The city of Bowling Green, Kentucky, recently allocated $123,000 to help fund the establishment of an African-American museum in a building on State Street in the city. The museum is expected to open next summer.
Six faculty members at Western Kentucky University are on the steering committee for the new museum. Relations between the university and the city’s black community were strained when the black neighborhood of Jonesville was razed in the 1960s to make way for the university’s athletic fields. The new museum will serve to preserve the history of Jonesville and other black communities through photographs, artifacts, and oral histories.
