CORBIN, Ky. — Growing up in Appalachian Kentucky in the 1960s, Wayne Riley wasn't surprised that Black residents felt unwelcome to sit down at certain restaurants.
He didn't live far from Corbin, a town of 7,200 just a short drive from his farm.
Riley heard often about the October night in 1919, when a white mob rounded up hundreds of black residents at gunpoint and forced them out of town on rail cars.
“Corbin ended up with a bad name. A ‘sundown town,’” Riley said, a term for thousands of rural towns of the era where Blacks were excluded by law or intimidation. “I’m 67, and for 66 years I always heard about the riot.”
The shameful chapter cast a long shadow over Corbin, which city leaders have tried to shake for decades. Today the town is still nearly 98% white.
This summer, when Corbin and nearby London saw vigils and marches after the police shooting death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, it heartened advocates of the area's fledgling "Sunup Initiative," to help reckon with Corbin’s past, promote racial justice and build diversity.
Since then, they're also adding their voices to an emerging effort by activists to link the seemingly disparate social-justice interests of Appalachia’s working-class whites with the Black Lives Matter racial justice movement centered in cities.
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'South, North, white, Black, Brown, Latinos — everyone needs to get in this'
In “some of the far, far corners of Eastern Kentucky, you will find that there are people that are as underprivileged” and marginalized as some Black communities in cities, Riley said, including facing similar disparities from jobs, poverty and education. “They’re pushed to the back burner, too.”
Riley, who founded the Laurel County African American Heritage Center in nearby London, said the two could make powerful allies for social justice.
“How do we bring these people together — the black people, the white people, and make a better community of people?” he said.
He isn't alone. Recently, Charles Booker, a Black state representative from Louisville who narrowly lost a Democratic U.S. Senate primary to Amy McGrath, started an advocacy group “Hood to the Holler,” which also seeks, in part, to connect rural white and urban Black voters.
Booker has argued he sees similar strains — generational poverty, job declines, environmental disparities and political marginalization — in corners of Appalachia and in Louisville’s predominantly Black West End.
And separately, the Kentucky director of the advocacy group Southern Crossroads has seen its recent campaign slogan “Rednecks for Black Lives” urging Southern rural residents to support racial justice catch fire, drawing media attention and Facebook groups.
One of them was started by Campton, Kentucky resident Greg Reese, who only recently sported a Confederate flag magnet on his car, but whose Rednecks for Black Lives Facebook group has grown to more than 8,000 members.
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“You can sit back and say, you know, ‘Hey, this ain't my fight.’ And a lot of us did for a long time,” he told a radio station in July. “But I want to be one of those out there pulling people into it because it is their fight. It always has been our fight. South, North, white, Black, Brown, Latinos — everyone needs to get in this.”
Darell Jackson, 32, one of Corbin’s Black residents, said seeing white residents turn out for vigils to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and the police shootings was “a beautiful thing.” Many were young.
“A lot of young white people are coming out to say we don’t care what our forefathers were or what they believed. This is what we believe. And I think that’s where the change is going to come,” Riley said.
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Sam Upshaw Jr., Louisville Courier Journal
Lisa Garrison — a member of Sunup, whose partners include Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and the University of Kentucky Appalachian Center — said the effort also matters beyond the political because it can help draw more diverse residents and businesses to an area Black Kentuckians once avoided.
“Anything to attract more minorities is good,” said Nathaniel Doneghy, who was among the few Black demonstrators attending vigils in London and Corbin.
And not everyone in the area supports the Sunup Initiative.
During one public meeting held by the group, Garrison said, critics argued there was no need for the group’s efforts, denying racist attitudes still exist in Corbin.
Those arguments have been made before.
What happened on that night in 1919
In the early 1990s, a documentary about the riot, which featured interviews with residents who remembered it, sparked a backlash. In the film, one resident claimed 1919 newspaper accounts were untrue, and that a group of railroad workers were asked to leave for causing trouble. The Courier-Journal reported in 1990 that some residents also felt the film, which included residents making racist comments, exaggerated those attitudes.
"We're no more racist than anywhere else," then-Mayor Thomas Thurston said at the time.
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Elliot Jaspin, whose 2008 book, "Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America" featured Corbin, said in an interview that while that “alternative history” was passed down to help absolve the town, Corbin still became well known as one of the towns where Black residents were unwelcome.
It's still a sensitive subject to some. In 2019, Sunup dropped the term “racial justice” from an earlier name because it “makes folks uncomfortable,” a member told a local newspaper.
And while Corbin’s original Sanders Cafe, the first Kentucky Fried Chicken that draws visitors, the group’s efforts to place a historical marker near Corbin’s restored train depot memorializing the night in 1919 have been unsuccessful.
Why keep bringing it up, many argue. “There are so many people who say there’s no problem, there’s no racism here,” Garrison said.
Corbin was a new L&N railroad hub for Harlan County coal when its small African American population in 1919 grew from about 60 to several hundred to fill rail jobs during World War I, many migrating from the deep South.
The violence was part of the "Red Summer," when similar riots — mostly white violence and terrorism against Black residents — occurred in dozens of U.S. cities. Some historians have said it grew from an alleged mugging, quickly blamed on Black residents.
“On the evening of October 30th, 1919, an armed mob led by L&N brakeman “Pistol Pete” Rogers terrorized the town by rounding up between 200-300 African-American men, women, and children and forcibly removed them from town on rail cars headed for Knoxville, TN and Louisville,” Corbin’s website now acknowledges.
Many left behind homes, possessions and good-paying jobs. Whites broke up empty Black neighborhoods and erected a sign reading, "Don't be here when the sun goes down," the Courier-Journal reported in a 1995 story.
Lesser known is that at least some white residents on the night of the riot opposed it or tried to stop it, though they were unsuccessful, according to historians.
Jaspin's book cites a 1920 letter from the commonwealth’s attorney prosecuting the riot’s ringleader and others. "The opposition to the Negro in Corbin is something fierce,” he wrote, noting they weren’t permitted to live or pass through the town “without being run, shot and whipped.” Just three Black residents remained in 1920.
Last October, Corbin Mayor Suzie Razmus and city leaders issued a proclamation on the 100th anniversary of the riot acknowledging a “dark and disturbing” history, and declaring the town to be a welcoming community.
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Sunup members put up placards of testimony about the expulsion to clarify the history in a local event.
“It was important for people who only know Corbin as one of the 10,000 sundown towns in this nation that this event is not who we are as a community,” she said.
In an essay last year, the writer Silas House, who grew up near Corbin, noted that in 2005, the local United Methodist Church there made a concerted effort to welcome African Americans displaced by Hurricane Katrina, in part to overcome the spirit of the riot. House wrote of an eatery that draws a diverse crowd and an art gallery with items reading “No Hate in My Holler.”
Still, "Corbin, like the South itself, still has a long way to go," he wrote.
And some Black residents in the area in and near Corbin said there's still a need to promote racial healing. Doneghy said he's seen firsthand that racist attitudes have not completely faded away, whether or not they're worse than anywhere else.
And while there’s fledgling support for the Black Lives Matters movement, he said, it's far from widespread.
“Oh, there’s a long way to go,” Doneghy said.
As time passes, hope for younger voices grows
Riley, speaking recently in his threadbare center in a former London church packed with African dresses, old photos, newspaper clippings, dusty books and the uniform of the area’s first black police officer, said it’s important not just to look back but to move forward.
He’s still planning to collect more oral histories of the area’s older Black residents, who lived amid segregation, as well as continue running summer programs for kids, holding Martin Luther King, Jr., events and operating a food pantry.
But he said he hopes that all the voices and groups working to highlight commonalities among seemingly disparate justice issues of cities and rural areas, particularly in a region that has a long history of coal mine worker activism, could help promote change.
“If we can come together, we get strong,” he said.
Chris Kenning is a statewide enterprise reporter. Reach him at email@example.com, or follow on Twitter at @chris_kenning. Support strong journalism by subscribing: courier-journal.com/subscribe.