There’s no sidestepping it—Kentucky was a slave state. And Northern Kentucky was no exception; the institution of human property was active locally in the Antebellum period, and yet the region’s proximity to the Ohio River, which separated slave states from non-slave states, made it an important stop on the Underground Railroad.
With Juneteenth today, let’s explore some of the stories and the people working to preserve them in the region.
“We had enslavers here before the county was even established,” said Hillary Delaney, research specialist at the Archive and History Center at Boone County Public Library.
Delaney is one of the researchers behind a massive database administered by the library called African Americans of the Kentucky Borderlands, which collects historical documents and other sources about the Underground Railroad in Boone County, as well as the individual stories of escapees fleeing northward to freedom.
Delaney’s research began after a community member inquired about a famous crossing of the Ohio River from Northern Kentucky in 1853. A group of enslaved individuals crossed the river near Petersburg and made their way toward Cincinnati. This group would later be dubbed the Cincinnati 28.
Although Ohio was not a slave state, it still had a so-called Black Code, a set of legal strictures that curtailed the rights of Black Americans. Plus, the group’s size made them conspicuous. With the help of some allies in Cincinnati, the group staged a mock funeral procession, which allowed them to move through the city streets to a safe haven in College Hill.
The project’s research has been going on for about 13 years, Delaney said. The program does a bus tour of historic sites in the county every September, and the project has teased out information about the lives of both individual escapees and enslavers in the county. It also houses interactive online exhibits where people can freely peruse historical documents and images.
The Cincinnati 28 story was unusual, said Dr. Eric Jackson, historian and Northern Kentucky University professor, because most escapees fled individually.
“They’re usually males between the age of 15 and 21,” Jackson said. “They’re running at certain times of the year, they’re living off the land.”
Jackson discussed the difficulties of studying the Underground Railroad and wrapping one’s head around the scope of it all.
“You’re talking [about] a secret organization…,” Jackson said. “You’re talking about a time period, particularly after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, where if you’re caught involved in those types of activities, you’re fined, you’re jailed or even killed. You’re violating the federal law, so you’re not actually advertising your engagement in that system.”
Still, Jackson and Delaney said, there are ways to get information about individual people, families and cases. Newspapers can sometimes be a good place to start, especially if they have interviews, but newspapers of the time weren’t always accurate. Tax records, census records, military records and court documents are other useful sources of information.
“Sometimes you just stumble across a gold mine of folks who have taken copious notes in their own private diaries, or they have personal papers; they just happen to have that material,” Jackson said. “Then you could use triangulating that with local newspapers that advertise African-Americans who are running away and try to use that as descriptors to see if that matches folks who are in these other documents.”
Delaney shared some documents related to a free man named Joe Kite. Like many freed people, Joe had taken the surname of his former master. Kite was a slave in multiple states, including in Kentucky. A newspaper called Cincinnati Commercial interviewed him in 1875, where he recounted the story of his life, including how he sued for the freedom of his sister, her children, his grandfather and aunt and won.
The article spells Kite’s name wrong, with a Y, as evidenced by Kite’s freedom papers, which has the spelling of his former master George Kite spelled with an I, illustrating some of the difficulties of working with historical documents.
You can read the full interview here.
“You’re talking about ordinary people doing extraordinary things because they chose to do it,” Jackson said. “They’re not trying to make a boatload of money, they’re not trying to be famous, they’re not trying to necessarily change society, they’re just trying to do the right thing. Because if you actually believe in the Declaration of Independence or the concepts of liberty, equality and justice, you’re actually trying to figure out a way to make that a reality.”
Explore the African Americans of the Kentucky Borderlands database here.
