Letting History Speak: The Legacy of the Kentucky Bicentennial Oral History Commission
In 1976, Al Smith and John Ed Pearce, two prominent Kentucky journalists, met with Gov. Julian Carroll, stressing the need to record “important events of past days in the history of Kentucky.” Carroll recommended that Smith and Pearce propose a specific plan for the Kentucky General Assembly to fund a commission on oral history. With Carroll’s endorsement, the General Assembly established the Kentucky Bicentennial Oral History Commission (later changed to the Kentucky Oral History Commission [KOHC]). Inaugural members of the commission included notable Kentucky historians, such as Forrest Pogue, Lynwood Montell, and Thomas Clark.1
Al Smith (left) and John Ed Pearce (right) at a KOHC Meeting, ca. 1970s–1980s. Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort.
The goal of the commission was to promote and assist in the development of oral history programs across the commonwealth as part of the United States’s bicentennial celebrations. An article in the Lexington Herald from November 28, 1976, described the mission of the commission as focused on finding “people who are old enough to have stories about some aspect of Kentucky life earlier in this century” and discovering “unwritten but remembered history which can be recorded before it is lost.”2 As the article implied, the focus of the commission was to record interviews with Kentuckians who experienced historically significant events firsthand or whose lives and experiences provided insights into Kentucky history.
Indeed, the creation of the Kentucky Oral History Commission in 1976 represented an important step toward capturing the unique remnants of Kentucky’s past. While there were already eight oral history programs in Kentucky at the time, they did not represent the commonwealth's diverse regions. Thus, a guiding principle behind KOHC was to record oral histories from every part of the state and provide wider access to them.
To accomplish this robust goal, the commission focused its efforts on funding oral history projects through grants (level 1) and an outreach project (level 2). The level 2 project focused on recording interviews with “old-timers” from all 120 counties in Kentucky. Community volunteers worked to identify individuals and stories within their localities that merited documentation through oral history interviews. The commission provided oral history training and recorders to each county primarily through public libraries and historical societies to complete this work. A majority of KOHC funds, though, were devoted to level 1 grants, providing monetary support to oral history programs and trained oral historians to conduct oral history projects that had statewide significance.3
In sum, the commission collected over 3,400 interviews from 118 counties in Kentucky under the level 2 project. The interviewees included multiple former governors, a Spanish-American War veteran, and thousands of individuals with previously unrecorded stories about Kentucky during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These interviews are permanently archived at the Kentucky Historical Society.4
This set of histories, now called the “County Collection,” is the largest and most requested oral history collection in KHS’s archive. Copies of interviews were given to interviewees and their local libraries, and many of these can still be found in libraries across the state. In recent years, several of these interviews have also been digitized and made publicly available. Public libraries across the state continue to expand their collections of oral history interviews, first started with the level 2 project in 1976. While the level 2 project ended with the bicentennial, the commission’s level 1 grants program continues to this day.
Since its founding, the Kentucky Oral History Commission has undergone numerous administrative changes. The Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives was instrumental in its early days, providing funding and administrative support. In 1981, Gov. John Y. Brown Jr. renamed the commission the Kentucky Oral History Commission (KOHC) and attached it to the Kentucky Historical Society. The next year, the General Assembly established the KOHC as a separate agency independent of KHS. In 1992, the General Assembly revised its decision and reattached the commission back to the Kentucky Historical Society, which still oversees it today.5
While the KOHC has undergone administrative changes, its mission has not. KOHC remains the only state commission in the nation committed to statewide oral history documentation through grant programs and outreach. The commission has awarded over $1 million to more than 600 individuals, colleges, and community organizations to support a growing collection of more than 35,000 interviews in repositories throughout the state. KHS has secured nearly 10,000 of these interviews within its collections. Many of these interviews have been digitized to ensure they are accessible to future Kentuckians. Beyond funding new oral history projects, the KOHC also offers transcription and presentation grants to further enhance the use of previously recorded oral history projects. In the spirit of the level 2 project, KOHC also provides training and recording equipment through technical assistance grants.6
In addition to the volume of interviews, KOHC-funded projects have also made a direct impact across the state by illuminating critical moments in Kentucky’s history through the voices of individuals who were there. For example, in 1998, KOHC funded The Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project. The intent behind the project was to document Black Kentuckians’ experiences during the Civil Rights movement and the complex challenges of race in Kentucky during the twentieth century. The project collected more than 175 interviews, which led to two symposia and a Kentucky Educational Television (KET) documentary film, Living the Story (2001). As a result of the project’s success, KOHC received the Oral History Association’s Elizabeth Mason Project Award in 2004 for its outstanding use of oral history.7
Poster for KET Documentary, Living the Story, based on KOHC’s Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project. Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort.
For the past fifty years, the Kentucky Oral History Commission has worked to record and preserve the diverse stories that embody Kentucky’s colorful history. Its mission has always been focused on helping Kentuckians rediscover the past experiences of their families, neighbors, and the commonwealth’s historically significant figures. This work is far from complete. There are thousands of oral histories yet to be recorded and still more that sit on unassuming cassette tapes scattered throughout local history sections of public libraries and in boxes tucked away in dusty attics. Without the work of KOHC, many of these histories will be lost to time. Thus, with the 250th anniversary of the United States’ founding upon us, there is no better moment than now to reflect on the KOHC’s half century of work and to look forward to another fifty years of letting history speak.
To learn more about the Kentucky Oral History Commission visit, https://history.ky.gov.
Additional References:
Living the Story: The Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky, directed by Arthur Rouse (Kentucky Educational Television, 2001).
Oral History and Audio-Visual Materials, Digital Collections, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort.
NOTES
[1] Meeting Minutes, 24 May 1976, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort.
[2] “Preserving Tales for Posterity,” The Lexington (Ky) Herald, 28 November 1976, p. 4, newspapers.com.
[3] Sarah Milligan, “Oral History in Kentucky,” Ohio Valley History 12, no. 1 (2012): 73–83.
[4] County Collection Oral History Project, 1976OH01-120, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort.
[5] John Ed Pearce, “The Genesis of Kentucky’s Oral History Commission,” The Kentucky Review 10, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 5–10.
[6] “Preserving the stories that are a part of Kentucky’s history,” Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, https://history.ky.gov/participate/kentucky-oral-history-commission.
[7] “Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project,” Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, https://history.ky.gov/news/civil-rights-movement-in-kentucky-oral-history-project.
