Baskin has conducted some interviews already, and the project is an opened-ended one, but as the youngest graduates of Lincoln Institute are now in their 60s, he is anxious to talk with alumni and former faculty before opportunities are lost. Right now he is concentrating on people in Kentucky, the Louisille area and southern Indiana, but he hopes to arrange interviews at the Lincoln Institute National Reunion which is scheduled July 30-Aug. 1 at the Galt House in Louisville, but will follow up with anyone who gets in touch with him. Ideally, Baskin wants to interview several persons together, who can engage in a conversation about Lincoln Institute, rather than conducting individual interviews. He can be contacted at (859) 985-3393, by email at or by mail at CPO 1715, Berea College, Berea, KY 40404.
All of the videotaped interviews will become part of the collection of Berea College Hutchins Library Special Collections and be available as a resource to scholars, students and any others interested in the education of Blacks in Kentucky.

As a Berea College graduate, Baskin says he feels an obligation to help preserve knowledge about this important part of Berea College's history and because of Lincoln Institute's importance in the history of education in Kentucky."

“Since Berea played a role in creating Lincoln, I feel like I should play a role in keeping the memory alive,” he says. "It's a token of appreciation for people who made it possible for me to be where I am today."

Baskin is a 1972 graduate of Berea, joined Berea's faculty in 1983. Prior to teaching general and Black Studies, Baskin served as director of the College's Black Cultural Center and taught in the history department. He is editor of THE GRIOT, the journal of the Southern Conference on African American Studies, Inc. He currently serves as Vice President of the Kentucky African American Heritage Commission. He is on the Kentucky Humanities Council's Speaker's Bureau, giving talks state-wide on "Berea College: Black and White Together" and "Lincoln Institute: The View from Berea College." In addition to earning a B.A. from Berea, Baskin earned an M.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University.

For further information, Baskin can be contacted at (859) 985-3393 or .

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Lincoln Institute Classroom

LINCOLN INSTITUTE brief history
(from Berea College public relations sources and Baskin’s research)
For more information on the history of Lincoln Institute, visit the Lincoln Foundation website at: www.lincolnfdn.org

In 1904, the Kentucky General Assembly passed a law, aimed at Berea College, making it illegal in the state to educate white and black students together. At that time, Berea College’s student body was approximately 5/6 white and 1/6 black. However, for most years between 1866 - 1890, there were more black students than white. The law was challenged unsuccessfully in the courts, and in 1908 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law to be Constitutional, Berea found itself at a crossroads.

Of the several options considered, including moving Berea to Ohio or West Virginia, the College’s Trustees decided that Berea would have to admit white students only and the College would create a new school for black students. $400,000 was raised for this purpose and 444 acres of land in Shelby County was purchased for the campus.

The architects for the project were African Americans William Tandy and G.W. Foster of the New York firm of Tandy and Foster. The cornerstone of the first building, Berea Hall, was laid in October of 1911 and the first classes took place in the fall of 1912, with an enrollment of 85 boarding students.

Lincoln Institute Sewing Class

The curriculum at Lincoln Institute emphasized vocational education - home economics for women and training in agriculture, the building trades and maintenance engineering for men. There was also a teacher training course. All students worked one day a week without pay maintaining the campus and students could also work additionally for a small wage to pay for their school expenses. And also like Berea, Lincoln was a non-denominational Christian school.

Lincoln attracted students from all over the state, and eventually day students from Louisville and Shelbyville were allowed to enroll, but it suffered from a lack of adequate funding. When Whitney M. Young Sr became the first black principal (and the school’s last) of Lincoln Institute in 1935, those problems had been made worse by the Great Depression. An action that prolonged the survival of the school was legislation passed by the General Assembly in 1941 that mandated that all local boards of education “provide all students living within their districts with the opportunity to acquire a high school education,” either by transporting students to a nearby school system or paying their room and board expenses. Since half of Kentucky’s 120 counties did not provide high school facilities for Blacks at that time, many districts were willing to sign contracts with Lincoln Institute for the education of their black students.

In 1947, Lincoln Institute became a public school supported by the state and all property and buildings were deeded to the state with the stipulation that it would be used for educational purposes. In 1965, Lincoln Institute officially closed because, legally, desegregation of schools made a separate all-black school such as Lincoln unnecessary. For five year after that, until 1970, the campus was the site of an innovative educational program for disadvantaged students from throughout Kentucky. Now the campus is a Job Corps facility.