Russell and the West End: A Geography of Exclusion
Near Louisville, Kentucky
The Russell neighborhood in Louisville's West End was, by the early twentieth century, the civic and commercial heart of Black Louisville. It had churches, schools, insurance companies, fraternal organizations, newspapers, medical offices, and its own economy. It was not wealthy by the standards of white Louisville, but it was self-sustaining, and it was the product of community investment over generations.
The forces that constrained it and eventually diminished it operated across multiple decades and through multiple mechanisms. The nineteen fourteen racial zoning ordinance attempted to codify the city's racial geography by law. When Buchanan versus Warley struck that down in nineteen seventeen, it was replaced not by integration but by private deed restrictions, which accomplished the same containment through contract rather than statute. Banks operating under redline maps drawn by the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation in the late nineteen thirties rated Black neighborhoods as financial hazards, declining mortgage loans and insurance.
The postwar decades brought urban renewal. Under programs funded partly by federal housing legislation, Louisville cleared neighborhoods that had been designated as slums, a designation that fell heavily on low-income Black communities. The highway construction era compounded it. Interstate Sixty-Four and Interstate Sixty-Five cut directly through the Smoketown neighborhood east of downtown, displacing thousands of residents. The physical structure of the city that had been built around Black Louisville was dismantled in the name of modernization.
By the nineteen seventies, a Kentucky Commission on Human Rights report found that Louisville and Jefferson County had more housing segregation than at any previous point in the county's measurable history. The nineteenth-century ordinance had been struck down. The redlining had been illegal for years. The segregation had deepened.
The Russell neighborhood has seen significant reinvestment in recent years, some of it welcomed and some of it arriving under conditions that raise the same displacement questions that have always attended reinvestment in Black communities.
