Lucy Craft Laney

Lucy Craft Laney was born to free Black parents in Macon, Georgia, before the Civil War, and showed early academic promise, reportedly reading fluently by age four with encouragement from the family she and her mother worked for. She attended Atlanta University as part of its first graduating class in 1873, one of the earliest cohorts of formally educated Black women in the post-Civil War South.

In 1883, Laney founded a school in Augusta, Georgia, that began with just six students meeting in the lecture room of a local church, and grew within a few years into the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute, one of the first schools providing formal academic education, rather than only vocational training, for Black children in Augusta and the surrounding region. Under her leadership as principal for fifty years, the school expanded to serve hundreds of students and trained many future Black educators, including Mary McLeod Bethune, who taught briefly at Haines before founding her own institution.

Laney insisted on rigorous college-preparatory academics at a time when many white philanthropic donors pressured Black schools to focus solely on vocational training, and she also established the region's first kindergarten and nurse training programme for Black students in Augusta. She continued leading Haines Institute until her death in 1933, and Augusta later named a public school and a downtown historic district in her honour.