Kentucky.gov

Frankfort, KY - Dr. Tracy E. K'Meyer is this year's winner of the Kentucky Historical Society's Richard H. Collins Award. This award is given annually, at the Kentucky Historical Society's annual meeting, to the author of the article in The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society judged by an outside panel of scholars to have made the most outstanding contribution to the history of the commonwealth during the immediate previous year. Collins Award winners receive a plaque and a prize of $1,000, funded by the KHS Foundation.

K'Meyer's article was "The Louisville Civil Rights Movement's Response to the Southern Red Scare," which appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of The Register. She received the award at the KHS annual meeting on November 9.

"I was inspired to write this essay in part as a response to the debate among scholars over the impact of anticommunism on the civil rights movement," says K'Meyer. "I think the story of how Louisville's civil rights activists were able to persevere in the repressive atmosphere of McCarthyism is important not only for what it tells us about the regional and national movement, but for the model it provides for social movements today."

Dr. K'Meyer received her Ph.D. in twentieth-century U.S. history, southern history, and oral/public history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1993 and has been with the University of Louisville since 1995. She is currently an associate professor of U.S. history and codirector of the Oral History Center at the university and was previously a professor in U.S. history at New Mexico State University.

K'Meyer is the author of Interracialism and Christian Community in the Postwar South: The Story of Koinonia Farm published in 1997 by the University of Virginia Press. Her award-winning article is a component of her larger work on the civil rights movement in Louisville, which will be published in the forthcoming Gateway to the South: The Civil Rights Movement in Louisville, Kentucky, 1945-1980, by the University Press of Kentucky.

The award is named for Richard H. Collins, one of the pioneers of Kentucky history, and best known for his Historical Sketches of Kentucky (1874). Previous winners have included Thomas D. Clark, Lowell H. Harrison, Robert M. Ireland, and Charles P. Roland. Published since 1903, The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society is among the oldest historical journals in the country and is a benefit of membership in the Kentucky Historical Society.

-30-

An agency of the Kentucky Commerce Cabinet, the Kentucky Historical Society, since 1836, has provided connections to the past, perspective on the present, and inspiration for the future. KHS operates the Old State Capitol, the Kentucky Military History Museum, and its headquarters, the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History. Since 1999, the thirty-million- dollar Center has welcomed more than one million visitors. For more information about the Kentucky Historical Society and its programs, visit our Web site.