Lucy Craft Laney
Written by Daisy Zeijlon
Source: Georgia Encyclopedia
b. April 13, 1854 - d. October 24, 1933
Lucy Craft Laney was a groundbreaking teacher, founder and activist who spent her life advocating for the rights of Black youth and women in the South. Her relationship with domestic subjects was complex; she taught them, but only so her students could safely gain access to rigorous academic training.
Bio
Lucy Craft Laney was born enslaved in Macon, Georgia, and her father bought their family’s freedom when she was a child (McCluskey). She learned to read as a young girl—likely from a member of the family her mother worked for—which enabled her to pursue higher education at a moment when just 5% of African Americans were literate (Perkins). At age 15 she enrolled in the first class of Atlanta University to earn a degree in the “Normal Department” or, as we would now call it, the teacher training program. In the nineteenth century this was often the only higher education track available to women, who were typically excluded from academic courses.
Haines Normal and Industrial Institute
Wanting to make academic training available to Black girls, Laney established the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in 1883. It was the first school in Augusta, Georgia for Black children, which Laney intended for girls but ultimately opened to all students. Starting with a class of just 6, within two years Haines had over 200 students (BlackPast) and by the time Laney passed away in 1933, it had more than 2,000 (McCluskey). For a time it was the only school in Georgia and one of just a few nationwide to offer high school-level courses for Black students—public high schools for African Americans were not widespread until into the twentieth century (Perkins). She went on to open Augusta’s first kindergarten and first nursing school for Black students, serve as a founding member of the NAACP’s Augusta chapter, and lead voter registration drives for women (Perkins). Laney’s career epitomizes the essential role that nineteenth-century Black women educators played in advancing the rights of Southern African Americans.
Pragmatism & Idealism
Laney was not a domestic scientist; rather, she used domestic training as a tool through which she could empower Black youth. At Haines, Laney did provide her students with excellent industrial training: she taught classes in sewing, cooking and gardening and sought out the highest quality teachers from around the country (Perkins). Still, academics remained her express priority. Subjects included Greek, Latin, philosophy, biology, ancient history, and in their extracurricular time students could participate in orchestra, debate, chorus or theater (Perkins). This was the kind of rigorous study that the intersection of racial and gender oppression had denied Laney at Atlanta University.
Why, then, did Laney include domestic subjects at all? This dual curriculum is reflective of a combined pragmatism and idealism that was common for Black educators in the late nineteenth century (McCluskey). As Sheena Harris has argued, these domestic skills were a kind of survivalist strategy (Harris) To inhabit a Black body in the nineteenth-century South was to navigate a landscape of white violence. Education was a means to full citizenship rights (Harris) and as such presented a threat to white supremacy. Vocational programs made education for Black people less threatening to white people, upon whom Laney and her peers were reliant for funding. White Americans believed that domestic skills were “instinctual” or “natural” for African Americans (Walden)—a legacy of enslavement that reveals a deep desire to maintain a racial hierarchy. White Southerners often refused to sell land to Black school founders or rent it to teachers looking for houses, and schools that did get built were often burned down (Harris). It was an inescapable truth that most Black educators were reliant upon white people for funding, which was a source of constant anxiety for Laney (Feger). Indeed, The Haines Normal and Industrial Institute was named for Francine E. H. Haines, a white Presbyterian missionary who provided the $10,000 Laney needed to open it (BlackPast).
Including but de-prioritizing domestic training was a way for Laney to advance the rights of the Black community while maneuvering through an entrenched system of white supremacy. Teaching domesticity to her students enabled her to grant them access to a previously prohibited academic education without putting them at increased risk. Put simply, operating within this framework allowed Laney to subvert it.
Sources
Feger, H. V. “A GIRL WHO BECAME A GREAT WOMAN.” Negro History Bulletin, vol. 5, no. 6, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, 1942, pp. 123–123, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44246284.
Jones, Ashley. “Lucy Craft Laney (1854-1933)”. BlackPast, 15 November 2017. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/laney-lucy-craft-1854-1933/.
Harris, Sheena. “Margaret Murray Washington.” Alabama Women, edited by Susan Youngblood Ashmore and Lisa Lindquist Dorr, University of Georgia Press, 2017, pp. 129-144. muse.jhu.edu/book/52089.
McCluskey, Audrey Thomas. “‘We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible’: Black Women School Founders and Their Mission.” Signs, vol. 22, no. 2, University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 403–26, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175282.
Perkins, Linda M. “‘Bound to Them by a Common Sorrow’: African American Women, Higher Education, and Collective Advancement.” The Journal of African American History, vol. 100, no. 4, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, 2015, pp. 721–47, https://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.100.4.0721
Walden, Sarah. “TASTE AND RACE: Revisions of Labor and Domestic Literacy in the Early Twentieth Century.” Tasteful Domesticity: Women’s Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790-1940, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018, pp. 143–65,https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv6p4ph.10