Georgia Davis Powers

Biography

Born in Springfield, Kentucky, Powers grew up in a family of nine children. She had eight brothers: Joseph Ben (Jay), Robert, John Albert, Phillip, Lawrence Franklin, James Isaac, Rudolph and Carl. Her parents, Frances Walker and Ben Gore Montgomery, later moved the family to the state's largest metropolis, Louisville. As a young girl she attended Virginia Avenue Elementary School and Madison Junior High School. She graduated from Central High School in 1940, and from 1940 to 1942 attended the Louisville Municipal College.

As a young wife and mother of an adopted son, William (known as Billy), Georgia and her husband Norman "Nicky" Davis joined the New Covenant Presbyterian Church in Louisville. A fellow church member Verna Smith encouraged Georgia to take her first steps into Democratic Party politics by joining the U.S. Senatorial campaign staff of Wilson Wyatt. For the next six years she worked on political campaigns, including that of Edward T. "Ned" Breathitt who ran successfully for Governor of Kentucky in 1963.

It was during this period that she began to discover the value of local politics in helping the disadvantaged, and she developed the political skills that would serve her and her constituents so well over the next two decades. After the Breathitt campaign, Powers worked for the Allied Organization for Civil Rights in promoting statewide public accommodations and fair employment laws in the early 1960s. In 1964, she was one of the organizers of a march on the state capitol at Frankfort in support of equity in public accommodations, an event in which Dr. Martin Luther King and baseball legend Jackie Robinson participated.

Powers was initiated as an honorary member of Sigma Gamma Rho sorority in 1993.

Public office

Elected to serve in the Kentucky Senate from January 1968 to January 1989, Powers sponsored bills prohibiting employment discrimination, sex and age discrimination, in addition to introducing statewide fair housing legislation. Even as an elected official, she was not able to get a room in a hotel in segregated Frankfort. She also supported legislation to improve education for the physically and mentally disabled. Powers was a member of the Cities Committee, Elections and Constitutional Amendments Committee and the Rules Committee. She served as secretary of the Democratic caucus from 1968 to 1988. She chaired two legislative committees: Health and Welfare (1970–76) and Labor and Industry (1978–88). In an oral history interview by Betsy Brinson in 2000, Governor Breathitt remembered:

Georgia Davis Powers, was a great leader and a strong supporter of Dr. King and represented his views in Kentucky very effectively. She was later a member of the Kentucky State Senate, a very influential member from Louisville, and I would consider her one of the real heroes of the Civil Rights Movement in this state; and one of the most effective civil rights leaders in this state... She was effective in the Senate and in politics through the art of persuasion. She did not antagonize people. She was very strong in her positions, but she has a wonderful personality and people liked her. And she would get votes very effectively for the causes she believed in. She just was a vote getter and a great lobbyist and persistent; but a wonderful warm personality. Everybody was crazy about her.

In her autobiography, I Shared the Dream: The Pride, Passion, and Politics of the First Black Woman Senator from Kentucky, Powers details her personal relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the intimacy she shared with him as friend, trusted confidante, and lover. She was at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. She supported the Rev. Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 by chairing the Kentucky campaign headquarters.

After she retired from her seat in the Kentucky Senate in 1988, she remained committed to the continuing fight for equal rights and human dignity. In 1990, Powers created the Friends of Nursing Home Residents (FONHRI) to organize faith-based volunteerism in the Louisville area to serve as visitors to the local nursing homes. She also incorporated in 1994 an organization called QUEST (Quality Education for All Students) to monitor the work of the Jefferson County school board to halt the return to segregated schools.

Awards and honors

Powers was included in a national photographic exhibit that opened on February 8, 1989, at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America. In 1989 Powers received an honorary doctor of laws degree from the University of Kentucky and an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Louisville.

Death

Powers died on January 30, 2016, at the home of one of her brothers in Louisville, after suffering from congestive heart failure for several years.

Legacy

In 2010 the Kentucky Legislature, under House Joint Resolution 67, renamed the portion of I-264 that runs through the West End of Louisville from I-64 near the Indiana border to the junction with US 31W the Georgia Davis Powers Expressway. The University of Kentucky endowed a chair in the name of Senator Powers as part of UK's Center for Research on Violence Against Women.