Augusta has a school, a museum and a road named for Lucy Craft Laney, but many Augusta’s know very little about the educator and civil rights trailblazer.
Laney was born in the age of slavery, but she was never a slave herself. During the Antebellum period in the South, a slave who knew a skilled trade could work on his or her own and make money that would belong to his or her owner. Laney’s father, David, was a very talented carpenter and managed to save enough money to buy his and his wife Louisa’s freedom.
The family, which thrived in Macon, Ga, grew large, with young Lucy being the seventh of ten children.
MORE: Area teachers undergo professional development at Augusta University Summer Institute
It is clear that Laney’s mother was determined that all of her children would be educated. According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, Laney could read English by the age of four and Latin by age twelve.
In fact, Laney was so fluent in Latin that she was able to translate Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War.
After graduating high school in Macon, a rarity for any girl of any color, Laney was accepted into the first class at Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta University) and graduated with a degree in teaching in 1873, making her one of the very few college educated Black women in the nation.
Laney’s goal in life was to become a teacher herself.
Prior to the Civil War, free Blacks could become educated, as Laney did, but for slaves, it was mostly prohibited.
MORE: Campers sink their teeth into cooking camp
After the war, the former slaves were basically sent out on their own and most had to resort sharecropping, which left almost no time in the day for education, even if the parent’s could scrape up enough money for their children’s education.
In the post-war political climate, hardly any White person wanted to carry the stigma of teaching Black kids as it was largely felt that the former slaves themselves had caused the four years of carnage.
Laney felt it was up to her to educate those kids. As a scholar of Latin long before she entered college, she still winced at the fact that, as a Black woman, she had not been allowed to study the classics at Atlanta University and was determined that her students’ thirst for knowledge would be thoroughly quenched.
For a decade, Laney taught school in Savannah, Milledgeville and Augusta. In 1883, at the urging of friends at her Presbyterian church and with help from the Freedmen’s Bureau, Laney opened her own school in a lecture hall at the church. At first, her student body consisted of six kids, but it soon ballooned to more than 200.
Clearly, demand was outpacing the supply of teachers, so Laney traveled to Minneapolis, Minn., to attend the conferences for the Presbyteryian Church where she met Francine E. H. Haines, a woman who would become Laney’s lifelong benefactor.
After returning to Augusta, Laney created the Haines Normal Institute, named in her friend’s honor.
By 1912, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, the institute employed thirty-four teachers, had 900 students enrolled and offered a fifth year of college preparatory high school in which Laney herself, of course, taught Latin.
MORE: Georgia teachers running on empty, according to new report
According to Georgia women of achievement, Laney’s school created one of the first kindergartens for Black children, the first football team for a Black highs chool, the first nursing institute and also offered on the job and vocational training to meet the individual needs of the students.
Despite the threats presented by white supremist movements such as the Ku Klux Klan, Laney joined the Niagara Movement and helped found Augusta’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Laney never married and never had any children of her own. Her portrait, which hangs in the Georgia Capitol building alongside of Black luminaries such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., has a caption that celebrates, “The mother of the children of the people,” a woman who knew that “God didn’t use any different dirt to make me than the first lady of the land.”
…and that is something you might not have known.
Scott Hudson is the senior reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
