymore my dad came from spring city tennessee the way they did elkhorn coal company and they would have if they had a black man working and they'd see how good he could work and then they'd ask him if you got any brothers or cousins that might want to work and if they said yeah and they lived in alabama or mississippi they'd get on the train and they'd go down there and recruit them you know more or less bring them back up here to work had a company store you could get food and clothing everything from the company store and they'd had this what they call script my dad would work and my mom would go down to the company store it's like credit she would get stuff that would come out of his payday when he got paid i remember he got his little finger he got two fingers cut off a buggy run across him and cut off two of his fingers and he got maybe two hundred dollars for that when people would see him and they'd ask them clarence what happened to your fingers my family ate them fingers off he'd say because what money he got went for the family you know i mean to take care of the family i'm from lynch kentucky coal mining area where we worked in the coal mine 30 years i went into coal mine in 68. been a united mine worker i was a mine inspector and uh worked in the mine doing all kinds of jobs in the mind and anyone no black white it was the families going underground away from their loved ones working together and getting back outside and no don't take no chances on the ground cause ain't nobody holding that topper but the good lord i i was a root boater for 17 or 18 years everybody in lynch belonged to umwa that works here everybody in venom had their own little another union not the same they were in jenkins and wheel right impossible and then we're from west virginia you know anywhere that they had the united mine workers they had a lot of black coal mines there's been a lot of people killed right there in in this park right out here because they had to bring national guards up here in 39 just to stop the war shooting it killing each other union and onion what i really liked about it then was in the 50s when things were segregated and the united my workers had a slogan like mining is dangerous no matter what culture you are we all work together right now so you got to depend on each other and you get along so it was good and then there was no the black got one pay scale and white got another one they had one pay scale and that was it that's and that was the good part about way back in the 50s and 40s initially when they started to allow women to go into coal mine i kind of remember it was my mother ruthie may k francis aaron thomas my sister drina smith thomas anita chapman patsy tensley garbage couple white women that went in all of them went by my mother because she's chickened out most of them did practically the same thing as the men i know my sister if i'm out of second she drove a coal cart i guess when you get the coal and bring it to the outside and they loaded on the trucks and stuff like that and they cut coal and chiseled and done just like to me uh ezell gerard smith i'm from lynch kentucky and now i live in louiseville kentucky we've seen our dads you know come in you know from working in the mine and just to be wore out and everything and they would always tell us you know don't go in the mine you know because it kills you and if you're going to go into mine i'd rather kill you myself so but unfortunately i did go into mine for about nine years and something luckily i got out before i could understand what the slow death that they were referring to black lung and arthritis and all from being in the dampness coldness and breathing in the cold dust i worked all three shifts the mind ran 24 hours a day i did everything there was in the mind except for be a boss then one day i was what they call pinning top drilling the top of the uh mine where you cut the coal out and then there's slate rock or stone rock it's just rock it's nothing you can use in the cold family so we would have to pin boards or plates or put up timbers so you could advance and one day just caved in and they pinned me into a piece of machinery and i was in the hospital for i can't remember if it was a month and rehabbed for about six months and when i went back i had claustrophobic you get to understand the sounds in the minds when you cut the cold out and there's nothing there but like just a smooth top let's say sand rock you can hear it ripping like paper or you can hear gas sometimes spewing and then you can hear um and see pieces of rock jagged just shooting down because of the weight because you haven't put anything there to kind of brace it there was a lot of rock falls a lot of cave-ins a lot of rib rolls you know where the sides would just explode due to the weight bernie baker's staff from benham kentucky and i live in washington dc now well i i remember the the community nurturing i remember fairness i remember remember the competitiveness i remember the rivalries that blossomed into you know indelible friendships and mutual respect they went out and hired workers based on their athletic ability willie watts told us that the way he got to to lynch was that his father was hired because he was a good hitter and could play infield very well and in in reviewing old company records personnel records we would we found some that were termination notices in a file could not hit was not a good fielder so these people were let go because they were hired not to work in the mines but before their athletic ability the leagues the recreation leagues were segregated by race but these folks scrimmaged against each other but to make each other better because the pride of the whole town was riding on the success of either a black or a white team or both teams the the sports life here in lynch looking around these walls you see all kinds of photos of of high school sports took a lot of pride as being a pirate growing up you invit and admired the older guys who were already playing sports and look forward to the day that you could don the blue and golf one thing about u.s steel if you were a good student and a good athlete they looked out for you the kids in eastern kentucky the reason they got to be so good nobody's gonna pick you on their team if you couldn't play if you wasn't good everybody tried to be the best they could people from jenkins and hazard and milford you know all these other cities that we used to compete against and now we all buddy buddies and we talk about old times and that area where we grew up they knew how to raise their young and you weren't only disciplined at home but you were disciplined you know in in the community if you got out of line and i've always felt before the book came out on how to raise a child you know it was done in the tri-cities area everybody knew everybody and still know everybody even coming back home with your kids people don't know the kids they can see them oh that's a smither that's the clocker that's the water that's you know that's the snow you know everybody know who you are even if they don't know you personally i live now in louisville kentucky by way of lynch kentucky as a kid i can remember many things best place in the world to have been raised as a kid the connection we had with each other family looking after family children had free hand to play without fear lynch itself was basically owned separate but equal uh type of situation and uh we all lived in different camps like from camp one to camp seven we all had our own little area we had like for example for recreation in camp two what they call a boarding house where most people attended that for parties uh et cetera a lot of men stayed at the boarding house then the number one spot that i usually identify home away from home was the pool room and there you had top floor for like the masonic fraternity having meetings then we had the pool tables downstairs which were all people in lynch mostly came to the pool room so that was the hot spot for a lot of things growing up in venom it was a segregated community and we black folk lived in the eastern part of venom everything that was dirty was in the black community the coal mines on the side on the north mountain side as well as a south mountain side were in venom the cold dump where they pile coal up and sometimes three and four or five stories high was in the black community where the cold cars were repaired and made all of the noise and the dust and the dirt was in the black community the bath houses there were two bath houses one for white and one for the blacks my father worked in the coal mine with the white coal miners and when he came from the coal mines he went to the left to go home and they would go to the right to go home and that's how that system that environment was set up the clean facilities in benham were all were in the white community such as the uh uh the company store the international harvester company owned the big store department store in benham and they owned the meat market in venom tennessee ernie ford saying this whole song i owe my soul to the company store my daddy did and they were taking money from his paycheck every week that they still would not allow him at times to charge things on that on that company charge account when i was approximately four years old i remember being in the meat market with my mother and every time that a white person would come into the store my mother was pushed back from being served she told me that she had to wait her turn and her turn did not come until after all of the white people in the store had been waiting on there was a theater the isaac family owned the theaters in cumberland venom and lynch now we could not go to blacks could not go to the isaac's theater in cumberland kentucky we could go to the theater and benham kentucky and we could go to the theater and lynch kentucky all of harlan county i had something to do in it job-related being in everett's black mountain put me home wallace creek uh smith which is some of the uglier places smith wallins creek and places like that they would always try me first and i would always just be there standing toe to toe jerome ratchford and of course i'm from southeastern kentucky specifically lynch kentucky harlan county my wife and i we've been living in atlanta georgia almost 40 years now my father was from talladega alabama and my mother which is somewhat of an exception was from louisiana even when i talk about segregation and we did live in a segregated community it wasn't i can and i can say this because i uh professionally i moved south and i got a chance to see some of the rudiments of strict segregation i wouldn't classify lynch as having strict segregation for example i don't remember seeing a separate water fountain for blacks and whites in lynch first time i saw that was if i went to the county seat or something of that sort but in terms of looking white people in the face and and being fearful of of consequences it's very tragic consequences if you didn't honor certain kinds of codes we didn't grow up with that kind of rigidity and so forth white communities and black communities floated together pretty easily on certain lines of demarcation and so forth but there were some signs a lot of signs of segregation as well you know from an employment perspective while they all went into those mines and went to the same depths there was disparities in terms of hiring and who could become a supervisor et cetera whatever you so if we kind of look at this on a generational arc you had from 1910 to about 1940 the black population in harlan county alone goes from 2 percent to 10 percent the percentage of black residents in neighboring eastern kentucky counties also peaked around 1940 the height of the region's coal mining but between 1940 and 1970 harlan county lost 70 percent of its black population the mines were starting to close down and the mining industry was racialized like all other labor who'd they lay off first black folks you got to go this not only impacted men who were currently employed in the mines but it was very clear that there would be no job opportunities for their children so all adults in the community really embraced instilling in their kids from a very young age you have to be not only prepared to leave this place but you have to be prepared to compete in an integrated society which is something that none of them had ever done at the same time the african-american great migration is booming right black folks are moving from all over the south they're leaving from georgia and alabama what these kentucky black folks parents had done a generation ago it's starting to uptick in like a huge way in the south they're going straight from bessemer to new york city straight to dc straight to detroit and you know that's where the jobs were at that time well you go back up to the mountain where my mom and dad were growing up where did they go for the summers when they were on vacation to visit those very cousins who might have been from originally from alabama who had migrated to cleveland who had migrated earlier to new york and they go visit them for the summers what does that do it plants a seed when i grow up i'm moving to new york that's what my father did that's how my brother and i you know came to be born and raised in new york but their migration story is very emblematic of how it kind of unfolded for many families during that generation of the out migration which really started around your 1940s 50s and 60s you've got cousins or aunts or uncles sisters or brothers clustered in a particular city it becomes a natural kind of transition for you to to migrate there too because your family will help you get set up you can live there for a little while until you find a job so that is the way in which the majority of folks migrated but there were some other cool patterns one was the integration of the military right after war work had got real slack i didn't working like three days a week i didn't see where i was getting the head like that during the and then in the 50s the career wall broke out and they had just integrated the services on the black and white marine crew and sergeant heard there were some good athletes up in here so he showed up here recruited me to go in the marine corps to play basketball so i went into boot camp so the integration of the united states military really served as symbolically as a opening of a new window of opportunity or possibility for the way that black men thought about what their life pathway might be and that really created a new kind of migratory uh structure as well and that is how many folks who ended up out west did so through the military i had a choice of joining the military working in a coal mine and or going to another city where you might have had a relative to go and get employment like chicago cleveland etc i joke a lot i did not have anyone to invite me for that particular time so my choice was to join the air force in 1960 leaving lynch and i think my first place was coming to going to louisville kentucky where i reside now and that was just like another world and everything and even beyond that is once in the military going to san antonio texas that was something that you you read about i thought you know right after the second world war we had four or five thousand people working here in the mine then you're getting all this automatic equipment they start cutting down cut down about 12 to 1500 they didn't need all the people so the people that were leaving here you know some had family and roots here they would go to cleveland detroit and places like that you know automobile places steel mills up there and get a job well some went to cleveland some went to new york new jersey louisiana my sister when she got out of high school she went to indianapolis and stayed with the rights and she got a job and she got an apartment then she sent for the next oldest cartel she goes up there and she gets her a job in janus the next one did and my brother casey he went there and we all stayed at my sister's house that's how my most of my family got to indianapolis but i have i haven't left here in fleming there's two black families now you still you sit and people walk up and down the street all time now you know you don't see anybody you know i mean bishop lamb church of god it's m p g o t military pillow and ground of truth they're the only black church in mac roberts and then this is one in fleming and there's no more around till you get to pikeville and there's two black churches in pikeville our church the rising star baptist church and it still sits on the mountainside and benham kentucky right now on the first and the third sunday of each month the baptist would have access to the church on the second and fourth sundays the methodists would have access to the church but every sunday first second third fourth and fifth we all went to church together anyway it's been about five or six years since that we had a service on a memorial day weekend at the rising star baptist church there there just aren't enough black people now living in bedroom kentucky [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] today [Music] [Applause] [Music] my dad he moved to cleveland and he worked in a steel mill and after my ninth grade year he moved all of the family there to cleveland when we left kentucky we had the greyhound bus and at that time it was still very segregated all the blacks had to sit in the back and i never will forget that it was halfway to cleveland and my mother couldn't get off the bus to get us water or anything because they had no place for the blacks to go get water and we wanted water so it started to rain and it rained so hard that she let the window down and she got water in an envelope until we had enough water to drink because we wasn't privy enough to go into the bus station where she could have purchased everything that we needed my my husband's sister we was best friends in kentucky and when he came home from the military that's when i met him he was from benham kentucky you just really entered into a different world when you stepped out and when we left venom we were prepared you know for hard times uh we were well taught our teachers were really good we were fundamentally sound you know with things that stick with us now that's there and you look back and you marvel at the abilities of our teachers who were relatively young because they would come up from kentucky state and knoxville college and it would be their first jobs city life wasn't for me we thought eastern kentucky was poor and i had never seen a poor person but when i seen someone eating out the garbage in the city and walking around with no shoes now we walked around with no shoes because we saving our shoes but just it was winter time one time and a lot of them just went straight to the military a lot of my uncles that are from there after they went to the military they ended up in different cities some of them stayed and made the military their career they all ended up in springfield massachusetts there my parents met because my dad was in the military and so that's and he was from st louis so that's how i ended up in st louis my mother i went the opposite direction of what black people were doing from a migratory perspective back in that particular time they were still migrating to the detroits to cleveland especially if you were in kentucky once i got my degree i realized that i wanted to go south i particularly wanted to work at a historically black college and university and the and the ones that had tradition and and for me to have choices so that's where i went and so my first position in higher education was at a small school liberal arts school in alabama called talladega college i knew that the south was going to be my base even though i went back to the midwest to get a degree and and so i got a position at every university uh in atlanta georgia and and then subsequently at kennesaw state university in marietta georgia bernard beckerstaff went to school and graduated from east benham high school went off to college and play basketball to play pro ball and be and he's right now involved in the nba we're so proud of him and the beauty of that he does not stick his chest out and say i am thus and such and et cetera et cetera he's a very humble gentle person and and all of us love him all of us love him and there's nothing he can do about it i went to cleveland i ended up going to raul granny college university in ohio for a year and a half and then drove out to san diego uh with a friend from cleveland then it all started from there i attended university of san diego coached at the university of san diego and then on to the uh the national basketball association even leaving kentucky you were still around your friends and your relatives so although we i left venom it was the same people it was a big city they were same people a lot of my husband's friends was in cleveland and we would always get together on sundays or saturdays or holidays you know eat together and have fun together and they said you know what everybody is scattered so we need to see if we can have a little reunion let's get together and see how many people we can get and our first reunion we see we didn't send out no literature or anything it was but word of mouth we had this hall and the hall was named shaker lee hall and the hall would only hold about 300 people but we had no idea my husband's friends kept coming calling in cleveland said we're coming up we're coming up they stayed in different people's homes i had so many people at my house i had to send my kids to my mother we couldn't get the people in there over a thousand people showed up and we were all from kentucky and i never will forget that night i was so dressed up i thought i was so pretty i had my hair done that day when i got in that hall my hair said it was so hot in that place you couldn't breathe they overflowed in the parking lot on the sidewalks because you couldn't get people in there this was the first time we tried it we didn't really branch out to chapters until about the second reunion some of the people from detroit says well since you all had a get-together we're going to have it in detroit next year and then after detroit i think we went to chicago and it just started building from that we have had at least about 15 chapters and now we're down to about 12. we have california texas kentucky atlanta the atlanta chapter was started in 1966. my husband garfield guest started the reunion before we had our first reunion the lynch chapter came to atlanta and brought all of their members and families it just impressed me very much to see them how they organized it most of the organizations consist of a president vice president secretary treasurer a business manager some might have a parliamentarian we also have bylaws that we go by i'm from lynch kentucky and now i live in bengham kentucky the social club started and i was actually just graduating from high school which my father and uncle and all had started the lynch chapter so there was jenkin will wright mac roberts all those people were from over in that end of the country so i was recruited right out of high school to be the secretary of the lynch chapter where i served as secretary and then as a vice president for 33 years if you wanted to be a new chapter for the eastern kentucky social club there's a year for originally from eastern kentucky you could even be married into a family of somebody that was originally from eastern kentucky you'll go to our executive board meetings and ask to host the reunion that's where the executive board we vote and see if you're ready to host a reunion and then actually my niece which was in knoxville decided they would like to have a club so i helped him establish a new chapter in knoxville tennessee it consists of a lot of young people there it's a young chapter and we kept saying we have to get our youth engaged and we need new chapters youngblood and i said hey why don't we just start a chapter in st louis and right now we're seeing the first fruits of that we are hosting our very first reunion okay thank you i'm just so pleased to say the book is finally here y'all [Applause] this is our book okay thank you hey [Music] [Applause] i have the privilege of serving as a co-president of the seika which is southeastern kentucky heritage association even though the organization was called the eastern kentucky social club our chapter is called seika because we wanted to bring in a more heritage field to get history on the different coal miners and where they came from what did they do how did they migrate we really wanted to emphasize what we thought was the true essence of what eastern kentucky is about the social club so we took social out and made ours heritage the st louis chapter uses heritage and what have you and that's really what it's about now to show you see that picture that that's in hartford connecticut in 83. there's 2 000 people at that demo that night for our reunion most of the city's crowd wasn't quite that big but they would be from 14 15 100 up to close to 2 000 just about all of them in the early years kids didn't attend you know they would have a bus out here in the school yard they'd get on the bus you know they suit cases and they would go from city to city every year to have the kentucky reunion my first real reunion was in indianapolis and that was in 1970 when i graduated from high school that was i had my own room and everything so at that time i'm you know i'm an adult i'm you know i'm in the mix of everything you know i got my own room i'm a part of the reunion it's been in dayton detroit milwaukee chicago lexington lewisville connecticut cleveland indianapolis georgia it's been in saint louis memphis nashville a lot of kids aren't exposed to going to all these different cities when they're young i was grateful for the exposure i guess the reunion plays a couple of roles one one it brings everybody together um and then they're planned social events where you have discourse you have a formal dinner dance you have a speaker who's usually astute and eloquent and articulate who can who can bring you a message a message that's based on our upbringing and relevant to today's life and it entails a lot of work but it also brings in a lot of revenue to these cities that we go into they have fun and they enjoy the cities and they spend their hard-earned hard-earned money when i tell people you know friends that hey yeah i'm going to this reunion this been 49 years they're in awe but the one thing i think that's important there's a transition coming and somehow we have to entice the younger generation to get more involved so they can carry this legacy on i could see us dying out if we don't get our kids our grandkids into the reunions we got to pull them in but we've got to pull them in letting them do their thing i can speculate that this is one of the longest standing african-american organizations that's just solely based on social purposes that has gone on for 50 years nearly that is a huge accomplishment but it also has a life course and we're at the tail end of that what i hope is that folks who are in the next generation step up and take leadership roles in the organization that we bring our ideas and really invest ourselves in carrying the mantle and i like to see that for our pass on because that's what it's all about that's what god put us here to work together as one the young people got a new way of doing this and we need to get them involved and let them pick up the torch and go ahead on with it i come back here every memorial day it's my fix that i get that that gets me ready to go go the rest of the year because i get here and i spend so much time with my friends and see people [Music] i was experiencing lynch post high school for about three years and i say that to say this so i kind of witnessed and i'm not just me singly but i i sort of witnessed some of the destination that occurred in lynch over time and i remember when we got into the seemingly in the 1970s and so forth people were not coming home any longer for christmas home itself now it's hard to visualize the way it was because the way things has deteriorated over the years the homes some burned torn down et cetera so it's a little bit different now than it was even 15-20 years ago there have been a history with the building here this was the old black school and my uncle sylvester baskin actually went to a u.s still came from saint louis and him and i went to a meeting and actually purchased the building for one dollar so that's how we got this building and it's the only eksc building we we own the eastern kentucky social club has just kept our history alive and you know any unit that loses his history that's catastrophic i think that was key for me as a young kid that my parents their stories they they love the area they always share the history with us like my daughter i share with her now she knows what lynch is she knows the community even though she hasn't been there she wrote a poem and she said you know i'm a descendant of lynch just because it's something that's important to us we plan on continuing on with the heritage and the traditions of eastern kentucky even though we don't live there is very much alive in our hearts [Music] the eastern kentucky social club was made possible through the support of open society foundations and by viewers like you thank you

Channel: Black in Appalachia

Views: 718,335

Keywords: black in Appalachia, African american history, black history, east tennessee pbs, etpbs, Eastern Kentucky, Letcher County, Whitesburg, Blacks in Appalachia, Dr. William Turner, William H. Turner, Harlan County, Southeast Kentucky, coalfields, Great Migration, Dr. Karida Brown, Eastern Kentucky Social Club, EKSC, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, William Isom II

Id: DCanT3QcDS4

Length: 54min 29sec (3269 seconds)

Published: Sun May 03 2020