Boyd Shearer

• Senior Lecturer, UKy Department of Geography 🔗
• outrageGIS mapping trail maps 🔗

Fred Douglass Park, the first public park for colored people ever opened in Lexington, was dedicated yesterday afternoon with elaborate exercises, preceded by a parade fully a mile in length and managed entirely by the committee of colored citizens appointed to arrange for the celebration. A crowd estimated at 5,000 filled the park and heard the program of addresses and music which had been arranged...
(Herald: July 5, 1916, p.8 C-4)

The Park Minstrels [show] ... will be given at Woodland Park Auditorium. Singing, dancing and fun-making with all the atmosphere of the old-time minstrel show, will be presented.... In order that everyone may enjoy the antics of ‘Mr. Bones’ and ‘Mr. Interlocutor,’ together with their tap-dancing and mammy singing cohorts, all activity at the Lexington playgrounds will be suspended Tuesday night.... The Park Minstrels is expected to be one the most elaborate undertakings that playgrounds have presented.
(Herald and Leader: August 10, 1930)

All public parks ... established and maintained for the recreation, pleasure and welfare of the colored population in cities of the second class shall be held, managed and controlled by a “Board of Park Commissioners (Colored)” of the city wherein the parks are located.
(Kentucky Revised Statues; chapter 97.400, 1942.)