Fifty-two years after the Jonesville residents — a Bowling Green African-American community — relocated, students in John Conley’s English 100 classes have dug deep into WKU’s forgotten history, which, according to Conley, was assigned within the context of a national conversation about the longstanding injuries that have been done to black people in the U.S. and in the context of a growing nation- al conversation about reparations.

“We’re working on a unit in which the students are encouraged to learn a little bit about the history of Jonesville and to kind of sit with that knowledge and to try to notice, then think about, then write about the history right under our feet on Western’s campus, how that impacts the way we under- stand ourselves as members of this university community,” Conley said.

If a student passed by the marker that stands just past Nick Denes Field on the outskirts of WKU’s campus, they could read that a community called Jonesville was bordered by Dogwood Drive, Russellville Road and the railroad tracks.

From 1881 to 1967, Jonesville was a neighborhood with a predominantly black population. At its height, 400- 500 people called Jonesville home and around 70 homes were peppered within it. A church stood as the center of the community — a church where Maxine Ray remembers attending Valentine’s Day parties and listening to ghost stories in a neighborhood many at WKU don’t know anything about.

Ray is one of the few people left who remember growing up in Jonesville. She was born there, along with her grandmother and mother. She played softball in vacant lots and borrowed books from the small library at the church.

And when asked what Jonesville looked like to her growing up, Ray gave a wistful smile and a single word:

“Home.”

Home was a small community where everybody knew everybody. Home was where her parents provided everything they needed and where Ray didn’t know that her mother worked until junior high because her she was always there when Ray came home from school.