Local historian and Huntertown Community Interpretive Park volunteer Sioux Finney says she invited Frank X Walker to participate in this year’s “Honoring Our Black Heritage” series after hearing him read his poetry during a program at Camp Nelson. His upcoming appearance at the Woodford County Library on Thursday evening, Feb. 26, comes during the 160th anniversary of the end of the U. S. Colored Troops.
With over 700 men from Woodford County who are now known to have joined the U.S. Colored Troops, Finney says inviting Walker to read poems giving voice to those veterans, their families and slave owners provides a perfect connection for this year’s Honoring Our Black Heritage series.
“The stories that he tells and the way he tells (those stories is) … just heart-wrenching and just an incredible portrait of U.S. Colored Troops as a history,” says Finney.
She notes Jerry Gatewood and other self-emancipated slaves who earned their freedom by serving in the Civil War bought land in the Huntertown Community and settled in Woodford County with their families.
Lauding Walker’s research and writing, Finney says he finds ways to tie Kentucky voices with notable figures in American history like Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. “You can feel and hear the voice, the emotion … and feel (these stories) in your soul” when Walker reads his poems, she adds.
One of his poems is printed here with permission.
Blue Summer
Pvt. Henry Clay Walker,
12th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery
If every single blade a grass in a field
stood in line and put on a new cap and boots
it might come close to helping you picture
how many of us showed up that summer.
I didn’t care if I had to stand behind
All the bluegrass in the state,
by the time we all put on blue wool jackets
you could no longer see the weeds.
In the weeks and months after next Thursday’s “Honoring Our Black Heritage with Frank X. Walker,” people in the community can continue celebrating Woodford County’s Black Heritage with a program by Reinette Jones on March 19 about the Notable Kentucky African Americans Database, and a program by Yvonne Giles on April 9 about Black jockey Bill Walker.
Co-sponsored by the Woodford County Library, Woodford County Historical Society, Huntertown Community Interpretive Park and Woodford County government, Finney says the Black Heritage programs expose people who attend to a deep and rich history that’s a part of who we are in Woodford County.
“We need to continue to understand those stories, and remember those stories and honor those stories,” she says.
Finney, a retired teacher, credits understanding the deep roots of the African American community known as Huntertown for expanding her view of Black history in Woodford County.