The fifty acres of swampy land in North Frankfort, Kentucky, has had many names: “the lower part of the city,” “the Craw” or just “Craw,” “the Bottom” or just “Bottom.” Underneath the neighborhood’s reputation as “a rough class of people, who didn’t mind killing or being killed,” however, it had a vigor marked by a sense of belonging, friendships that defied racial segregation, and a cohesion that acted against the daily struggle of poverty.
In Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community, Douglas A. Boyd weaves together history, folklore, and geography to offer a compelling and sensitive meditation on a forgotten neighborhood and what it meant to those who knew it best.
Douglas A. Boyd, is the director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky. Mr. Boyd coedited Community Memories: A Glimpse of African American Life in Frankfort, Kentucky .
Reservations are suggested.