Lucy Craft Laney: The Educator Who Built a College in a Church Basement

Lucy Craft Laney was born in eighteen fifty-four in Macon, Georgia, one of ten children. Her father had purchased his own freedom before she was born and later purchased her mother's freedom as well. By the time Laney was four, she could read. By twelve, she was translating Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War from Latin. In eighteen sixty-nine she joined the first class at Atlanta University and graduated from the teacher training program four years later.

She taught in Macon, Savannah, Milledgeville, and Augusta. Then, in eighteen eighty-three, she did something that had almost no precedent for a Black woman in the post-Reconstruction South: she started her own school. She began in the basement of Christ Presbyterian Church here in Augusta with a handful of students and no guaranteed funding. Within three years the state had chartered it. She named it the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute, after a northern Presbyterian woman named Francine Haines who donated ten thousand dollars after hearing Laney speak at a church convention.

By nineteen twelve, Haines employed thirty-four teachers and enrolled nine hundred students. Laney added the first kindergarten for Black children in Augusta, and created the first nursing training program for Black women in the city. She taught Latin herself in the college preparatory program. Haines graduates went on to Howard, Fisk, and Yale. The school was not merely an educational institution; it hosted orchestra concerts and lectures and served as the cultural center of Augusta's Black community for decades.

Laney died in nineteen thirty-three after fifty years as principal of the school she had built. In nineteen seventy-four, Governor Jimmy Carter selected her portrait as the first portrait of a Black woman to be displayed in the Georgia state capitol. The school she founded no longer exists, but the people it shaped, and the institution it proved was possible, shaped this city and well beyond it.