SEIGEL, GREG AND REBEKKA
ern Kentucky depleted the number of talented and ambitious individuals in the community. Those who remained to struggle against segregation and racial oppression organized and participated in such diverse groups as the Anti–Separate Coach Movement, the Council on Interracial Cooperation, the Kentucky Negro Education Association, the Kentucky Association of Women for the Prevention of Lynching, the NAACP (National Association of Colored People), the National Association of Colored Women, the National Negro Business League, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Kentucky State Colored Chautauqua, the Kentucky Commission to Study Negro Affairs, and many other groups. Education was very important to blacks recently freed from slavery. After the Civil War, one of the fi rst schools for African Americans, a Freedman School (see Freedmen’s Bureau Schools), was orga nized in 1866 in Covington under the direction of Jacob Price. Even before the Kentucky legislature passed the 1904 Day Law, legally requiring the segregation of public and private schools, the vast majority of schools, other than Berea College in Berea, were already segregated. In 1874 the Kentucky legislature passed laws creating a comprehensive public school system that included segregated schools for African Americans. The revenue for the maintenance of these schools was derived from the taxes on property. For African American schools, this means of support automatically reduced the school term to 2 or 3 months a year, while the term for white schools was 5 to 10 months a year. The African American schools in Northern Kentucky, which according to state law had to be located at least one mile from a white school, were separate and unequal. The William Grant School and the Our Savior School in Covington, the Southgate St. School in Newport, the Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Wilkens schools in Elsmere, and the John G. Fee Industrial High School in Maysville were schools for blacks built in Northern Kentucky. Although far inferior to white schools in physical, material, and fi nancial aspects, these schools provided their students with an outstanding education that rivaled the one offered in white schools, thanks to dedicated teachers and principals. African American schools were closed during the era of desegregation following the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kans. in 1954. In 1892 the Kentucky legislature passed a law requiring separate railway cars for African American and white passengers on interstate railroads. Minnie Myers, while traveling from Cincinnati to Lexington, Ky., in 1895, arrived in Covington and was required to move out of her first-class railway car seat in an integrated car into a segregated car designated “for colored only.” As part of the Anti– Separate Coach movement, she protested her physical removal and later sued the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. Such courageous and defiant acts of resistance were commonplace during the “Jim Crow” era.
Segregation was the norm in Kentucky, just as it was in most other states, but there were areas in Northern Kentucky where segregation did not take root. When the Covington Public Library (see Kenton Co. Public Library) opened in 1900, its open-door policy, allowing blacks full access to its books and ser vices, made it the first desegregated main library in the South and one of the few in the United States. Since there were no state laws requiring segregated facilities at public libraries, the Covington public library was never legally confronted about this policy, thanks to cooperative community leaders and forward thinking library staff who avoided public scrutiny. Since 1893 the Green Line carried streetcar passengers with integrated seating between Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. In 1916 the company was indicted by a Kenton Co. grand jury and found guilty of not providing separate facilities as required by Kentucky’s separate coach bill. Appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, this conviction was upheld in 1920, but the Green Line Streetcar Company found ways to evade the state laws by amending its charter and never instituted segregated streetcars. Many Christians fought against the evils of segregation. For example, when the Diocese of Covington (see Roman Catholics) built Camp Marydale in Boone Co. during the 1940s, Rev. Anthony Deye, a teacher and coach at the allblack Catholic Our Savior School, made certain that the camp was open to all children, regardless of race. Despite some advances, however, racism reigned supreme. “Legal lynching” was condoned under the public hanging law in effect at the time. African Americans accused of crimes, especially if the alleged crime was raping a white woman, were tried under hostile circumstances, with no real opportunity to prove their guilt or innocence, and customarily given a death sentence. In other cases, the victims of lynching were not even accused of a specific crime, except, perhaps, violating some unwritten social convention. During the 30-year period 1899–1930, Northern Kentucky residents were partners in and witnesses to three rape trials that gained national attention. In 1899, 18-year-old Richard Coleman was charged with the rape and murder of a white woman in Maysville. To avoid a possible lynching, the local sheriff transported Coleman to Covington for safekeeping. After being ordered by a grand jury to return him to Mason Co., the sheriff turned Coleman over to a mob of hundreds of white men, women, and children who proceeded after a quick “trial” to burn Coleman alive and cut off his body parts as souvenirs. No persons were ever charged in this sensational act of mob frenzy and extreme brutality. In March 1930, a white woman from Crescent Springs in Kenton Co. charged an African American youth, Anderson McPerkins, with rape. After a quick trial he was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. He was saved from being lynched by a white mob through the combined efforts of the Cincinnati branches of the International Labor Defense and the NAACP, the Kentucky Commis-
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sion on Interracial Cooperation, the Cincinnati chapter of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), and the Ninth St. Methodist Episcopal Church of Covington. In 1932 his verdict was overturned, and he was released from prison. In 1935 John Pete Montjoy was accused of robbing and raping a white woman and given a quick trial. He was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. Again, individuals and groups from Covington and Cincinnati joined together in an attempt to have Montjoy’s verdict overturned. This time they were not successful. On December 17, 1937, Montjoy was hanged in front of the Covington city-county building. In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans., after 80 years of ruling in favor of segregation, finally declared state-sponsored segregation unconstitutional. But it took 10 more years and a growing civil rights movement, which made use of boycotts, sit-ins, and marches, together with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to bring the era of “Jim Crow” to a close. Kentucky Commission of Human Rights. Kentucky’s Black Heritage. Frankfort, Ky.: Kentucky Commission of Human Rights, 1971. Wright, George C. A History of Blacks in Kentucky. Vol. 2, In Pursuit of Equality, 1890–1980. Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1992.
Jim Embry
SEIGEL, GREG AND REBEKKA (Greg: b. 1947, Cincinnati, Ohio; Rebekka: b. 1948, Columbus, Ohio). Greg Seigel, a traditional potter, and Rebekka Seigel, a contemporary quilt-maker, both inherited from their grandparents a passion for hand-making items. Greg Seigel was always interested in art, but it was not until he moved into a house that was set up for pottery-making that he got his hands into working with clay. Largely selftaught and strongly influenced by the inventiveness of his machine-making grandfather, Greg began creating functional pieces with touches of whimsy. Moving to rural Owen Co., Ky., allowed him to incorporate local materials into his clays and glazes and to build his own brick kilns, where he creates stoneware art and utility pieces using traditional hand-firing techniques. Greg’s legacy is embedded in the hallways of the Owen Co. Elementary School, where he has worked beside students in grades 4–12 to design, create, and glaze tiles and then install them into murals on the school’s walls. Rebekka Beer Seigel grew up in Cincinnati, where she met and married Greg Seigel in July 1973. While expecting the birth of the first of the couple’s two children, she learned basic quilting skills from her grandmother; but she found traditional patterns uninspiring. She preferred to tell stories in quilts and sought to express herself in fabric. The subjects of her intricate hand-sewn, pictorial appliqué quilts frequently honor female pioneers in all fields. Some of her quilts are in the permanent collections of the Kentucky History Museum in Frankfort and the Evansville (Ind.)