Pioneering Black Louisville journalist Mervin Aubespin dead at 86

Mervin Aubespin, one of The Courier Journal's first Black reporters, who dedicated his life to documenting local Black history, has died.

Aubespin died June 26 at the age of 86. He was living in Southern California.

From talks with Nelson Mandela early in his South African presidency, high school classes with a teenage Muhammed Ali and reports on the frontlines of racial protests in the 1960s, Aubespin recorded key landmark events in history by living it.

Speaking with The Courier Journal decades later, Aubespin said he felt pulled into journalism because there was no accurate depiction of what it was like to be a Black resident in Louisville nor any consistent coverage of Black issues.

"I noticed also that there wasn't much written about us," Aubespin said in 2013.

In 1996, Aubespin was one of a few journalists from across the world selected to travel to South Africa and meet with then-President Mandela.

As Mandela took a seat across from him, Aubespin recalled in a Courier Journal article: "It occurs to me that I am living history. I am meeting and talking with someone whose story will be told over and over."

Aubespin's story has also been shared over and over — from being born into a Creole family in Opelousas, Louisiana, in 1937 to moving to Louisville for a fresh start in the late 1950s, where he described the deep hardships facing Black residents at the time.

"When I got here in 1958, there were no movie theaters open to Blacks downtown, no restaurants," Aubespin told a Courier Journal reporter in 2013. "And if you wanted to buy clothes, you could buy them, but you couldn't try them on."

Aubespin was active in local civil rights demonstrations for public accommodations in 1961.

He was also a dedicated artist as a member of the Louisville Arts Workshop, which is where he met sculptor Ed Hamilton in the late 1960s.

"I thought I was the only Black artist in Louisville," Hamilton told The Courier Journal, recalling how he was just freshly graduated out of art school when he first connected with other local Black artists. "So when I found them, I thought, 'Oh, my life has totally changed.'"

Together, Aubespin and Hamilton fashioned an arts community in the city where Black artists could showcase their work and share their skills.

"We were all just together in our role to try to create a space where it was safe for kids to come and learn and for adults to come and learn what art was all about," Hamilton said. "So Merv was all a part of that too."

Aubespin was hired by The Courier Journal in 1967 as the newspaper's first Black news artist, though he was soon pulled into a reporter position to cover racial unrest and riots in west Louisville the following year.

In a first-person account, Aubespin wrote that a city police officer shoved a shotgun to his chest and ordered him to leave the area during the 1968 riots, refusing to believe he was a reporter despite being presented his credentials.

When a white photographer abandoned him out of fear for his own safety, Aubespin directed his younger brother and a friend to take photos while he reported at the scene.

"Looking at the stories years later, I realized that I didn't even get a byline," Aubespin wrote in 1993.

Aubespin later became an associate editor at The Courier Journal.

Even outside his role at the newspaper, he still had brushes with Louisville legends. When he taught mechanical drawing at Central High School, Aubespin remembers occasionally driving a teenaged Muhammad Ali to school, where Aubespin had him as a student.

Aubespin mentored hundreds of Black students or journalists throughout his decades in a newsroom, including several who would become chief editors of other newspapers as well as a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.

"He did more than give lip service to the issue of diversity," Bennie Ivory, former executive editor of The Courier-Journal, said in 2007.

Throughout the decades, Hamilton and Aubespin developed a close friendship — one consisting of spirited Derby parties, outdoor dinners featuring Aubespin's Louisiana-style gumbo and a notable trip to Paris and Rome with their spouses and friends.

As an artist, Hamilton recalled Aubespin painting local scenes, such as the heart of the Black business district on old Walnut Street before it was lost to urban renewal, before delving into a more abstract style later in his life. He still has some of Aubespin's work — a stylized jazz scene — in his home today.

After retiring from The Courier Journal in 2002, Aubespin kept recording history. In 2011, he was one of three authors to co-write "Two Centuries of Black Louisville," which features rare photographs and highlights the struggles, heritage and culture of the city's Black activists and the evolution of the Black community.

"We didn't think there was any sufficient documentation on the success and that history and recognition for the Louisville Black community, which was a very, very diverse but very, very solid and comprehensive community, with a lot of people who achieved a lot of things that people didn't know about," said Ken Clay, a co-author and close friend of Aubespin.

Clay said Aubespin had a "gregarious personality. He could immediately make a very positive impression."

Aubespin was also a local leader in the Black community, Clay said.

A former president of the National Association of Black Journalists, he founded that organization's first local chapter — the Louisville Association of Black Journalists. He has been inducted into both the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame and the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame.

He was awarded the Distinguished Service to Journalism Award in 1991, given by the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communications. He also received the Ida B. Wells Award for his dedication to bringing minorities into the field of journalism.

In 2010, he was the recipient of Louisville's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Award.

"Dr. King had a dream, and Merv Aubespin had a passion and a voice for fairness and equality," Jerry Abramson, then-Louisville Mayor, said in 2010. "Over his decades of teaching, reporting and mentoring, Merv has helped shape the dreams and voices of many individuals and made this community a much better place."

Following his death, former Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer recalled Aubespin as an "enthusiastic promoter" with an "infectious good humor."

"Merv's lifelong passion was finding ways he could lift people up, and after he left the newspaper, he found politics was one way to do that," Fischer said in a statement. "As a candidate and as Mayor, I benefited from his wise counsel and support, and I will always cherish our tradition of spending Election Day at the Kroger at 26th and Broadway, encouraging people to go vote."

"He was a true friend," Fischer continued.

Reach reporter Rachel Smith at rksmith@courierjournal.com or @RachelSmithNews on X, formerly known as Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Pioneering Black Louisville journalist Mervin Aubespin dead at 86