Post by libby on Jan 30, 2016 13:48:32 GMT -6
Georgia Davis Powers, legislator and civil rights pioneer, dies at 92
Georgia Davis Powers, the first woman and first black person elected to the state Senate who during a 21-year career won passage of major legislation to help Kentucky’s most vulnerable citizens, died early Saturday in Louisville. She was 92.
Powers was elected in 1967 after working in two statewide political campaigns and helping organize civil rights marches across the South. In 1989, a year after her retirement, a book revealed she also had been Martin Luther King Jr.’s lover.
Powers, who had suffered from congestive heart failure for several years, died at 3:40 a.m. at a brother’s home in Louisville, said Raoul Cunningham, president of the Louisville NAACP and a longtime friend.
“Clearly, she was not afraid to ask difficult questions and seek solutions to answers to problems involving race, class, or gender,” said Gerald Smith, a University of Kentucky history professor who interviewed Powers extensively in 2010 and arranged for her to donate most of her papers to UK Special Collections. “She holds an influential and undeniable place in Kentucky history.”
Read more here: www.kentucky.com/news/state/article57463143.html
Georgia Davis Powers, the first woman and first black person elected to the state Senate who during a 21-year career won passage of major legislation to help Kentucky’s most vulnerable citizens, died early Saturday in Louisville. She was 92.
Powers was elected in 1967 after working in two statewide political campaigns and helping organize civil rights marches across the South. In 1989, a year after her retirement, a book revealed she also had been Martin Luther King Jr.’s lover.
Powers, who had suffered from congestive heart failure for several years, died at 3:40 a.m. at a brother’s home in Louisville, said Raoul Cunningham, president of the Louisville NAACP and a longtime friend.
“Clearly, she was not afraid to ask difficult questions and seek solutions to answers to problems involving race, class, or gender,” said Gerald Smith, a University of Kentucky history professor who interviewed Powers extensively in 2010 and arranged for her to donate most of her papers to UK Special Collections. “She holds an influential and undeniable place in Kentucky history.”
Read more here: www.kentucky.com/news/state/article57463143.html