CRITTENDEN, Ky. (ABP) — A Kentucky woman simply struck by a passion presided over the grand opening of a museum dedicated to the history of African-Americans in Kentucky June 18.
Connie Taylor grew up in Grant County and never noticed a black person, at least not that she remembers. Because today there is a black woman who says she played with Connie as a child, Taylor credits her parents’ teachings that everyone is the same to her own “failure” to recognize the color of her friends.
The new Grant County Black History Museum is housed in the restored Dry Ridge Consolidated Colored School in Crittenden, Ky. School restoration was completed as a project of the Northern Kentucky African-American Task Force.
Taylor grew up in the area but hadn’t lived there for decades. When she learned of the restoration she was inspired to create a museum. She is a genealogy enthusiast and while researching the history of a black friend in Cincinnati she wondered why there were no blacks in Grant County, which had a strong slave presence at one time.
She discovered that most left for jobs in the north in the early 20th century. They were not fleeing harsh treatment because Grant County employed a “gentler slavery” she said, fully aware of the oxymoronic term.
For her part, Taylor left Grant County as a young adult. Despite an early divorce she later sought ministry training at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., believing her life experience qualified her as a minister to singles.
After hearing a special guest “talk about what it was like to be a female working in a church setting” Taylor was convinced either she or the Lord “must be confused.”
Instead, she entered ministry in the marketplace. She left a “cushy job” in nursing after mission trips to Brazil left her feeling her priorities were mixed up and she headed for the Navajo Indian reservation in Arizona.
There she spent two decades directing nursing at the hospital and consulting in health management. She moved back to Grant County last summer, breaking a childhood vow never to return.
And now she has a museum.
Her genealogy research ignited a passion in her to discover the history of blacks in Grant County. She found Della Jones, who lived all her 106 years in the area and remembered many names Taylor was able to discover, and could clearly reconstruct relationships.
She was a double amputee and Taylor fed her each night after spending her days researching, finding pictures, letters and memorabilia. Della would fill her in on the details of anything she learned.
To a historian’s delight, Della was a hoarder who “had an amazing amount of stuff.” Many pictures were not identified, but Taylor found a 99-year-old woman in Dayton who could put names to many of them.
Della was the last black Taylor found who actually grew up in Grant County.
The local sheriff had inmates help carry a 300-pound chalkboard into the school and museum for Taylor. He also had them refinish furniture, sand the floors, rebuild steps and paint.
“They were very talented folks,” said Taylor, 62. “When I asked them what in the world are ya’ll doing in jail, they said they made a mistake. I said, ‘Don’t do it again.’”
But the result is “a museum that is going to be much nicer than I ever thought it could be,” she said. She intends to form a non-profit to fund the museum’s maintenance.
She documents a “polite racism” in Grant County. Blacks worked in white homes and ate lunch with the family they worked for, and “afterwards they’d go their separate ways.”
Through generations of unwritten rules of conduct “They were in their place, but they didn’t know it, so it didn’t matter.”
After Taylor started her research and discovered the “wealth of black history” in Grant County, where today there are virtually no blacks, “I felt if I didn’t tell the story it was going to get lost and I just didn’t want that to happen.”
Except for brief stints, she hadn’t lived in Grant County since she left in 1967, but “then I got this passion,” she said. “If you get the passion the good Lord provides you what you need.”
She was raised Baptist and her life on the reservation and now recording the history of slaves in her home county is part of her marketplace ministry. “It’s called doing your mission; holding up all of God’s children,” she said.
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Norman Jameson is reporting and coordinating special projects for ABP on an interim basis. He is former editor of the North Carolina Biblical Recorder.