The Kentucky Commission on Human Rights is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, but instead of looking at its past, the commission has its eyes on the future.
There is no question that human rights have come a long way in Kentucky since the days the commission was created by Gov. Bert T. Combs in 1960. In those days, not a single black was playing interscholastic sports at the University of Kentucky ... or any other school in the Southeastern Conference, for that matter. In 1960, women still were second class citizens in Kentucky whose place was in the kitchen not in board rooms or in the General Assembly or any other governing body.
How things have changed. While women still hold a decided minority in the state legislature, Kentucky has elected a woman governor and a female member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Enough women have been elected to county offices — including judge-executive — and fiscal courts and city councils and city commissioners that their presence is no longer thought that unusual. Ashland proved years ago that a black can be elected to office in a city that is overwhelmingly white when it elected the late Wendell Banks to several terms on the Ashland Board of City Commissioners.
One local resident — attorney David O. Welch, a former Ashland mayor — has played a key role in the history of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights. A former chairman of the statewide commission, Welch helped it achieve its purpose of being an advocate for fairness and equal treatment in the state. Welch is a member of the commission’s hall of fame.
But as it enters its second half-century, the Kentucky Human Rights Commission is launching a listening series in communities throughout the state in which members hope to hear concerns and opinions about civil and human rights in Kentucky. The tour will include stops this month in Cadiz, Mayfield, Richmond, Somerset, Paris and Versailles, and we feel certain there will be a session later this year in Ashland, one in which we hope the commission will take a few minutes to recognize Welch for his contributions.
The human rights commission could have spent the year boasting of its accomplishments, but instead of celebrating how far the state has come, the commission is concentrating upon how far the state still needs to go.
That’s the right approach. We’ve come a long way as a state in the last half century, but there still is much more to accomplish.
