Senator Georgia Powers Donates Papers, Gets A Well Deserved Honor From University Of Kentucky For Namesake Endowment Chair.

UK to get Sen. Powers' papers, name endowed chair for her
By Nancy C. Rodriguez

Louisville’s Georgia Davis Powers, a trailblazing former legislator and civil rights icon who marched with the late Rev. Martin Luther King, is donating a collection of her important papers and interviews to the University of Kentucky.

The university, which is scheduled to hold a press conference Friday morning to announce the acquisition, also will endow a chair in the name of Powers, a Springfield native who was the first female and first African American to serve in the Kentucky Senate.

The endowed chair will be part of UK’s Center for Research on Violence Against Women.

“I’m highly honored. It’s very unexpected and wonderful. I’m just elated over it,” said Powers, who was asked to donate her papers — legislative materials, speeches, newspaper articles, book manuscripts and oral history interviews — while completing an oral history project with the university this past summer.

Powers said having the endowed chair in her name is “an honor of all honors.”

“I have always been an advocate for women and African Americans and those without a voice,” she said, in an interview Thursday.

Powers graduated from Central High School in Louisville in 1940. She attended the old Louisville Municipal College, the segregated school of the University of Louisville, and later moved to Buffalo, N.Y., where she worked as a riveter in an airplane factory during World War II.

Powers, who permanently returned to Louisville in 1957, was elected to a seat in the Kentucky Senate in 1967. Starting with her first bill for a state-wide fair housing law, Powers carved out a 21-year career fighting for civil rights legislation that prohibited sex, job and age discrimination.

“Each person creates their own legacy daily by what they do for others. That’s what I have tried to do my whole life,” Powers said, when asked about how she would be remembered.

Dierdre Scaggs, associate dean of Special Collections at UK, said Powers’ oral histories and archival papers highlight her involvement in the Kentucky civil rights movement, her career as a senator and her experiences as a black woman.

“The Powers collection is important for Kentucky history, for the history of women, and the history of African-Americans — these materials will be used by interdisciplinary scholars of United States history, politics, gender and race,” Scaggs said.

The papers donated to UK Libraries will include more than 2,000 newspaper clippings, photos, speeches and legal pads filled with the legislator's handwritten thoughts.

Powers’ oral history interviews, the Georgia Davis Powers Oral History Project, supplement her written memoir and offer new information about her life and work. The collection documents the role she played in affecting public policy as she pushed for legislation on public accommodations and open housing.

The most recent interviews in the collection were conducted by UK historian Gerald Smith, who officials said played a crucial role in acquiring Powers' papers and strengthening her relationship with UK Libraries.

Smith, an associate professor of history and co-editor of the Kentucky African American Encyclopedia, said the Powers collection will provide scholars and students with “another window into understanding Kentucky's political history as well as the people, places, and events which shaped the civil rights movement in America.”

The Georgia Davis Powers Endowed Chair is the fourth chair created by the Center for Research on Violence Against Women and will focus on multicultural studies of violence against women and the unique experiences of women of color.

“Culture, race and ethnicity — these things matter to whether or not you experience violence and what you do in response,” said Carol Jordan, director of the Center for Research on Violence Against Women. “These issues are so important; we thought that they required their own chair. And we wanted to use this opportunity to add a chair as well as honor an extraordinary woman.”

“She (Powers) understands the kind of work our center is trying to do,” Jordan added. “She has always been an advocate for women. Her work connects with our work and so it makes sense that we honor her this way.”

UK will hold a national search for the appropriate scholar to fill the chair. The Center for Research on Violence Against Women is establishing a $1 million endowment to support the Georgia Davis Powers Chair. Having already raised $720,000, the center will raise an additional $280,000 by the end of 2011 for the endowment.

UK Provost Kumble Subbaswamy said the collection and endowed chair will allow the university to “capture Sen. Powers’ history and hold up her story as an inspiration to the next generation. In doing these things, we will achieve what we know Sen. Powers would want us to do: directly improve the lives of Kentucky families.”

Editor's comment: In the interest of FULL public disclosure, my wife has written a biography of her. Publication is imminent. Stay tuned.