Kentucky
Kentucky School for the Blind, Colored Department (Louisville)
- Established 1884
- Integrated with the Kentucky School for the Blind, 1955
Forty-two years after the founding of the Kentucky School for the Blind, at the urging of Superintendent Benjamin Huntoon, the Kentucky legislature appropriated $20,000 for a separate facility for "colored students." According to the act, "the blind children aforesaid, when such buildings shall have been erected, shall be entitled to receive on equal terms their due proportion, according to numbers, all rights, benefits and privileges secured to the white blind children of this Commonwealth." The school, designed by noted Louisville architect Charles J. Clark, was located on Haldeman Avenue 600 feet away from the building for the white students. (Kentucky law required that the two schools were separated by "no less than 600 feet.") The Colored Department enrolled its first students in 1886.
In the summer of 1955, African-American students began classes with their white counterparts for the first time, gathering together every morning to walk down the 600-foot-long pathway to the main building. KSB was among the first schools in Kentucky, including schools for sighted children, to integrate1 and was also, with West Virginia, the first school for the blind to integrate. Teaching positions were found for all the faculty of the Colored Department. In the summer of 1956, eleven African-American students moved into the dormitories formerly for whites only, and the old school building was abandoned. It was torn down in the early 1960s.
- The Wayne County and Fayette County school districts also integrated their classes in 1955.