Alice Rogers

Director of Public Relations & Marketing

(502) 564-1792 x 4476

The Kentucky Historical Society plans to launch its new Civil Rights Oral History Project website on January 12, 2005 in time for Martin Luther King Day observances and Black History Month in February. 

The new site features Kentuckians sharing their personal experiences with the Civil Rights Movement in their own words. Access to over 300 hours of audio content, 18 hours of video content, and over 10,000 pages of electronic oral history transcriptions is provided on the site. All material will be full-text searchable.  In addition, the site will sort the audio, video, and transcripts by county, by subject, and by decade allowing the user to search or browse the site based on his/her interests.

The Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky has been a focus of a continuing oral history project, launched in 1998 by the Kentucky Historical Society’s Oral History Commission. More than The new website fulfills the oral history commission’s goal to make these resources broadly available to Kentucky schools and the general public.

“This is a milestone for us in presenting these compelling, informative, first-hand accounts of this aspect of Kentucky history,” notes Kim Smith, director of KHS’s Oral History Commission. “For instance, more than 18 hours of video footage was shot for a video, Living the Story: The Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky. With the launch of the website, all the broadcast-quality video footage shot for the documentary are now available to the general public.”

The website is in its final stages of testing and preparation now. The address for the site will be published on the Kentucky Historical Society’s website at http://history.ky.gov by January 12. For more information, contact Dr. Doug Boyd, oral history program manager, at 502-564-1792 or email at Doug.Boyd@ky.gov.                                                     

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The Kentucky Historical Society is an agency of the Kentucky Commerce Cabinet.