Lucy Craft Laney

Lucy Craft Laney was born free in Macon, Georgia, on April 13, 1854, the seventh of ten children of David and Louisa Laney. Her father, a carpenter and later a Presbyterian minister, had purchased his own freedom roughly two decades before her birth and afterward secured his wife's freedom as well. In a state that forbade the education of Black people, young Lucy learned to read by the age of four, and by twelve she could translate Latin passages, including Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War.

At fifteen she entered the first class of the newly founded Atlanta University, graduating from its Normal Department in 1873. For a decade she taught in the public schools of Macon, Milledgeville, and Savannah before settling in Augusta. There, in 1883, she opened a school for Black children in the basement of Christ Presbyterian Church. It began with a handful of pupils and swelled to more than two hundred by its second year.

Securing a state charter in 1886, Laney named the school the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute after Francine E. H. Haines, a Presbyterian benefactor whose gift helped sustain it. Under Laney's leadership the institute grew to hundreds of students and dozens of teachers, offering rigorous academic and teacher training. She founded Augusta's first kindergarten and its first nurse-training program for Black women, and she mentored figures such as Mary McLeod Bethune.

A founder of the Augusta NAACP chapter in 1918 and active in the National Association of Colored Women, Laney served as principal for fifty years until her death on October 23, 1933. She was later among the first three Georgians honored with a portrait in the state capitol. Her name endures on the school, the boulevard, and the museum that keep her light burning for generations she taught to rise.