Appalachian Figures
On a Monday morning in May 1919, a Knox County lawyer who had grown up on Big Richland Creek took the oath as Kentucky’s thirty ninth governor. The Louisville Courier Journal marked the moment with the headline “Black Becomes 41st Governor” and reminded readers that James Dixon Black’s promotion came not by election but by succession when Governor Augustus O. Stanley departed for the United States Senate.
Black’s time in the Governor’s Mansion lasted barely seven months. He lost the fall election to Republican Edwin P. Morrow and left office in December 1919. Yet in those few months he pardoned one of the last men imprisoned in the aftermath of the Goebel assassination, wrestled with a textbook scandal that damaged his party, and tried to bring home a War of 1812 battle flag from an English chapel.
For Appalachia, James D. Black represents something else entirely. He was a mountain educator and banker, a co founder and later president of Union College in Barbourville, a Methodist lay leader, and a lifelong suffrage supporter whose politics were shaped as much by Knox County’s courthouse square as by Frankfort’s marble halls.
This is the story of the short term governor who never really left the hills.
From Big Richland Creek to Tusculum College
James Dixon Black’s life began on a farm nine miles east of Barbourville, on Big Richland Creek in Knox County. A 1922 biographical sketch places his birth on 24 September 1849, while the Kentucky Historical Society’s roadside marker for him gives the date as 29 September. Either way, he came of age in an upland community where family, church, and the county seat defined public life.
Black’s father, John C. Black, was a South Carolina native whose Scotch Irish parents moved west into Tennessee and then into the Kentucky mountains. There they developed what one early history called “one of the finest farm estates” in Knox County. The elder Black became a prosperous farmer and justice of the peace, a local Republican in a region that was still sorting out its post Civil War loyalties.
James was the youngest of a large clan. He attended rural schools and a subscription school in Barbourville before leaving for Tusculum College in East Tennessee, where he completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1872. Decades later his alma mater awarded him an honorary Doctor of Laws, a recognition of the public career he had built from that mountain beginning.
After graduation Black returned home to teach in Knox County’s schools while reading law. In August 1874 he passed the bar and opened a practice in Barbourville. That small town practice, eventually known as Black, Black and Owens when joined by his son Pitzer and his son in law Hiram H. Owens, remained the center of his working life even when the Governor’s Mansion briefly interrupted it.
Building Union College in a Mountain Town
For Knox Countians, Black’s most lasting legacy may not be his time in Frankfort but his work in building Union College. In 1879, thirty five local citizens purchased stock to launch a new college in Barbourville. Black helped organize the effort, served as secretary of the new institution, and insisted that it bear the name “Union” to symbolize his hope that the school would unify a divided community.
Union College histories and Kentucky Historical Society material agree that Black remained tied to the institution throughout his life as attorney, fundraiser, and trustee. In 1910 he became the college’s eighth president, serving until 1912 while Kentucky’s governor John Y. Brown appointed him to represent the state’s forestry and mineral interests at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Union College preserved his handwritten speech notes and an eight page printed address from this period. The titles and fragments of those addresses, along with his contribution “Be True to Self; Have Faith in Self; Happiness Is the Essence of Success” in the anthology Kentucky Eloquence, Past and Present, portray a man who framed success in moral and spiritual terms as much as economic ones. To the students and church members who heard him in Barbourville, Black was a mountain moralist in a frock coat, deeply committed to education as a route out of poverty for the children of the hills.
“Representative of Knox and Whitley”: Early Political Years
Black stepped into formal politics in 1875, only a year after beginning his law practice, when voters in Knox and Whitley counties elected him to the Kentucky House of Representatives. He served a single term, representing a largely Republican district as a Democrat at a time when party lines in the mountains did not always match the patterns of central Kentucky.
Back in Barbourville he continued to blend law and education. He served as commissioner of common schools in 1884 and 1885, administering Knox County’s public school system and advocating for improved rural education. He also deepened his involvement in the Methodist Episcopal Church and in Freemasonry, serving multiple times as master of Mountain Lodge No. 187 in Barbourville and once as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Kentucky.
This pattern would define Black’s whole life. He was never a career office seeker. Instead he moved between law office, classroom, lodge hall, and church, accepting political responsibility when called but always returning to the courthouse square in Knox County.
Lieutenant Governor on an Uneasy Ticket
Statewide politics returned in 1915. That year Democrats nominated Congressman Augustus O. Stanley for governor and chose James D. Black as their candidate for lieutenant governor. The ticket balanced two internal factions. Stanley opposed nationwide Prohibition, while Black was a temperance man who had the trust of rural and churchgoing voters in the mountains.
The ticket narrowly defeated Republican Edwin P. Morrow. Stanley’s margin over Morrow was only 421 votes, the closest gubernatorial result in Kentucky history to that point, while Black defeated his own Republican opponent by more than 8,000 votes.
Despite sharing the ballot, Stanley and Black were never close allies. Under the state constitution, the lieutenant governor acted as governor whenever the governor left Kentucky. Stanley distrusted Black’s appointments and, according to later accounts, largely refused to travel so that Black would not have opportunities to fill offices.
As lieutenant governor Black presided over the Senate during three regular sessions and an impeachment trial, but his real power waited on events outside his control.
Seven Months in the Governor’s Chair
That turning point came in May 1919 when the legislature elected Stanley to the United States Senate. On May 19, Black took the oath of office and became Kentucky’s thirty ninth governor.
Because no legislative session met during his brief tenure, Black’s official acts appear in his Executive Journal as a series of appointments, pardons, proclamations, and administrative decisions recorded by the Secretary of State between May and mid November 1919. The Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives preserves that journal, along with his Governors’ Papers, as primary evidence of how a small town mountain lawyer handled the duties of governor.
Two acts from those months drew particular attention. First, Black used the pardon power in the long shadow of the 1900 assassination of Governor William Goebel. Henry Youtsey, a former clerk in the state Auditor’s office, had been convicted and imprisoned for his role in the shooting. After years of controversy and earlier pardons for other defendants, Youtsey received a full pardon from Governor Black in 1919.
Second, Black confronted a storm over the State School Textbook Commission. Under Stanley, the commission had adopted textbooks that had been submitted in “dummy” form without the final printed versions. The Kentucky Court of Appeals ruled that the commission had acted illegally. Critics charged that the process favored certain publishers and hinted at corruption.
Black asked the commissioners to resign. When they refused, he declared that he had no authority to remove them absent proof of fraud or corruption. The Louisville Courier Journal argued that he could simply replace unconfirmed Stanley appointees, but Black declined to push that boundary. His apparent caution satisfied neither reformers nor party regulars and became central to the fall campaign.
History, Flags, and the War of 1812
One of the more revealing episodes of Black’s governorship did not involve Kentucky’s present but its Revolutionary and War of 1812 memories. In early 1919 an English visitor reported that a battle flag captured from Kentucky troops at the disastrous 1813 Battle of the River Raisin still hung in the chapel of the Royal Hospital at Chelsea in London.
Louisville newspapers seized on the story and urged that the flag come home. As the Kentucky National Guard’s modern history of the banner recounts, Black quickly agreed and appointed Louisville attorney John Buchanan as the state’s commissioner to pursue its return. A Long Beach, California newspaper summarized the plan that July, telling readers that “Governor James D. Black said he would seek its immediate return.”
The 1920 General Assembly even passed Chapter 49 of the Acts of Kentucky authorizing the governor to send a commissioner to England with an appropriation for expenses, although Black himself was out of office by then. In the end the British never returned the original flag and, according to later research, it decayed in storage, but Black’s effort shows how a mountain governor used historical memory and veterans’ symbolism to rally public feeling in the aftermath of World War I.
It also foreshadowed his later War of 1812 themed rhetoric in “Be True to Self; Have Faith in Self,” where he invoked Kentucky’s soldiers at the River Raisin and the Thames to argue for courage and duty in civic life.
A Suffrage Governor in a Losing Campaign
If the textbook battle hurt Black in 1919, his record on woman suffrage speaks to a different side of his politics. The national compendium History of Woman Suffrage describes him as a “staunch and life long suffragist” and notes that he campaigned for governor on a suffrage friendly platform.
That volume records a telling episode. In June 1919 the governor of Louisiana sent a telegram to southern governors asking them to oppose ratification of the proposed Nineteenth Amendment. Black instead granted Kentucky suffrage leader Madeline McDowell Breckinridge a sharply worded interview for the press, declaring that he would not oppose ratification. In other words, a Knox County Democrat from the mountains broke with the states’ rights argument that many southern leaders used against women’s voting rights.
Later that year Republicans won control of the Kentucky House while Democrats held the Senate. When the legislature met in January 1920, the new governor Edwin P. Morrow urged swift ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, and Kentucky’s lawmakers ratified it on the first day of the session. Black was no longer in office, yet contemporary suffrage leaders remembered him as one of the southern governors who had cleared the political ground for that historic vote.
Black’s support for women’s rights stands in contrast to his era’s racial politics. Scholars who study the Great Migration and sundown towns in Kentucky have tended to place him within a Democratic establishment that struggled, and often failed, to oppose racial violence and exclusion. His record on race was more cautious than his commitment to suffrage or Prohibition and remains an important field for further research using his governors’ papers and mountain newspapers.
“Defeated at the election by Edwin P. Morrow”
By the fall of 1919 James D. Black found himself in a difficult position. He was already governor, yet he still had to run for a full term against Edwin P. Morrow, the same Republican he had helped defeat four years earlier. The Democratic Party was badly divided, and Morrow made textbook corruption and patronage central themes of his campaign.
National suffrage historians would later write that “Governor James D. Black, defeated at the election by Edwin P. Morrow, was a staunch and life long suffragist.” Contemporary newspaper summaries outside Kentucky described his loss more bluntly. The Gloucester Gazette of Virginia reported that he fell short in the Democratic primary by roughly fifteen thousand votes, and general election returns showed Morrow winning by a comfortable statewide margin in November.
Black’s own voice from the campaign survives in a one page letter he wrote on 9 August 1919 to Orville J. Stivers, now held at Western Kentucky University. In it he thanked Stivers for congratulations on his primary victory and referred to the paradox of running for an office he had already occupied since May. That letter and his correspondence with Alben Barkley, cited by Barkley’s biographer from papers at the University of Kentucky, reveal a mountain politician who understood just how fragile his political footing had become.
On 9 December 1919, when Morrow took the oath of office, James D. Black’s governorship ended. He returned to Barbourville with the same understated dignity that had marked his arrival in Frankfort.
Prohibition Inspector and Mountain Banker
Black’s public service did not stop with his defeat. In 1920 he accepted appointment as chief prohibition inspector for Kentucky, a position that placed him at the center of enforcement in a state where distilling and moonshining were both economic mainstays and cultural flashpoints.
Lexington newspapers chronicled his involvement in raids, investigations, and legal disputes during the early 1920s, particularly in the Bluegrass, where wet interests and dry agents battled over enforcement. Mountain communities that had known him as governor now encountered him again as the man responsible for enforcing the “Great Experiment” across Kentucky.
At the same time he deepened his role in local finance. By 1921 he was serving as president of the National Bank of John A. Black, the successor to a private banking house founded by his older brother. With capital of thirty thousand dollars, surplus and undivided profits of fifty thousand, and deposits approaching eight hundred fifty thousand, the institution was a major player in the economy of Barbourville and the surrounding coal lands.
Black held substantial real estate himself, including two thousand acres of coal and mineral lands in Whitley, Bell, and Knox counties, along with a brick business block and family home at Main and High streets in Barbourville. A local tourism site today identifies a handsome house used as Barbourville’s visitor center as having been built by the former governor for his daughter Georgia Clarice Owens, a reminder that mining wealth and professional success could translate into fine homes even in small Appalachian towns.
Churchman, Elder Statesman, and Final Years
Throughout his later life Black remained active in the Methodist Episcopal Church. The 1934 journal of the Kentucky Annual Conference recorded his introduction to the assembled ministers on the occasion of his eighty fifth birthday, a sign of the respect he enjoyed among his fellow Methodists.
He also served as a director of the Barbourville Cemetery Company and continued to speak at civic events. When Alben Barkley sought a United States Senate seat in 1938, Black joined the campaign as Barkley’s Ninth District manager, an alliance noted in both Barkley’s biography and the National Governors Association’s sketch of Black.
Illness finally intervened that summer. While working for Barkley’s campaign, Black contracted pneumonia and died in Barbourville on 5 August 1938. He was entombed in a mausoleum at Barbourville Cemetery, overlooking the town whose fortunes he had tied to Union College, mountain banking, and a brief moment of statewide power.
Today a Kentucky Historical Society marker on North Main Street in Barbourville summarizes his life: mountain born educator, co founder of Union College, and Kentucky’s thirty ninth governor. Knox County’s own county history materials proudly remind readers that this one rural county produced two Kentucky governors, Black and his Republican successor Flem D. Sampson.
Black’s story offers a window into how Appalachian communities shaped, and were shaped by, statewide politics in the early twentieth century. From Big Richland Creek to the Governor’s Mansion and back again, his life followed the path of an Appalachian professional who never stopped thinking of himself as a Knox County man.
Sources and Further Reading
Executive Journal of Governor James D. Black, May 19, 1919 – November 15, 1919, Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, Secretary of State records. KDLA Access+1
Governors’ Papers, James D. Black, Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, Public Records Division, referenced in the National Governors Association biography. KDLA Access+1
“Black Becomes 41st Governor,” Louisville Courier Journal, 20 May 1919, and related coverage of his inauguration and Morrow’s 1919 inauguration. Facebook+1
Letter, James D. Black to Orville J. Stivers, 9 August 1919, MSS Small Collection 3286, Western Kentucky University, TopSCHOLAR.
Kentucky Court of Appeals opinions on the State School Textbook Commission, cited in Lowell H. Harrison’s essay on Black and summarized in later accounts of the 1919 campaign. CORE+1
History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 6 (1922), chapter 16, especially the discussion of Kentucky’s ratification campaign and descriptions of Governor Black’s suffrage stance. Wikisource+1
1919–1920 coverage in the Lexington Herald and Lexington Leader on Black’s service as Prohibition inspector and on suffrage ratification, as collated in LexHistory’s “Prohibition – The Great Experiment.” Lexington History Museum+1
Louisville press coverage of the River Raisin battle flag, including articles quoted in John Trowbridge, “Kentucky’s River Raisin Battle Flag: A Forgotten, Now Lost Relic of the War of 1812,” Kentucky National Guard Public Affairs. Kentucky National Guard+2dvidshub.net+2
Official Journal of the Kentucky Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1934, which notes Black’s eightieth fifth birthday and his introduction to the conference. ePLACE
Early biographical sketch in Charles Kerr, History of Kentucky (1922), transcribed in “Biographies, Knox County, KY,” Genealogy Trails. Genealogy Trails+1
Lowell H. Harrison, “James Dixon Black,” in Kentucky’s Governors (University Press of Kentucky), and Harrison’s entry “James D. Black” in The Kentucky Encyclopedia, which synthesize Black’s life and political career. CORE+1
National Governors Association, “Governor James Dixon Black,” for a concise, vetted biography and references to the Governors’ Papers. National Governors Association+1
Kentucky Historical Society, ExploreKYHistory marker text for “James D. Black (1849–1938)” (historical marker 1811), outlining his life from Knox County birth to Union College and the governorship. Kentucky Historical Society+1
Union College institutional histories, including Union College 1879–1979 and the “2 Presidents” archives guide, for Black’s role as co founder, fundraiser, attorney, and later president. Internet Archive+2libguides.unionky.edu+2
Knox Historical Museum, The Knox Countian, especially William Sherman Oxendine, “James D. Black, Governor of Kentucky” (1993), Oxendine’s “A Biographical Sketch of James D. Black,” and C. R. Mitchell, “Governor James D. Black and the Kentucky Gubernatorial Election of 1919” (2014), which provide local detail and political context. Knox Historical Museum+2Knox Historical Museum+2
LinkNKY feature, “Kentucky’s Governors (1919–1931),” for a brief narrative of the Black–Morrow succession and Prohibition era politics. LINK nky+1
LexHistory.org, “Prohibition – The Great Experiment,” for context on Black’s work as chief prohibition inspector. Lexington History Museum+1
James C. Klotter, Kentucky: Portraits in Paradox, 1900–1950, and Harrison and Klotter, A New History of Kentucky, for placing Black within the broader story of early twentieth century Kentucky. National Governors Association+2Explore Kentucky History+2