Mary Jackson McCrorey was an educator and activist who devoted her life to advocating for Black Americans. Best known for the twenty years she spent working alongside Lucy Craft Laney at the Haines Institute in Augusta, she was also the first Black educator to serve as principal in the Athens public school system and a member of the teaching faculty at Atlanta University.
Early Life and Career
Mary Jackson McCrorey was born in Athens to Alfred and Louisa Jackson in about 1867. She was the seventh of their eight children and the first to be born after emancipation. Though neither Jackson parent could read or write, all of their children were literate, and three of their daughters—Camilla, Mary, and Judia Jackson Harris— became educators. Jackson McCrorey received her basic schooling in Athens, likely at the Knox Institute, which was the only school open to Black students during her childhood. She may have also received lessons from her older sister Camilla, who had been a teacher at the Knox Institute in the early years after emancipation. Jackson McCrorey was the first member of her family to attend Atlanta University, graduating from the Normal course in 1885. Later she continued her education with summer courses at other influential institutions, including the University of Chicago and Harvard University. In 1941 she was awarded an honorary doctorate in pedagogy from Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina.
Jackson-McCrorey first appears in the teaching rolls for rural Clarke County in 1880, when she was still young enough to be in school herself. Then, upon receiving her teaching degree from Atlanta University in 1885, Jackson McCrorey took a more prestigious position in Athens’s newly-opened public school system, becoming the principal of the Foundry Street School in 1886. The Athens School Board used a series of subject tests to audition its prospective teachers, and in June 1886, Jackson McCrorey received the highest score in the entire applicant pool, including both Black and white hopefuls. After Athens she spent time as a teacher and principal in Orlando, Florida, and she was a member of the teaching faculty at Atlanta University during the 1892-1893 school year.
Haines Institute
Jackson McCrorey moved to Augusta in 1895 to work alongside Lucy Craft Laney as the associate principal of the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute. Considered the equal to Laney in both intellect and passion for racial uplift, Jackson McCrorey expanded the Haines educational program, organized the summer teacher training institutes, and participated in projects to promote Black welfare and education. In 1904, for example, she was elected assistant secretary of the National Association of Colored Land Grant Colleges and Principals of Normal Schools, and in 1912, she spearheaded Augusta’s Civic Improvement League.
Like Laney, Jackson McCrorey also traveled widely to raise funds for Haines. She worked closely with the Board of Missions for Freedmen of the Presbyterian Church, a group that provided support to the Haines Institute and many other Presbyterian-identified Black schools and churches in the South. As one contemporary observed, Jackson McCrorey spoke “in almost every city of importance in the North and West.”
Though Jackson McCrorey left Haines after twenty years of service, she remained deeply attached to Laney and the institution. When Laney died in 1933, Jackson McCrorey expressed her grief to W. E. B. Du Bois, writing “she was the closest friend I ever had.”
Johnson C. Smith University
In 1916 at nearly fifty years of age, Mary Jackson married Dr. Henry L. McCrorey, President of Biddle University (later Johnson C. Smith University) and a widower with four children at home. After moving from Georgia to her husband’s home in Charlotte, North Carolina, Jackson McCrorey took on both official and unofficial roles at the university, including serving as faculty for the North Carolina State summer school for teachers, and as the counselor of women at Johnson C. Smith University.
After moving to North Carolina, Jackson McCrorey carried on the regional and national advocacy that she began in Georgia. She presented at the Urban League’s 1917 national social work conference, and later partnered with Atlanta’s Lugenia Burns Hope and others to organize national services at the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) for young Black women, and to challenge the YWCA’s exclusionary policies by pushing for Black representation in leadership. She was also involved in Mary Church Terrell’s National Association of Colored Women, was a founding member of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, and a signatory of the widely-circulated 1921 pamphlet, “Southern Negro Women and Race Cooperation.” Jackson McCrorey also worked alongside Mary McLeod Bethune, serving as corresponding secretary for the International Council of Women of the Darker Races beginning in 1922, and as an officer in the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) from its founding in 1935; she held both of these positions until her death in 1944. Jackson McCrorey was an internationalist in her work, engaged in advocating for and learning from Caribbean women, and in 1936, drafted the NCNW’s telegram to President Roosevelt expressing the organization’s sympathy with the Jews in Germany.
Mary Jackson McCrorey was killed in January 1944, in a tragic fire that gutted the President’s House at Johnson C. Smith University. Along with Jackson McCrorey’s life, the fire consumed Jackson McCrorey’s vast correspondence, her writings, her family memorabilia, and records from her time at the Haines Institute.
In addition to her husband, she was survived by her sister, Judia Jackson Harris, to whom she left the bulk of her property and material possessions, and multiple nieces and nephews. She is buried in Charlotte with her husband and stepchildren.
