"ON NOT RUSTING OUT"

 “ON NOT RUSTING OUT – WE SHALL MAKE OURSELVES FREE”

To close out Women’s Herstory Month, I want to highlight a fellow Georgian, Lucy Craft Laney.  She was born on April 13, 1854, in Macon, Georgia, in the middle of the decade of struggle over slavery, in the same year that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in Congress.  Though born in the deep South, she was born as a free Black person, because her father Rev. David Laney had bought his freedom (and that of his wife Louisa) 20 years before Lucy was born. Rev. Laney was pastor of Washington Avenue Presbyterian Church in Macon.

Both her parents were strong believers in education, and they passed this belief on to their 10 children, including Lucy.  It was illegal to teach Black people to read throughout the South, including Georgia  – white oppressors still remembered that Nat Turner read the Bible and heard the message “Jesus means freedom” there.  Lucy’s mother, however, taught Lucy to read and by age 12, she was translating     from Latin, including Julius Caesar’s “Commentaries on the Gallic War.”  Lucy attended a mission school in Macon, run by the American Missionary Association and graduated from high school there.  She enrolled in 1869 in the first class of Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), a school where W.E.B. Dubois would later teach.  Dubois would become her lifelong friend and supporter.  Laney was miffed, however, that AU would not let her take courses in the classics because she was female.  She graduated in 1873 with a degree as a teacher.

Laney worked as a teacher for ten years in Macon, Milledgeville (home of Flannery O’Connor), and Savannah, before deciding to open her own school for Black girls in Augusta in 1883. She began her school in the basement of Christ Presbyterian Church in Augusta.   Her first class had 6 students, but the teaching was so excellent that word spread quickly, and by the end of the second year, the school had 234 students, including some Black boys who showed up.  She needed funding for this rapid expanse, and being a lifelong Presbyterian, she went to the Presbyterian General Assembly in Minneapolis in 1886 to ask for funding.  The Presbyterians turned her down – who wants to fund a hick school down in Georgia in the midst of neo-slavery?

One of the delegates to the Presbyterian assembly, however, was impressed with Laney’s work.  Francine E.H. Haines was president of Presbyterian Women’s Work, and she decided to make a substantial financial donation to the school, and in response to this generosity, Laney renamed the school to be “The Haines Normal Industrial Institute.”  Thanks to Haines’ support, the Presbyterians soon came on board.  The school grew to encompass an entire city block of buildings, and it was a viable alternative to the poor public education offered to people classified as “Black” in Augusta and in Georgia.  Mary McLeod Bethune began her teaching career at Haines, and Lucy Craft Laney became one of her mentors.  Because of its excellent reputation, the school’s enrollment grew to more than 900 students.  Among its many accomplishments were starting the first kindergarten for Black children in Georgia and one of the first in the South; starting the first Nurses’ Training School for Black girls and women;  starting the first football team from a Black high school in Georgia.  Laney served as principal of the school for over 50 years.

    Laney did not confine herself to the education world – she joined the Niagara Movement early on, and she helped to found the NAACP.  She fought for Black rights in Georgia and throughout the South as neo-slavery tore away at the rights won for Black people in the Civil War.  She was a strong voice for human rights and the need to educate all people, so that they would know the intellectual and political meaning of the self-evident truth “that all people are created equal.”  

    When her health began to fail, many of her friends and colleagues urged her to slow down, but her reply to them was “I don’t want to rust out; I intend to wear out – we shall make ourselves free.”  She died in 1933, and was buried on the grounds of the school.  The school remained in operation until 1949, when it merged with another high school to become Lucy Craft Laney High School, one of whose famous alumni is opera singer Jessye Norman.  Lucy Craft Laney became the first Black woman to have her portrait hung in the Georgia Capitol, joining Martin Luther King, Jr., and Henry McNeal Turner’s portraits, while Jimmy Carter was Governor.  The inscription under her portrait: “Mother of the people.”