About

The Eastern Kentucky African American Migration Project (EKAAMP) documents and helps preserve photos, oral histories, and other materials related to African Americans in Eastern Kentucky.  To find photographs, recordings, and more, please visit the Find page.

Purpose

EKAAMP documents the unique cultural history of an African American diaspora: the history of intergenerational migration into and out of the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky throughout the 20th century. 

The Appalachian region often escapes the collective consciousness of Americana.  Even when representations of Appalachia do enter the cultural-historical discourse in academia or in the media, African Americans are rarely inscribed into the social heritage of this region.  However, there were tens of thousands of African Americans who first migrated from the rural South to the coalfields of West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky—if only for one generation—as a first stop throughout the Great Migration.  Because of this peculiar layover, there are many African Americans across the country who still call Appalachia “home.”

Goals

EKAAMP was established to accomplish the following goals:

  • Create a community archive, from the ground up, through the personal donations of African Americans who share a social heritage with the Appalachian region.
  • Contribute to the proliferation of public knowledge by providing access to the materials donated to the archive.
  • Create an opportunity for interdisciplinary research collaborations among graduate students and faculty in the social sciences and humanities.

The Eastern Kentucky African American Migration Project presents an opportunity to unearth the contours of this rich piece of American history through the power of personal narrative.  Through this initiative, individuals, families, and organizations who share Eastern Kentucky roots will have the opportunity to donate to the EKAAMP collection, a collection that includes their oral history interviews, physical materials, and objects all relating to their cultural history in Appalachia, their subsequent migration, and their experiences throughout the pre-and post Civil Rights-era of the 20th Century.

For information on how to get in touch with EKAAMP with questions or to donate materials, please visit the Contact page.

Origins

EKAAMP got its start when Dr. Karida Brown, granddaughter of an eastern Kentucky coal miner, focused her dissertation research on the culture and history of the African Americans who migrated into and out of the coalfields of eastern Kentucky throughout the 20th Century. Dr. Brown has collected over 200 interviews with African Americans from eastern Kentucky and has used these historical accounts to document the phenomenal journey that a generation has taken from the mountains of Kentucky to cities across the United States. 

Dr. Brown has traveled across the United States, engaging with members of this community and generating interest in EKAAMP, its collections, and its people.  She has conducted oral history interviews with migrants in over 30 cities across the United States.

UNC Partnership

In partnership with the Southern Historical Collection curators Biff Hollingsworth and Chaitra Powell at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) Libraries, Karida established the EKAAMP collection of oral histories at UNC, which led to other collections of eastern Kentucky African American family archives at UNC. UNC Libraries hosted the first EKAAMP exhibition in 2015 and collaborated with Karida to produce several subsequent iterations of the exhibit.  A mini documentary chronicling this exhibit is on the EKAAMP Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/327281537436976/videos/473186382846490/

In 2016, EKAAMP became part of a three-year Andrew Mellon Foundation Grant to support community archives, which supported opportunities for community members to learn to care for their archives, donate their archives, and share their archives through exhibits and other venues.  EKAAMP has received further support since 2019, when UNC-CH Libraries received a grant from the Kenan Charitable Trust to support historically black towns and settlements.