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Lucy Craft Laney (1854-1933) is a beloved name in Georgia. Her portrait hangs in the Georgia state capitol. Her labors for 50 years as principal of the Haines Institute for Industrial and Normal Education — the first school for African-American children in Augusta, Georgia — are treasured. She contributed much to the furtherance of education among African-Americans in her state. She was a life-long Presbyterian, and was also the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Rev. David Laney (1814-1894).
David was born a slave in 1814 in Sumter, South Carolina, and trained well in carpentry, but purchased his own freedom as well as that of his wife, Louisa Tracey Laney. Lucy was born twenty years later, in Macon, Georgia, the sixth child among ten biological siblings, several cousins and at least one orphan who was embraced by the family. David went on to become the first pastor of the Washington Avenue Presbyterian Church in Macon (ordained in 1866), and helped to found the Knox Presbytery and Atlantic Synod of the PCUSA. Lucy, meanwhile, was prepared from early in life to help educate young minds.
Mary Jackson McCrorey wrote a tribute to Lucy which appeared in the June 1934 issue of The Crisis. One vignette which she relates has to do with Lucy’s love of reading and her father’s encouragement.
Miss Laney was prepared — to begin with, by inheritance. She was bred, born and reared in a Christian family….
Her father was a Presbyterian minister with qualifications of marked leadership. Her mother and father had some education, they were for the times more than ordinarily intelligent, and they had high ideals in living. Both of them read good literature. He in particular read much of it. She handled a great deal of the kind while doing the delicate, careful work in looking after the home of her owner. They bought for their children good books and papers like those bought for their owners’ children. Miss Laney herself had read several of George Eliot’s books, Charles Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare before reading several of Shakespeare’s plays and she had read other standard literature long before she left home to go to school. Years after when she was at her best in developing her school she would enjoy telling me how she would get away with the other children in the family by her love for reading. She would sit on the woodpile reading while the sisters were washing the dishes and the boys were carrying in the wood for the night. When they complained because she was not helping to wash the dishes, she would say, “Pa, I just must finish reading this book.” And he would say, “Let her alone. I want her to finish her book.” How she chuckled to tell of getting out of washing those dishes. She often said in a modest manner to make me think that her mother and father, and especially her father, were looking for evidences in her life of much they had hoped and prayed and worked for in the making of their family.
A child who reads will often grow up with a love for learning. Certainly this was the case with Lucy Craft Laney, and she passed on that love of learning to many during a long career spent educating the young of Georgia.
