In 36 years as a reporter for the Louisville newspapers, I have written dozens of stories about discrimination — against African Americans, women, the LGBTQ community and many other people.

This year alone, I wrote about how Louisville Metro police have cited black people at nearly six times the rate of white people for possession of marijuana and how they have pulled over African American drivers for petty traffic violations, then subjected them to humiliating searches in which they were handcuffed and forced out of their cars.

So, why did I write a 3,500-word story Sunday partially defending John Breckinridge Castleman, who was raised by slaves and fought for the Confederacy?

Also you may want to read: Quit asking whether white men are racists and instead just hold them accountable

The answer goes back to 1987. Assigned to do a project to mark the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution, I decided to write about the most important Supreme Court cases from Kentucky.

One of them involved a fiery African American militant from Louisville named William Warley.

In 1917, Warley, a postal carrier, newspaper editor and leader of Louisville’s fledgling NAACP chapter, challenged a deplorable local housing segregation ordinance that barred people of either race from moving to blocks where the majority of residents were the opposite color.

The law forbade black people from moving to a white-majority block, and white people from living in a black-majority area.

City leaders, who were white, of course, said the law was necessary to prevent "conflict between the white and colored races" and the inevitable decline of property values when black people moved next door to white people.

Surprisingly, in 1917, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law, ruling for Warley and a white real estate agent, Charles Buchanan, who had teamed with him to challenge the law.

So what’s that got to do with Castleman, you ask?

In 1924, six years after Castleman’s death, Warley and 18 other black leaders signed a letter to the Courier Journal insisting that Castleman, who led the city’s park board for more than two decades, had "steadfastly refused to allow any kind of racial segregation in the parks of the city."

Check out: A crooked lawyer cost 800 clients their disability checks. Now, they may get them back

"This has been true in theory and in fact," said the writers, who at the time were protesting a rule that had just gone into effect excluding black people from Cherokee and other large parks. "For the colored people have used all parks of the city … without hindrance through all these years and with little or no trouble of any kind."

If Warley and other black contemporaries gave Castleman their approval, I thought, what gave people the right to second-guess him, and them, 100 years later?

Warley was hardly a "Stepin Fetchit" who bowed and scraped before white people. He was radical for his time — or any time.

In 1914, he led a black boycott of Louisville's National Theater, which forced African Americans to enter by a rear door. When some black people refused to go along, he printed their names in his newspaper, The Louisville News.

In the 1920s, he intervened to prevent lynchings in rural Kentucky, several times risking his own life through his investigation.

In short, if Warley defended Castleman’s record, I thought, it was worth giving him a close look before his likeness was removed from the public square where it has been the past 106 years.

What I found is that Castleman did fight for the Confederacy, and in his autobiography, he expressed some repugnant views on black people and naively idealistic ones about slavery.

But commanding the forerunner to the Kentucky National Guard, he fought to prevent lynchings. He embraced Lincoln and repudiated the Confederal cause. And as parks commissioner, he fought to keep black people from being excluded entirely from the parks.

Warley wasn’t the only one who endorsed Castleman. Other signatories of the letter included I. Willis Cole, publisher of another black newspaper who fought against Jim Crow laws and was a champion of justice.

They knew as well as anyone the context in which Castleman functioned as parks leader — that "separate but equal" was the law of the land at the time.

Against that backdrop, few thought Warley and Buchanan had a chance of overturning Louisville's residential segregation ordinance.

The chronology of a controversy: How the Castleman statue went from revered to reviled

The courts repeatedly had condoned the segregation of schools and railroad cars, as well as measures barring black people and white people from intermarrying.

Louisville's lawyers insisted their ordinance applied equally: White people were barred from moving to black blocks, just as black people were prohibited from doing the reverse. In fact, the lawyers said, the ordinance would improve black neighborhoods by "ridding Negro sections of that undesirable class of white people which is frequently found in such localities."

Pendleton Beckley, the city attorney, said in a brief that the law would affect only "that relatively small percentage of Negroes who, to gratify their newborn social aspirations, seek to move into white neighborhoods."

Buchanan and Warley cooked up an ingenious scheme to challenge the ordinance. Buchanan agreed to sell a vacant lot to Warley that was on a majority white block in Portland.

Warley signed a contract to buy it, but only on the condition that he could live there, which he could not because of the city's segregation law. Buchanan then sued Warley for breach of contract.

A Jefferson Circuit Court judge dismissed the suit, and Kentucky’s high court affirmed.

With nowhere to turn, Buchanan and Warley took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The law's stated goal may have been to "preserve the peace," Buchanan said, but its true purpose "was to place the Negro, however industrious, thrifty and well-educated, in as inferior a position as possible."

The prospects for a victory appeared slim. Just nine years earlier, the court had upheld a Kentucky law that banned private schools from teaching black and white students together. 

But on Nov. 5, 1917, the court struck down Louisville’s residential segregation on the grounds that it hindered the rights of white and black people to buy and sell property.

"That there exists a serious problem arising from race hostility may be freely admitted," the court said in a unanimous opinion in Buchanan vs. Warley. "But its solution cannot be promoted by depriving citizens of their constitutional rights and privileges."

Also: The 'sad, scary case' of how a nursing home whistleblower exposed a fatal cover-up

Warley never moved to the vacant lot on Pflanz Avenue in Portland, though his victory at the Supreme Court was one of his prouder moments. Two days after the decision, his first child was born, and she was named Victoria in its honor.

His radical style eventually brought him the enmity of both white people and more conservative black people, historian George Wright wrote in his seminal history, "Life Behind A Veil: Blacks in Louisville 1865-1930."

In 1929, when Warley sued Louisville to force it to integrate city parks, he could not raise enough money for an appeal to the Supreme Court. He had trouble keeping his paper afloat, often having to produce it alone.

His trials were compounded by a drinking problem, Wright found, which worsened in the 1930s, leaving Warley virtually bankrupt. He and his newspaper both died in 1945.

If he were alive today, would Warley have wanted Castleman’s statue removed?

We’ll never know. But I don’t think so.

Reach Andrew Wolfson at 502-582-7189;; Twitter: @adwolfson. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today:

Read or Share this story: