From the Courier Journal, a "special" story written by Kentucky Supreme Court Justice Bill Cunningham:
Bill Cunningham | King's legacy: a personal reflection
Several years ago, on my birthday, a son asked me to recount the greatest changes in my lifetime.
Changes that I never expected to see.
The answer was easy. The end of the Cold War and civil rights.
I grew up in the segregation days of the Jim Crow South. Whites and blacks were segregated, always separate. Separate public rest rooms and water fountains, separate seating at public events. I remember the “Whites Only” signs, separate entrances, and separate seating. Mixed marriages were forbidden by law. A mixed couple suffered being ostracized, seen together at their own physical risk.
And we had separate schools. In old Eddyville, the blacks lived in a section of town called “Freewill,” its name derived from the days of emancipation when the slaves were at liberty to live where they chose of their own “free will.” The descendants of former slaves went to their own little shabby school up at the end of the hollow. There, they matriculated through the first eight grades. I remember seeing inside my own textbooks, issued by the County Board of Education, a stamp which allowed a check mark for either “white” or “colored.”
When my “colored” contemporaries finished the eighth grade, they faced a hard choice. They could quit school and go to work. Or if they wished to continue with their education — and few of them did —the Board of Education would send them to the Lincoln Institute near Louisville. They would be given a bus ticket to the big city in the fall and a return ticket home for Christmas. The school board also paid for their lodging there.
It is all true. Yet today it seems unreal — like something I dreamed. To my children, it is incomprehensible.
Of course, all that changed after Martin Luther King Jr., arrived on the scene and began his grand march for civil rights. A few years ago, as we commemorated Martin Luther King’s birthday, I went to Paducah to walk in the MLK March sponsored by the local NAACP. It was a cold, but brilliantly sunny day. We marched from the Cherry Civic Center to the cemetery and placed a wreath on a monument. There were over 100 people on that trek.
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