The Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project is committed to discovering, honoring, and telling factual stories about people who lived and worked in this state who also gave a public account of their Christian faith. Researching the stories of women and minorities from the past is frequently more difficult than researching what happened to men from the majority culture. Many times their perspectives are missing from the standard historical narratives. Often, written accounts of their lives were neither created nor have they been preserved. Because of past gender, ethnic and racial biases, what is written is about them often disregards their own beliefs and opinions. To discover their stories takes tenacity and creativity as well as an ability to read between the lines. Take Martha Cross, for example. She, her husband, Alexander, and their seven-year-old son, James, left Hopkinsville, Kentucky, for Liberia in 1853. They were sent from the Ninth Street Christian Ch...

  The tenth president of Liberia was Alfred Francis Russell who was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1817. His father was his owner’s son. His mother was enslaved. This meant that Alfred, also, was enslaved from birth. In 1833, his mistress emancipated him so that he could join 200 other emancipated former slaves on the ship, Ajax, bound for Liberia. Russell was also a clergyman. He was an Episcopalian priest who had started his ministry as a Methodist minister. He was elected vice president of Liberia and assumed the office of president for one year, 1883-1884, after the elected president resigned. As president, he made a proclamation that combined his commitment to the native peoples of Liberia with his faith this way: “ Our aboriginal citizens…are important, nay indispensable, to us in building up this national fabric, and the redemption of land, so long under the dominion of the devil ” [1] . While the role of emancipated slaves from Kentucky in the formation of the nation o...

Christmas is a holiday rooted in the Christian tradition, so why is it a federal holiday? Ulysses S. Grant won the 1868 presidential election. He was inaugurated in 1869. The country was recovering from the Civil War. The president had a large challenge to reunite the nation. One tool that looked promising was to institute some federal holidays that everyone could celebrate together. Until this time, states designated their own holidays but it took an 1870 bill from Illinois Congressman Burton Chauncey Cook to name four new federal holidays. They were New Year’s Day, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. President Grant signed the bill into law on June 28, 1870, four days after it had passed the Senate. This law only applied to federal employees and financial institutions within the District of Columbia. Fifteen years later, the paid holidays were extended to federal employees throughout the country [1] . By 1916, the Christmas holiday was given to employees of the Unite...

It took until 1850 and Kentucky’s third state constitution for the Commonwealth to guarantee public education for its citizens. The 1891 constitution [1] is still in effect which mandates the legislature to provide a common fund to pay for a state-wide school system that does not discriminate by race or color. The constitution does not permit the fund to be used to support sectarian or denominational schools. Initially, the Kentucky legislators were apathetic to the idea of a state public school system and resistant to the thought that anyone should have to pay for the education of someone else’s child. For decades the legislature prioritized roads, bridges and railways over education. These have been characterized as “short-term” goals by historian, Frank Mathies, that were more certain to be rewarded with votes [2] . It took the combined lobbying of the Kentucky Education Society founded in 1827, the Kentucky Common School Society, founded in 1834, and the Kentucky Association of ...

  The oft quoted saying that history is written by the victors is sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill and sometimes to Machiavelli. It can be disputed and is losing its claim to accuracy in this post-colonial world in which increasingly all lives and voices, particularly black, brown and indigenous lives matter. Each week the Kentucky Faith and Public History Education Project features a famous Kentucky Christian on our Facebook page. We are intentionally researching and then portraying men and women from each race and ethnicity that has impacted the history of Kentucky with their lives who gave clear credit to their Christian faith for their achievements. It is significantly more difficult to find written records of Kentucky women than men. It is most difficult to find written records of Kentucky’s African American women. Effie Waller Smith is one such woman. Her story and her perspective on the early events of the twentieth century are woven through her poems. They are writ...