Been Coming Through Some Hard Times: Race, History, and Memory in Western Kentucky by Jack Glazier (review)

In Been Coming Through Some Hard Times: Race, History, and Memory in Western Kentucky, anthropologist Jack Glazier examines race relations between African American and white residents in Hopkinsville and Christian County, Kentucky, roughly between 1856 and 2005. He argues that segregated historical memory has emerged from racially distinct social worlds and spatial worlds. This separation, and the historical domination of whites in determining who is included in a usable past, is as significant to shaping racial politics as other aspects of black struggle, such as voting rights. Moreover, the particular ways in which race and memory have interacted are shaped by both place and time. Glazier combines methodologies of history and anthropology to examine an Upper South community and to reveal “the ways in which the past bears on a racially divided communal present; and the manner in which the present is projected backward by racially segmented historical memories” (4).

The six chapters in this book are roughly chronological. In keeping with his emphasis on place, Glazier begins by providing an overview of the social and political economy of the town of Hopkinsville and the surrounding county. This area culturally and economically resembled the Deep South more than other parts of the Upper South because it had a large enslaved population that labored to produce tobacco on large plantations. The author subsequently brings to life distinctly black and white worldviews during several historical periods and analyzes the effects of divided memory on contemporary politics.

Using the diary of a Hopkinsville slave owner, Glazier deftly illustrates white racial ideologies underpinning the slavery in Western Kentucky and the unraveling of whites’ confidence in the loyalty of their slaves when they were confronted with rumors of an imagined slave insurrection, as well as the very real rebellion of slaves fleeing to join the Union army. White paternalism and Christian mission led some owners to offer freedom to individual slaves, if they were willing to go to Liberia. In later years, whites interpreted these actions as evidence that, in Kentucky, slavery was milder than in other parts of the South. The experiences of black missionaries to Liberia revealed, however, that theirs was a “contingent freedom” and a form of exile (60).

Glazier provides valuable insight into post–Civil War conditions in an Upper South state when he describes the challenges African Americans experienced as they tried to forge community institutions. African Americans received some assistance from the Freedmen’s Bureau, but without a federal military presence, Bureau officials had little power against white backlash. As in other Border states, many white Kentuckians, including slave owners, had joined the Union Army but sympathized with the Confederacy. After the war, white “Regulators” terrorized African Americans, but black communities pushed forward, using their own limited resources to further educational goals. By the early twentieth century, whites had institutionalized Jim Crow in Christian County, and African Americans began leaving for northern cities. Glazier argues that during this period, African Americans developed a strong race consciousness and followed Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist approach to race relations.

The final chapters draw upon oral histories and ethnographic research to illuminate how historical segregation, including segregated community memories, have shaped contemporary racial politics in the Hopkinsville area. White “romantic nostalgia for imagined antebellum monoculture of universal Christian faith, contented slaves, and manly honor” are manifested in confederate and other public monuments, which exclude black memories of the past (174). African Americans keep their individual and collective memories alive through family and church reunions, where families testify to struggle and progress. Racially-defined community memories have collided, however, over street-naming, city redevelopment, mayoral politics, and other issues. Glazier argues that while there has been progress in race relations from a cultural standpoint, there are still significant social and economic inequities. One way to begin to change these conditions is to forge “highly segmented” memories into a “shared past” (213–14...