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One of the most painful chapters of Kentucky’s story – the history of racialized slavery – will be memorialized later this month on Juneteenth in a national celebration of the centuries-long struggle that led to its abolition.
As we contend with our collective past, UK Libraries has an important role to play. With extensive primary source documents and a wide range of resources, we serve as a gateway into the study of the lived experiences and histories of enslaved people in Kentucky, their emancipation, and the Black experience across the 160 years that have followed.
Our collections are a record of the violence and brutality of our Commonwealth’s story, yes – but even more so the courage, hope, and strength that have marked the ongoing fight for equality and freedom.
Researchers who want to explore Kentucky’s history of racialized slavery should begin with Researching African American Slavery in Kentucky, a research guide curated by Special Collections Librarian Reinette Jones.
The archive of slavery is a complex one, and the guide provides pointers on the kinds of information most readily available, and some of the challenges researchers face while using them. It also offers guidance on how to work with a wide variety of these sources, from county birth and census records to newspapers, government sources, and the trove of public documents available through county clerks’ offices, including tax records, property deeds, and the record books, certificates, and registries that documented the sale of enslaved people.
The guide is particularly useful for those seeking records and documentation of the lives of enslaved people, the lives of formerly enslaved people after emancipation or freedom gained by other means, and the financial aspects of slave ownership.
A partnership between UK Libraries, the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies (CIBS), and several UK faculty, the Self-Emancipated & Enslaved People in Kentucky (SEEK) Project has spent several years collecting fugitive slave advertisements from historical Kentucky newspapers.
Led by Associate Professor of History and African American & Africana Studies Dr. Vanessa Holden, Special Collections Librarian Reinette Jones, Historic Newspapers Curator Kopana Terry, and former UK Librarian Jen Bartlett, the team has developed a student-focused workflow that has resulted in the clipping and collection of close to 3,000 advertisements.
The ads have come primarily from the Lexington-based Kentucky Gazette, the state’s oldest newspaper, with others from Richmond, Kentucky’s Farmer’s Chronicle and the Louisville Daily Journal. The team plans to collect all ads from existing Gazette issues, then turn their attention to smaller titles in the hopes of creating as exhaustive a record as possible of all fugitive slave ads published in Kentucky.
“These ads allow people to learn about slavery through Black resistance, which is a different entry point into the subject than usual,” said Holden. “The ads are typically only five to eight lines long, so you don't get the beginning or the end of the story, but you do get the middle. The archive of slavery so often reifies the violence it describes, but this project allows us to foreground the humanity and the agency of self-emancipated people.”
The SEEK Project plans to launch its own website in the Spring of 2027 with a user-friendly interface that allows researchers to explore the individual stories that made up the large-scale movement of fugitive slaves seeking freedom in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Each advertisement will link back to the original newspaper issue, allowing an expanded view of the ad’s source and context.
The SEEK Project plans to share its data with Freedom on the Move, a national project based at Cornell University. “There are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of these ads,” said Holden. “As we continue to collect more, we’ll be able to make incredible connections at a national scale and really see the volume of people who were engaged in fleeing slavery.”
The research team has honed their process since the group first formed in the Fall of 2022. The work of finding and clipping ads has primarily been done by undergraduate students. “Exploring the archive is a very different experience from hearing a lecture in the classroom, and it’s been incredibly meaningful to students,” said Holden. “One student approached me and said, ‘If this is Kentucky’s history, that means it’s mine too.’ We’ve been able to have thoughtful, careful conversations about what this archive reveals, and we’re looking forward to the ways these conversations will expand once the collection becomes public.”
“Faculty very frequently utilize library services in their research, but it has been a pleasure to work with librarians as true partners and collaborators,” she added. “With their expertise in data management, they’re able to build systems that allow others to also find and explore all of these materials that we’ve worked to uncover. I can’t imagine conducting this project with any other research partners.”
The SEEK team is also exploring meaningful ways to connect their findings with the Digital Access Project (DAP). A partnership between the CIBS, the Lexington Black Prosperity Initiative, and the Fayette County Clerk's Office, DAP allows researchers to digitally access nearly a quarter million records from the late 18th century to 1865 that are held by the County Clerk’s Office, including deeds, mortgage records, and a variety of probate records that contain information about enslaved people.
First launched in 2003, the Notable Kentucky African Americans (NKAA) Database contains over 3,300 entries about people, places, events, and communities pertaining to African Americans in and from Kentucky, making it the pre-eminent resource for information on the Black experience in the state. Entries span centuries, from enslavement and emancipation to Jim Crow and Civil Rights and into the present day.
Entries are organized by over 400 subject headings and over 1,100 places. They are built from over 4,600 sources which are linked in each entry and also browsable by users.
The NKAA database was co-created by Reinette Jones and former UK Librarian Rob Aken and is utilized by more than 200,000 users each year.
The Researching African American Slavery in Kentucky and Researching African American Slavery in U.S. History guides contain an exhaustive list of the many resources available to UK Libraries users and the public for exploring the Black experience, both prior to and following emancipation, in Kentucky and across the country.
Two other Kentucky-based resources may provide users with a useful starting point in their research:
