One of our state's most significant historical figures in the field of education is receiving her just due today from the Georgia Historical Society. Lucy Craft Laney's courageous career is being memorialized in cast iron at her former Augusta home on Phillips Street, site of the black history museum named in her honor.
The Georgia Historical Society approves only 12 historical marker requests a year, says Christy Crisp, the society's program director, and it's hard to think of anyone more deserving than Ms. Laney.
After graduating from Atlanta University in 1873, she taught children in Macon and Savannah before moving to Augusta, where she started the city's first African-American school, which became known as the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute. As if this wasn't enough of an achievement for a black woman in the deep South during that era, she also formed the city's first nursing school for blacks.
The Laney marker is an acknowledgment by the state's leading historical organization that her influence on education, women's history and black history was felt - in fact, is still being felt - far beyond Augusta.
As Christine Miller Betts, executive director of the Lucy Craft Laney Museum, correctly notes, the historical marker preserves the legacy of the many contributions Ms. Laney made to her community and the state. It is a legacy all Georgians can take pride in.
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