Louisville, where we introduce you to the people, places and things that make up Kentucky's largest city.

This week we explore black history in Louisville.

We start at Roots 101, Louisville's African American History Museum, which opened in 2020 and the very next year was named one of the best new attractions in the country by USA today founder and CEO Lamont Collins tells us about his passion project.

Then we sat down with Dan Gediman, co-founder and executive director of Reckoning, Inc.

a nonprofit organization focused on examining the legacy of slavery in America.

One of their latest projects includes museum exhibits about the role of black soldiers in the Civil War, currently on display at the Muhammad Ali Museum in Louisville, and soon to travel across the state.

We start at Roots 101.

[MUSIC] [MUSIC] Lamont.

Collins is the CEO and founder of Roots 101 African American History Museum.

Still a relatively new museum in Louisville, it was started in 2020.

So take me back to that.

That time in our a pivotal time in our city and in the country.

What made you want to start something like this here?

>> Well, I always felt that our story needed to be told.

It just happened to be when I started to tell the story.

Breonna Taylor was killed.

The city was under protest, and.

But it was a perfect time to do it.

You know, sometimes you have to sit back and allow God to give you a message on what to do.

And I've done several businesses, but this is the first time I've done something purpose driven.

So this is what makes this museum so vital at this time, because this is the time to continue to tell our story, because America's telling us we don't have a story.

>> Yeah.

And tell us to about your background.

You're from Louisville.

A lot of people might remember you played football at U of L, and what made you feel it so important for our city in particular to tell this story?

>> Well, like I said, I was born and raised here.

I've seen the history of Louisville, lived the history of Louisville.

I talked to dead people in the sense that I have so much remembrance about the the role models that were in this city.

Far as my experience at UofL, my career really is more so of a high school career than a college career.

When I got to college, I stayed injured pretty much every year, but I was vital because I was from Louisville.

I was Louisville boy.

I had respect as a player on the field, but never took a career as a UofL.

You know, that didn't happen in my career high school.

It was strong.

Like so many athletes, injury changes what we do, but it built who I was.

I was always involved on campus.

I won the Jerry Stringer Award, which was the award for the the most outstanding telecommunications student.

Jerry Stringer was a friend of Darrell Griffith when we won the national title and he was a communications student.

So when he passed away, they gave an award I, I got the first Jerry Stringer Award.

So UofL was a great experience.

I opened so many doors for me, and the same doors that opened then are the doors I have now from Barcelona.

>> Yeah.

So tell us about Roots 101.

For somebody who's never been there.

What what are they going to see?

What are they going to learn there?

>> I think Roots what makes Roots so vital is that you see America, you see the history of black people.

You see the resilience of black people.

You see the the contributions of black people.

That's what makes Roots so unique.

It's an emotional journey.

It's not a bunch of AI.

There's there's actual artifacts that you can pick up and feel at my museum.

Everybody can touch and feel everything that comes in the museum.

When you come in the museum, I have some shackles that more than 400 years old, shackles from Ghana.

Everybody puts those shackles on.

I mean, I put them on the most wealthiest woman in Louisville.

I put them on.

And the reason I do that, I want people to understand what we've been through.

And it's I had a lady come in.

The museum had 37 million views on YouTube.

It was a white lady that started to cry, and she cried from compassion of holding those chains, not from guilt of those chains, because the Roots we don't talk about guilt, we talk about the greatest part of America is when black people and white people came together.

That's what made America the beacon in the Hill.

It was not that it was separated.

It's that it was growing together on the history of what it was.

I think that's what makes Roots so unique.

When you come out of that museum, you feel everything in that walk, but when it's over, you feel like there is an opportunity, that there's greater allies together than we are apart.

And that's what I would say.

We're better together.

And I think that's what Roots tells that story of how black history is American history, and American history is the history of all of us.

And that's what we do.

>> Yeah.

And it's so important to for young people today to understand and learn about that history.

I know you all do a lot of education outreach.

Tell me about that.

>> Well, yeah, it's so important for young people because, you know, if you don't know the history of where you're going, you don't know where you've been.

Right?

So a unique time like this, the same things that I heard my grandfather and grandmother talk about at the kitchen table are the same things I'm talking to my grandchildren.

The only thing different than what I talk about from what they could talk about, is I did see a black president in my time.

But when we saw that black president, now we see the residual fallback from people in America.

Some people in America feel like somehow they're losing something in the process of black progress.

So Roots brings all that to the table.

I mean, there's no way that people leave out of Roots and don't feel different than they come in Roots because it's not about alienation, it's about coming together.

And we can't allow people to tell that story as if it can't be told without telling the truth of the story.

>> What do you what do you want people to feel as they leave Roots 101.

>> I want people to understand the importance of, of of of respecting each other's journey.

The, the, the, the, the feeling of understanding again that we're so much more than just color in this country.

We're color has been part of what we do.

But when people run away from color, then they run away from the history of who they are.

And it's what I mean.

In school, we all learn color.

We all learn red, blue, green.

That's the first thing we learn is color.

And for people to say we don't see color, it's just oxymoron.

We see it.

The question is, do we see the character of the color that we see?

So I deal with the issue of let's just deal with the issue.

And if education has told us that's the story, then what do we do with that story?

What we do with the facts?

Okay, we look different, but are we different?

And if we are different, why are we different?

What is the the what is the common thread that makes us together than separate?

>> Right.

We're similar than than different.

Going back to your sports background, the Kentucky Black Sports Hall of Fame is going to relocate to Roots 101 this year.

That's it.

Tell me about that.

>> Well, as we expand the building, you gotta remember we still don't have ownership of the building.

So we're taking pieces and leasing and moving moving on.

And still that's an issue that we have to deal with down the road because, you know, it's always better to own a place than use a space.

Right.

And the black community will always have spaces but not places.

So my whole thing has been trying to create a place, you know, we have museums and, you know, I love all museums, have all the relationships with all the museums.

But when a museum has 30,000ft S and they put a 1500 square foot black exhibit in for the month of February, we still have issues, right?

And we can't allow people to say, okay, we've covered that history in 1500 square feet, and we covered it because it's February.

That is an injustice to black people, right?

And that's something we have to talk about as black people, but also something that that white America needs to talk about.

You're not telling my story when you take 1500 square foot and put it in place of a 30,000 square foot building, and I'm supposed to feel great about it?

Plus, you may have more of my history than what I have, and it's sitting in your basement.

But if you truly cared about our community, how can I share that information with Roots 101?

How can I share that information that we all, instead of holding that information and making it just a space instead of making a place?

And I think that's what the beauty of what we're trying to do is make it a serious place not to be.

There's an African proverb that says the greatest King plant shade trees he'll never set up under.

See, I'm planting a shade tree that all kids can sit up under.

All kids can say to the education shade tree of history, a shade tree of healing, a shade tree of love.

That's what it's about, you know?

And that's what roots is about.

>> And on the note of funding and creating a space, I know that you all have been outspoken about the fact that you all received no funding from the city, and a lot of other museums in the city do.

Why is that?

>> Well, I can't answer the question why?

But I can answer the question.

It doesn't happen, right?

I think the why is why doesn't happen.

Other museums do get funding.

I mean, in six years, just the number of people coming through our doors.

Fantastic, right?

If you talk about the national attention, it's fantastic.

If you talk about the support for not just the government.

I don't have banks knocking at my door asking, how can we help Roots?

I don't have investors.

One of my best friends, I won't say his name's a big realtor and big investor, and the first thing he tells me is Lamar museums don't make money.

Okay, I agree on that.

But the difference is they do live off endowments.

I could take a broom, a baseball and throw it through some of these museums right now, and nobody's inside of them.

But the endowments keep them going, right?

So what I need for people to understand, treat Roots the same way, endow some things with $5,000 the same way, and not try to say it doesn't make money, no museum makes money.

So that's not even a logical thing to say to me is hey, museums don't make money, so we don't invest in people, don't invest in museums.

They they don't donate to museums, they invest in museums.

And I need people to invest in what we're doing.

>> And is that how all of your funding comes.

>> Right now?

My funding comes from people that are invested, people that I say are invested, people that want to believe there's a difference and they're difference makers, and those are people that normally invest in museums or normally invest in that type of thing that we do.

But people that look at it as just a business model was just a excuse not to give, because it's not a business.

I mean, we run it like a business as a nonprofit, but museums are not.

I mean, you go to Owsley Center anywhere else, they need money to operate, and we're no different.

>> There is maybe not a monetary return on investment, but there is a community return on investment.

Explain what that is.

>> Oh, the return on investment.

If I use history as an example, when a kid knows his history, he walks differently.

He talks different because he knows what's inside of him.

The greatest thing about the Jewish community is they teach their kids their history.

From the time they're 13 years old.

They learn their history, they go to Hebrew school.

They're told that they're survivors from the Holocaust, survivors from biblical times, and they're told they can make it.

And then at 13 years old, they're told a way to put away, told to put away childish things and still working to become a man or a woman.

Our community doesn't have that opportunity.

First, we tell our kids they have no history, but if kids had their history where they walk different, where they talk different, would they be different?

And they would say, there's no difference in our community, any other community.

Our history matters.

>> Well, thank you so much for sharing your story with us.

And coming up, the nonprofit organization reckoning, Inc.

created an exhibit about black Civil War soldiers that was on display at Roots 101, and now a similar version is on exhibit at the Muhammad Ali Center.

We're going to have more on that when we sit down with Dan Gediman.

[MUSIC] Dan Gediman is the co-founder and executive director of Reckoning, Inc.

and public radio and podcast host, as well for a series all of the same name, I'll examining the history and the impact of slavery in America in Kentucky really fascinating things.

Now, reckoning, Inc.

is a project nonprofit that started in 2019.

So take us back to that time and why that was important to start this.

>> Sure.

So I'm a transplanted Kentuckian.

I originally grew up in Massachusetts, and in the whole time I'd lived here, I came here to work in public radio in 1984.

I never really heard anybody talk about slavery and that there had been slavery in Kentucky.

I didn't know it had even existed here.

I just assumed, since it was a Union state in the Civil War, that slavery had been abolished here.

That was not in even vaguely true.

Right?

As a matter of fact, slavery did not officially end until the passage of the 13th Amendment in December of 1865, and Kentucky was one of two states that didn't ratify the 13th amendment.

So.

So slavery died hard in Kentucky, really hard.

And and the country was incredibly divided over the issue of slavery all through the night, really from the from the beginning of the state, from the first constitutional convention in 1792.

There has been tremendous there was tremendous controversy over slavery.

What should be done about it?

Should it happen here in Kentucky?

Should it not?

Should it be abolished, etc.

And it got revisited again when the Constitution was changed in 1850.

So it's been this ongoing it was this ongoing issue in Kentucky, and I didn't know any of this history.

And interestingly, I got a Kindle as a gift, and I looked at old books that were available for free, and one of which was Uncle Tom's Cabin.

And the very first page, very first paragraph, is a negotiation between a slave trader and a slave owner in Kentucky over the sale of uncle Tom.

And this blew my mind, the whole idea that there had been a a market for slaves in Louisville right here.

>> Particularly because of our location on.

>> The river, but also in Lexington and elsewhere in Kentucky, but especially in Louisville and Lexington.

So I became fascinated with that.

I wanted to know everything I could about that history, and I found that there really wasn't that much to, you know, in books to read.

So I had to go to primary sources and read newspaper articles and read, look through the, you know, the the classified ads in the Louisville newspaper.

And virtually every single day there were ads for slaves.

So that really was the impetus behind this organization.

And the first thing we did was a podcast series called The Reckoning, and it was all about the history of slavery, in particular in Kentucky.

And it really sort of told the story of slavery in America through the lens of what happened right here in Kentucky.

And in particular, that series focused on one family, the Bullitt family of Oxmoor Plantation and now Oxmoor Mall, that they had been one of the major slaveholding families in in Louisville and very involved politically in the state, etc.

And so we sort of looked at this through the lens of that white family and the black families that they enslaved.

And I found descendants of both families and interviewed them for the series.

So that was our first big venture.

And then when Covid hit, we kind of diverted, you know, we couldn't really keep doing what we were doing.

So we diverted in a different direction, which was into researching everything we could find out about enslaved people in Kentucky.

Who were they?

What were their names?

Who were they enslaved by?

What were their stories?

How were they related to one another?

And so one group that we focused on were African American Civil War soldiers, because there is so much paper, so much of a paper trail left behind by these soldiers, by virtue of the fact that they were mostly enslaved men who were joining the army.

So they left just this enormous paper trail.

And as I realized that, I thought, why don't we apply for some grants to just research those soldiers?

And we've been doing that for the past five, going on six years with something called the Kentucky Black Civil War Soldiers Project.

And through that, we have now identified, I think we're just shy of 25,000 soldiers who they were, who they were enslaved by, where they were born, and basically everything we can learn about them and then have created family trees for over a thousand of them, in particular soldiers who were enslaved here in the Louisville area.

>> Yeah, it's incredible because there's so, so little information about the ancestors of African Americans.

And so this is such a great way for those families to figure out exactly who their ancestors were.

>> And to our knowledge, we have accumulated more information about enslaved people in Kentucky than any other state in the country.

Wow.

And we are working actively with other states who are trying to do similar things to, to to learn as much as possible about the enslaved population of their state.

So, yeah, so that's and that in turn, has led to pretty much all the things we have done since then.

We just finished a project where we transcribed all the Catholic Church records of people who enslaved enslaved people in Kentucky and have published all of that online.

And then we are now involved with, if I may talk About it, a new podcast series which grew out of the research we did into this Bullitt family.

Okay.

And I found out that there was one member of the Bullitt family, Judge Joshua Bullitt, who was one of the eldest sons in that family who was arrested for treason right here in Louisville.

And it turned out he was the leader of a paramilitary organization called the Sons of Liberty in Kentucky that had 10,000 or so members.

They had arms and explosive caches in barns and attics all over Kentucky, and they were preparing an armed insurrection.

It was all going to happen on the same day in 1864, and they were going to overthrow the governments of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and I think also Missouri.

Install, take out the governors, take out the leaders of the legislature and install their own governments.

And then they were going to create a new country called the Northwest Confederacy that was going to secede from the Union, join up with the Southern Confederacy and end the Civil War, and essentially have three different countries the United States of America, the Northwest Confederacy, and the Confederate States of America, of America.

And the only reason we aren't currently living in the Northwest Confederacy is largely because of one man from Nelson County named Felix Stidger, who was a former Union soldier who volunteered to be a spy on this organization, the Sons of Liberty, and he embedded himself in this organization and became the number two man, the assistant to this judge, Joshua Bullitt.

And at the very last minute, right before they were going to pull the trigger on this armed insurrection, troops swooped in here in Louisville on Main Street where we are, and arrested this guy, Joshua Bullitt, who had on him the equivalent of $300,000 in today's money.

In a combination of a check, cash and gold bars that he was carrying in a satchel and was arrested for treason, sentenced to death, and then his his his sentence was commuted by Abraham Lincoln, personally lobbied by his attorney general, who was the first cousin of Joshua Bullitt.

>> Wow.

>> Okay.

And he basically said, hey, I can vouch for my cousin's integrity.

You should release him into, you know, essentially just just let him go.

And so he was exiled and he left the country and went to Canada and spent the rest of the war in Canada.

But the reason we don't live in the Northwest Confederacy today, and that the Civil War ended the way it did and not this other way, is largely because of this one man from Nelson County, Kentucky, named Felix Stidger.

And this is a story I never was taught in school.

I bet nobody here in Kentucky knows this.

Very few people in Kentucky outside of academia know this story.

And that's the story we're telling in our new project, which is called The Copperhead Conspiracy.

It's a podcast series.

It's out right now.

You can go on any of the podcast networks, Apple, YouTube, Spotify, etc.

just put in the Copperhead Conspiracy and you can learn all about this story.

>> Yeah, it's an incredible story.

And why don't more people know about this?

I guess just because it never came to fruition.

>> So actually there is a story behind that too.

So this was a story that everybody knew about in the 19th century.

It was widely written about when the fifth anniversary happened.

They wrote about it in various magazines and newspapers.

The 10th anniversary, the 20th anniversary, etc.

and then in the 1950s, there was a historian of the 19th century who basically said, you know what?

I think this is fake news.

I don't think this really was a big deal.

I think this is propaganda.

And we should ignore this.

This was just a disagreement among gentlemen about, you know, how US policy should be or should be run.

And that's all it was.

And so the next several generations of, of historians that came after him just said, you know what?

There's nothing to see here.

So it stopped showing up in history books.

>> Interesting.

>> But if you go back and look at history books that were used in the early 20th century, it's right there.

There's chapters.

>> About, wow.

>> There's entire books about it.

>> Incredible.

So in the podcast to you talk about how stories like these are so important, particularly because of the parallels we can see that are fairly obvious to some of the stories that we're seeing in real time today.

>> Yeah, there's a long history in America that goes all the way back to the American Revolution.

Well, literally to the American Revolution, where every, every generation or so in American history, there are groups of people, usually men, who feel strongly that the government isn't doing what they what it should be doing.

And they feel like because of what happened in the American Revolution, they have the right to take up arms against their own government.

Okay.

So this has happened throughout the early 19th century.

It happened around World War One.

It happened around World War Two.

It certainly happened during the Vietnam War.

And in the modern era.

We've seen it with the militia movement.

We've seen it with the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys and all these paramilitary organizations who believe that it is their right to take up arms against the government if they disagree with its policies.

So it's a long standing thread in American history that just happens in in the very recent past.

So we just hit the fifth anniversary of the January 6th insurrection, the most recent and dramatic example of how this can happen.

And by the way, almost the exact same thing that happened January 6th happened upon the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, when they were counting the votes from the Electoral College.

That year, armed insurrectionists came and tried to end that count, and it took the US Army coming in and putting down that insurrection.

So that's how much this history repeats itself to this day.

>> It's so important to to understand that, because it does give you a perspective on where we are today and for a new generation to learn these stories.

>> Right.

And Louisville, Kentucky was the epicenter or an epicenter of this story that almost changed history.

>> The exhibit on black soldiers in the Civil War will be traveling throughout the state this year, including at public libraries and Nelson, Harrison and Madison counties, as well as the SEEK Museum in Russellville.

The new Copperhead Conspiracy podcast is out now.

You can find out more about both of those organizations when you follow us on social media.

You can find us on Instagram at KETinLOU.

And don't forget, you can always watch and share this episode.

It's online at Keturah.

Louisville.

Thanks for taking time to learn a little something about Louisville.

I hope we'll see you here next time.

Until then, make it a great week!