Digital Access Project is a partnership between many organizations and individuals, including Shea Brown, Meredith Watson, Vanessa M. Holden, Anastasia Curwood, Kathy Newfont and DeBraun Thomas, pictured left to right above. Photo by Honeysage Photo Co.
Kentucky’s history through the end of the Civil War is a story of contradictions. While remaining a part of the Union, Kentucky was home to many enslaved and emancipated people. Because the state did not secede, the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply, and enslavement did not officially end in the commonwealth until the 13th Amendment was ratified in December 1865 nearly three years after Lincoln signed the document on January 1, 1863.
Because of its unique position — both geographically and politically — Kentucky played an important role in the growth of the nation, as well as in the field of Black studies. Today, an increasing number of initiatives and programs are working to support new research in that field and make information accessible to a wider audience than ever before.
The Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies (CIBS) at the University of Kentucky came into being in 2020, as the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor became part of a national conversation at the height of the global pandemic. But its roots within the university had been established well before.
“We already had an idea in the existing African American and Africana studies program that we wanted to build a more robust research component,” explained Dr. Anastasia Curwood, professor of history and director of UK’s CIBS. “We’re all world-class researchers, and we wanted to reach out with our research.”
During this time of increased national attention on racial justice, the university’s increased commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion created an opportunity.
“It built our momentum, and so we really pushed to establish and fund CIBS as the research and outreach arm of African American studies,” said Curwood.
“We originally conceived of having work groups while also supporting individual faculty and providing what we call high-impact practices for students, where they do hands-on, individualized work,” Curwood continued.
The organizations working together to power the Digital Access Project include the Fayette County Clerk’s office, the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies, Lexington Black Prosperity Initiaive, the Blue Grass Community Foundation and others. Photo by Honeysage Photo Co.
The first work group to emerge from CIBS was the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative, which is directed by Dr. Vanessa Holden.
“Kentucky is such a critical state in American history,” said Dr. Holden, who also serves as an associate professor of history and African American and Africana studies at the university. “It’s the first [state] added to the union after the original 13, and it’s the place where westward expansion was tried out for the first time. It’s literally in the middle of early American history — geographically in the middle and also in the middle of U.S. politics and policy making.”
One of the first projects from the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative to reach a milestone is the Digital Access Project, a partnership between CIBS and the Fayette County Clerk focusing on digitizing local records related to African American history, including records pertaining to enslaved people, which was previously available to the public on a limited basis. The project celebrated the launch of its first phase on November 14.
“All county clerk’s offices in Kentucky are mandated by law to digitize all of their paper records,” Holden explained. “The logical thing to do is to work backwards, as more recent documents are the ones that lawyers, real estate agents, and contemporary people need fastest. Of course, the documents we’re most interested in start from the beginning and move forward.”
While many historic records, particularly those relating to enslaved people, have been tossed out or lost to fire, flood and the passage of time, Kentucky is unique in the amount of information that survives, because the state “didn’t secede [so] our courthouses weren’t burned to the ground,” Holden said.
“More counties have complete sets of records that go back to the late 18th century,” she added. “The Fayette County Clerk’s office had a really outstanding collection that dates back to the 1780s.”
While the Fayette County Clerk’s collection of documents has been well preserved and kept, they are largely located in giant books, which makes it difficult to get a photograph of the entire page.
“It takes training and developing skills over time to negotiate the physical documents themselves,” said Holden.
To that end, thanks to funding provided by the Blue Grass Community Foundation’s Knight Foundation Donor Advised Charitable Fund, the UK Office of Community Engagement, and the Lexington Black Prosperity Initiative — a Black-led funding initiative focused exclusively on Lexington’s Black community — the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative was able to hire and train digitization specialists to do this delicate work. The specialists worked full-time in teams of two from May 2022 to August 2023 on the project, with the result that more than 77,000 pages have been made accessible, ranging from the late 1700s through 1865.
Holden said that the next step of the project is to move forward in time. “We will move past 1865 and meet up with the clerk’s office, probably somewhere in the nineteen-teens,” she said. “I’m very proud of the end of this first phase but we’ve got more work to do.
“We’re also doing some of the work for surrounding counties because those counties were once part of Fayette County,” she said, adding that one important tenet of the project is that they digitize the entire record books.
“We don’t pick and choose documents because we believe that we need the full picture. This project serves the whole commonwealth.”
While the documents will certainly serve researchers, another audience served will be genealogists from all over the country, particularly those who are descendants of enslaved people for whom access to genealogical information has previously been limited.
“Because of a bunch of different migrations, whether forced through sale, through the removal of indigenous peoples, or for folks who at various times left for work in other places, many Americans can trace their family history back to Kentucky,” said Holden.
Dr. Vanessa Holden, co-director of the Digital Access Project, shared info about the initiative at a recognition reception for the project that took place at Limestone Hall in November. Photo by Honeysage Photo Co.
In addition to the Digital Access Project, the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative supports a number of other projects.
Curwood said, “We have a group that’s documenting racial violence in Kentucky, working with the law school to solve cold cases of racially-motivated murders. Some of those folks are
writing biographies of the victims, filling out their lives as individuals with families, jobs, likes and dislikes. The worst thing that happened to them isn’t their whole story.”
She continued, “We’ve got people using AI to mine the oral histories, from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We have people creating digital projects on Black girls in the 19th century and the present. The projects are spread out, we say, from Appalachia to Zimbabwe, from antiquity to the present and into the future. It’s everything that has to do with Black people’s experiences and perspectives.”
Other projects include a partnership with university librarians to find and make available runaway slave ads from historic newspapers, as well as a partnership with a faculty member who is a fiber artist to explore Black contributions to fiber art. More Kentucky-centric research includes Curwood’s personal interest in the influence of Black people on the horse industry, while Holden is exploring the history of Black people in the bourbon industry.
For those who want to support the work of the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies and the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative, funding is always needed to move projects forward.
Holden said, “One important way to support us is to come to the programming that we put on. Almost everything we do is open to the public and we want folks to come and engage with us.”
Of the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies, Curwood said, “My big goal is for us to be the top center for Black studies nationwide. The University of Kentucky has the top group of internationally known scholars in Black studies of any SEC school, and we also have the most robust research support.”
Holden agreed, and of the Digital Access Project said, “It’s a really good example of the way that Black studies is for everybody. It’s the best of what a university and public partnership can be.”
The records that have been digitized as part of this project are available to peruse under the “Digital Access Project” headline under the Land Records tab on the Fayette County Clerk website, fayettecountyclerk.com.
Fayette County Clerk special projects deputy clerk Shea Brown and University of Kentucky’s Dr. Vanessa Holden are co-directors of the Digital Access Project. Photo furnished