The Mountains We Call Home
The Mountains We Call Home
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Background
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, gender discrimination, ableism, physical abuse, pregnancy termination, and mental illness. It also directly quotes the pejorative term “imbeciles.”
Cultural Context: The History and Destruction of Louisville’s West Walnut Street
From the 1920s to the 1950s, West Walnut Street in Louisville, Kentucky—now Muhammad Ali Boulevard—was the vivid commercial and cultural heart of the city’s African American community. Often compared to Memphis’s Beale Street or Harlem’s 125th Street, this district, stretching from roughly 6th to 13th Street, was home to more than 150 Black-owned businesses, including theaters like the Lyric, nightclubs like the Top Hat Club, professional offices, and shops. This thriving area existed as a self-sufficient haven for a community excluded by segregation from most of the city’s economic and social life.
In 1949, Title 1 of the Housing Act authorized a nationwide program of “Urban Renewal,” which aimed to clear areas designated as slums or “blighted.” While the Act was supposed to address areas that posed a danger to public health, it disproportionately affected Black communities. As Jessica LaVoice notes, “neighborhoods with a high share of Black residents were between two and three times more likely than white neighborhoods to be cleared and redeveloped” (LaVoice, J. “The Long-Run Implications of Slum Clearance: A Neighborhood Analysis.” Journal of Public Economics, vol. 236, August 2024). In Louisville, this policy was used to raze the West Walnut Street district in the 1960s, dismantling a prosperous area and displacing hundreds of Black families and businesses.
This history provides important context for The Mountains We Call Home. When the seamstress Patience frets that politicians will “bring in urban renewal to urban remove us” (230), she is referencing this specific, destructive historical process. Mrs. Claxton’s passionate drive to register voters is a fight for the political power needed to protect her community from the very forces that destroyed West Walnut Street, making Cussy’s work at the library part of a larger struggle for survival.
Historical Context: The Louisville Western Colored Branch Library
The library where Cussy serves her furlough is a historically significant institution. The Louisville Western Colored Branch Library, which opened in a temporary location in 1905 before moving into its permanent Carnegie-funded building in 1908, was the first free public library in the United States built exclusively for and staffed entirely by African Americans.
Philanthropist Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of thousands of libraries, but he did not mandate integration; instead, he funded separate facilities in segregated communities. Under the leadership of its pioneering first director, Reverend Thomas Fountain Blue, the Western Branch became a central hub for community life and education. It also housed the first training program for African American librarians in the country, making Louisville a leader in the field and preparing professionals who would go on to serve communities across the nation.
This context informs the setting of Richardson’s novel and Mrs. Claxton’s mission. When Cussy arrives and sees the motto “Knowledge Is Power” (161), she is entering a space founded on that principle as a means of racial uplift. Mrs. Claxton’s work to “grow readers” and “grow voters” directly continues the library’s legacy of empowerment (167). The narrative positions Cussy, a book woman from the mountains, within a parallel urban tradition, showing a shared commitment across different communities to Literacy as Liberation.
Historical Context: Eugenics and Mid-Century Prison Medicine
The threat of forced sterilization that looms over Cussy reflects the real-world application of eugenics in the mid-20th-century United States. The eugenics movement, a pseudoscience aimed at “improving” the human gene pool by controlling reproduction, heavily influenced U.S. policy. In the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, the court upheld a Virginia law allowing the compulsory sterilization of the “feebleminded,” with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes infamously writing, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” (Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. “Opinion of the Court.” Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 207. Supreme Court of the United States, 2 May 1927). By the 1960s, an estimated 60,000 Americans, two-thirds of them women, had been sterilized in state-run institutions. These procedures often targeted those deemed socially undesirable, including people living in poverty, people with mental illnesses, and women cited for “defiance” or “promiscuity.”
This historical reality provides the backdrop for Cussy’s imprisonment. The warden’s statement that the medical board ordered Cussy’s sterilization because they decided she doesn’t “have the capacity to rear children” is a direct echo of eugenic ideology (129). The use of lobotomies to control institutionalized populations was also common. By the early 1950s, tens of thousands of such procedures had been performed in the U.S., disproportionately on women, to make them more docile. The warden’s threat to use a similar surgery to make Cussy “obedient and calm” shows that her fears are grounded in a widespread, state-sanctioned system of medical abuse (114).
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