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...