LOUISVILLE, Ky. — When Louisville segregated its parks 100 years ago, Chickasaw Park was the first open to Black people. Although it was a Black park, it was in a segregated white neighborhood.
"It used to take two buses to get down here because Blacks didn't live in this area," Cheri Bryant Hamilton said.
The troubled history is part of a new book chronicling the birth of Chickasaw.
"We met at my dining room table and we've been meeting ever since," Leborah Goodwin explained, detailing their twice-a-week committee meetings where they compile four decades of neighborhood lore, like the century-old West Louisville Tennis Club and a basketball court so small it was called the stamp.
"We've been working on this since about five years now," Bryant Hamilton said. "Our publisher said you don't name the baby 'til it's born."
"And we have a deadline," Goodwin added, "but I won't tell you what it is."
The years-long work compiles interviews, pictures and stories from Chickasaw families, with over 200 contributing.
"Some of them were the first ones on the block," Rhonda Ramsey Finney, the project's treasurer, said. "No other houses were around them. They would go over to the other side of Greenwood. They wouldn't be welcomed, let's just say. And they watched it all evolve."
The book's history stretches back to 1943 when most of the land around the park was deed restricted. That means only white people could purchase. That changed after the Black-owned Standard Realty Corporation purchased 19 acres from Greenwood Avenue down to Winnrose allowing Black families to build their homes there for the very first time.
That set the stage for a civil rights movement that blossomed around Chickasaw Park, a stage the women behind the project hope to pass on.
"So that we don't make the same mistakes before. We learn from history so that we can look and see what other people did and see the possibilities," Ramsey Finney said.
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