Lucy Craft Laney

Lucy Craft Laney was born free in Macon, Georgia, on the thirteenth of April 1854, the seventh of ten children of formerly enslaved parents who had purchased their own freedom. She read Latin by ten, learned Greek as a teenager, and was admitted to the inaugural class of Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta) in 1869 at the age of fifteen. She graduated in 1873.

She taught in Macon, Milledgeville, and Savannah through the 1870s and early 1880s. In 1883 she founded the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Augusta, Georgia — a school for African American girls and boys that she initially operated out of a Presbyterian church basement with five students. She solicited funding from the Presbyterian Church USA at the General Assembly in Minneapolis in 1886; the appropriation she received from a wealthy Pittsburgh donor named Francina E. H. Haines gave the school its name and its first building.

Haines Institute grew over the next four decades into one of the principal secondary schools for African American students in the southeastern United States. By 1912 it enrolled more than nine hundred students and ran the only kindergarten teacher-training program for Black women in Georgia. Its graduates included Mary McLeod Bethune (also placed in this archive), who taught at Haines for one year early in her career and credited Laney as her principal model.

Laney's pedagogy emphasized classical languages and academic rigor for Black girls in defiance of contemporary expectations that Black education should focus exclusively on industrial training. The graduates of Haines populated the Black teaching profession across Georgia, the broader Southeast, and the migrating Black North through the early twentieth century.

She died of kidney failure in Augusta on the twenty-fourth of October 1933, age seventy-nine. She is honored in the Georgia Capitol Rotunda by a portrait — one of the first three African Americans so honored in any U.S. state capitol.

She is honored here as the educator who built Haines Institute and made classical learning the right of Black girls in the American South.