Bowling Green’s Downtown Academy visits small businesses and Shake Rag district

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – Students with the City of Bowling Green’s Downtown Academy got the chance to tour small businesses and learn about the historic Shake Rag district, seeing many of its top landmarks on Friday.

“Everywhere between the State Street Baptist Church to the Shake Rag Bar & Lounge and White Squirrel and Shake Rag Barbershop, all the way down to the Riverfront Park development that the city is working on… the Service One Credit Union, Mustang Club, Southern Queen and George Washington Carver Center area,” Downtown Development Coordinator Telia Butler says.

Students also got the chance to work on their capstone projects that will be presented in March, and could possibly help spark change in the city.

“We’ve had ideas from everything from public art and murals to some toolkits as resources that the community and downtown neighbors may want to use and collaborate on together. So we’re very excited to see how these projects finalize, because they’re going to leave an impact in the community,” Butler says.

During Black History Month, it’s important for students to learn about the history of one of the two prominent African-American communities in Bowling Green, which is why this tour was scheduled specifically for February.

“We wanted the students to understand more about the Shake Rag community, not just that it was a historically African-American community that got displaced, but learn about some of the really cool, groundbreaking characters and trailblazers that came from here, like Ora Porter, Kentucky’s first African-American nurse, or Ernest Hogan, father of ragtime, or Porter Parish Grainger, the first jazz composer in New York City… like some of those really, really neat characters along with the story of the Southern Queen and the State Street School and how those are being revitalized and rebuilt to still honor that heritage and tell that story and they also learned more about the George Washington Carver Center and how they are working on a Shake Rag walking tour that’s self-guided, where there will be physical markers that tell more stories of Shake Rag available to anyone, any time to just walk along the street and read more about Shake Rag,” Butler says.

The next meeting will take place on March 13th and will focus on professional development.