A new book club that will explore Hopkinsville’s history and culture is starting up this month and will have its first meeting online.
The first selection for the Museum Book Club is Ted Poston’s “The Dark Side of Hopkinsville,” a collection of short stories set in segregated Hopkinsville in the 1910s. Poston, who is remembered as the Dean of Black Journalists in America, wrote the stories about his boyhood in Hopkinsville.
Alissa Keller, executive director of the Museums of Historic Hopkinsville-Christian County, said the first book club meeting will be at noon Tuesday, Jan. 19.
Poston was born in Hopkinsville on July 4, 1906. He graduated from Attucks High School in 1924 and from the Agricultural and Industrial State Normal College (now Tennessee State University) in Nashville in 1928.
After college, he moved to New York City and several years later began his career as a national reporter for the New York Post. He is recognized as the first Black journalist to maintain a career at a major metropolitan newspaper in the United States.
Poston retired in 1972 and died in 1974. He is buried at Cave Spring Cemetery in Hopkinsville.
In May 2017, the Kentucky Historical Society installed a marker in honor of Poston in downtown Hopkinsville. It was the first KHS historical marker dedicated to a Black person in Christian County.
Copies of “The Dark Side of Hopkinsville” are available to purchase in the Pennyroyal Area Museum’s gift shop, The Vault by Planters Bank, or can be checked out at the Hopkinsville-Christian County Public Library. The museum and gift shop are open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
Poston wrote the fictionalized accounts of his childhood as a personal project during his newspaper career. The stories were first published as a collection a decade after his death, but the title of the collection was Poston’s suggestion, his biographer, the late Kathleen Hauke, learned while researching the characters and real-life episodes that inspired his short stories.
“The stories combine excellent writing and humor to examine difficult issues,” Keller said.
Keller said she plans to have a quarterly meeting of the Museum Book Club.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
