William G. Kenton, House Speaker

Maysville, KY

Born into slavery in Bourbon County and raised at the "Glen Alice" farm near Maysville, Elisha Green purchased freedom for himself and part of his family and became an influential Baptist minister. He helped organize African American Baptist churches in Maysville and Paris and, believing freedpeople needed land, joined a white landowner to found a Black community near Paris. Politically active, he was chosen a vice president of the Kentucky Negro Republican Party at an 1867 Lexington convention and remained a force in Baptist life until his death in 1889.

New Richmond, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, the Ohio River town of New Richmond became a hotbed of antislavery conviction, its citizens sheltering freedom-seekers along the Underground Railroad just across the water from slaveholding Kentucky. In 1836 the abolitionist James G. Birney chose the town as the launching point for The Philanthropist, one of the era's boldest antislavery newspapers, before moving its publication to Cincinnati. That such radical work could take root here reflects how small river communities, emboldened by Quaker and evangelical reformers, turned the borderland into a front line of the fight against slavery.

Cincinnati, OH

In the Walnut Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati, the Manse Hotel opened in 1931 to welcome Black travelers who were turned away from white-only establishments across a segregated America. Its founder, Horace Sudduth, had risen from Pullman porter to become one of the city's leading Black entrepreneurs, and his hotel became a hub of social life, gatherings, and dignity at a time when a night's lodging could not be taken for granted. Listed in the Negro Motorist Green Book, the Manse was part of the nationwide network that made safe travel possible for African Americans during the Jim Crow era.

Lexington, KY

On Lexington's public square, the Cheapside Auction Block was the site where thousands of enslaved African Americans were bought and sold in the nineteenth century, including children torn from their parents. By the late 1840s Lexington had become the center of Kentucky's slave trade and a market feeding the brutal export of people farther south. Nearby stood a whipping post, established in 1847, in a county where by 1860 one in four Lexington residents was enslaved.