There are more notable African Americans with Kentucky roots and ties than any one person knows about. Very little has been written about many of them and it is a challenge to find what was written in the past. For some, their stories have only been told by word of mouth. The Notable Kentucky African Americans Database (NKAA) has been developed as a finding aid to bring together a brief description of pertinent names, places, and events, and to list the sources where additional information may be found. This is not currently an all inclusive database, but we are working toward that goal and suggestions are welcomed.
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Clarence B. Martin, a native of Alabama, played high school basketball at Benjamin Russell High School in Alexander City, AL. In college, he played…
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In 1954 William R. Schultz, Jr. was the first African American to graduate from the University of Kentucky (UK) with a pharmacy degree. In newspaper…
Robert M. Johnson was an African American expatriate who had been enslaved for 24 years in Lexington, KY to Dorothea D. Christian and her husband the…
Lillian Nareen White was an outstanding athlete in track and basketball at Georgetown (KY) High School [the school merged into Scott County High…
Listed below are selected non-fiction titles and collections that focus on the history of enslavement in Kentucky (the state as a whole). This is not…
In 1904, much was written about the attempted murder of the Mulligan family at Maxwell Place in Lexington, KY. The University of Kentucky (UK)…
There had always been "foreign-born Negroes" in Kentucky, starting with the thousands of enslaved who were born in African countries [see the NKAA…
