The adventures of P.G. Peeples and Jim Host | Opinion

“P.G. Peeples is the only man I would trust with my wife and my wallet!”

That is what W. James “Jim” Host, 88 — raised in Ashland, Kentucky — a UK graduate and one of the most prominent American businessmen and public servants based in Lexington, Kentucky, said to me when I went to meet him — at P.G.’s recommendation — when I visited him the day after I was named acting president at Kentucky State University, 25 years ago. P.G., my lifelong Harlan County “homeboy” and head of the Lexington Urban League at the time, had backed my selection.

Jim is recognized as the pioneer of collegiate sports marketing, best known for founding Host Communications, which revolutionized the industry by creating the first corporate partner programs for the NCAA and securing long-term media and marketing rights for major universities, such as those in the SEC, particularly the University of Kentucky. Those now learning of P.G.’s stellar role in elevating the social contracts between Black and white residents in Central Kentucky need to know that Jim Host was also the gust of wind, the zephyr, beneath P.G.’s wings from the time P.G. began his work at the Lexington Urban League in 1969.

Like the white and Black characters in Mark Twain’s classic book, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Jim Host and P.G. Peeples, whose distinctive relationship was, at first, surely defined by the racial and social hierarchy of post-antebellum Lexington. In the book, Huck is a white boy who had absorbed many of the prejudices of his environment, and Jim is an enslaved Black man fleeing bondage. Legally and socially, Jim is considered property, and Huck initially sees himself as helping a “runaway slave,” which he believes is wrong.

As P.G. Peeples and Jim Host traveled together not far from the Kentucky River – just as Huckleberry Finn and Jim rode the Mighty Mississippi River — the dynamics of their association and rapport also underwent a profound transformation. From the racial hierarchy that marked the area in and around Memorial Coliseum (later Rupp Arena), their shared experiences and values created a bond of mutual trust; they came to share a raft that became; P.G. told me more than once, “a kind of classless and raceless space separate from the constraints of ‘proper’ Central Kentucky society.“

Jim Host accepted P.G. as a fully and unique human individual — smart, loyal, caring, and morally grounded — rather than as a representative of an emerging civil rights organization. In Jim, P.G. found a loyal supporter and bridge to Jim’s extensive business and political network. They became more than colleagues and associates. They became brothers.

Only God knows the most critical moments when Jim Host decided to support P.G. Peeples, even if it meant he might have been damned by some of his mainly white business and political network because he was rejecting the moral code that they both had been taught. That decision marked the culmination of their relationship: from socially conditioned inequality to a deeply personal friendship grounded in shared humanity and deep commitments to improve their community. It’s not a stretch to say that Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald had a relationship similar to that of PG and Jim Host.

Many, many people — Black and white — in Central Kentucky benefited from this singularly matchless relationship as it evolved from one shaped by the history of slavery, discrimination, and prejudice into one that challenged both, making it the moral and emotional core of their work together.

The Adventures of Jim Host and PG Peeples will make another remarkable novel and a valuable lesson for all mankind.

William H. Turner is a former interim president of Kentucky State University, an advocate for marginalized communities, an author, and a native of Harlan County.