Article 2: “If You Go There … It Will Happen Again”: The Historical Legacies of Racism, Law Enforcement and Educational Inequality in Covington, Kentucky

In this article, inspired by Toni Morrison’s evocative description of places that are “never going away” and events that “will happen again,” I explore the historical legacies of racism, law enforcement, and educational inequality in Covington, Kentucky. I argue that these legacies can best be understood by juxtaposing and then reading across historical moments that share a geographic location. After establishing that Covington’s police force, like so many in the Kentucky (Smith 2012), was likely founded to surveil and contain enslaved Black people in the Antebellum period, I demonstrate that Covington public schools were created and maintained as racially separate and deeply unequal institutions for over a century. I then examine two historical moments united by their Covington locale but separated by nearly fifty years: first, I analyze newspaper accounts of 1970 Black student protests and the white resistance these protests inspired; then, I analyze a 2014 lawsuit brought against a Covington school resource officer, who (the court found) used excessive force against an eight-year-old Latino boy and a nine-year-old Black girl.