Mary Barksdale

Mary Zoner Hurston Barksdale Lawes (November 24, 1920 - October 9, 1992[1] ) was a prominent African-American nurse and businesswoman. She was the owner and administrator, for twenty-seven years, of the Hurstdale Rest Home, the only black-owned rest home in western Massachusetts.

Mary Barksdale
Born(1920-11-24)November 24, 1920
Georgia, U.S.
DiedOctober 9, 1992(1992-10-09) (aged 71)
Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.
Alma materSpelman College

Life and career

Lawes was born in 1920 to John Paul Hurston and Lula Mae Taylor, in Atlanta, Georgia.[2] She attended Spelman College[3] and migrated to the Springfield area in the 1940s.

In 1952, she graduated from a Springfield area nursing school and became a licensed L.P.N. She was one of the first Black nurses to work for the Holyoke visiting nurses program and later Springfield Hospital.

Community service

Barksdale was a past President of the Jack and Jill Club of America,[4] a national black mothers' organization. She was on the Board of Directors for both the Action for Equality and Achiever's Opportunity Corporations. She also received a certificate of excellence from Harvard University[5] for her work in gerontology. She, along with her late husband, Abraham Barksdale, was instrumental in the founding of the D. Edward Wells Federal Credit Union.[6]

Civil rights

Her husband's Abraham Barksdale's crowning achievement was the desegregation of Springfield Public Schools. In Barksdale v. Springfield School Committee, a de facto segregation lawsuit, Abraham Barksdale and Mary Barksdale challenged the concept of racial isolation because the school a child attended was based on the neighborhood in which you lived.[7] Barksdale won and Springfield Public Schools were desegregated in 1965.

References
  1. "Mary Barksdale". genealogybank. Retrieved 14 October 2013.
  2. "Mary Zoner Hurston Barksdale (1920 - 1992) - Find A Grave Memorial". www.findagrave.com. Retrieved 2016-02-24.
  3. "Spelman College". www.spelman.edu. Retrieved 2016-09-22.
  4. jack-and-jill.org
  5. Welcome to Harvard University
  6. United States of America Before the National Credit Union Administration Archived 2007-06-07 at the Wayback Machine Accessed February 13, 2008
  7. "BARKSDALE v. SPRINGFIELD SCHOOL COMMITTEE | Leagle.com". www.leagle.com. Retrieved 2016-02-24.
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