Crowd of nearly 10,000 gathered at civil rights event in Lexington (KY) in 1867
The Lexington Herald Leader
Crowd of nearly 10,000 gathered at civil rights event in Lexington in 1867
By Sam Osborne
July 14, 2014
It's been 50 years since volunteers descended upon the deeply segregated South to register black voters, a right a majority of blacks in the Deep South had been deprived of for more than a century.
The "freedom summer" of 1964 was a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement, as voter-registration drives brought a national spotlight to the plight of disenfranchised blacks and led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting.
A recently unearthed piece of Lexington lore reveals blacks in Kentucky were fighting for the same privileges nearly a century before.
On July 4, 1867, an estimated crowd of 10,000 people, comprised mostly of blacks, participated in one of the largest civil rights gatherings in Kentucky until Martin Luther King Jr's march in Frankfort on March 5, 1964....
Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2014/07/14/3336147/crowd-of-nearly-10000-gathered.html#storylink=cpy
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