The Logan family is a group of Americans descended from Warren Logan and his wife Adella Hunt Logan, African Americans who were born into slavery shortly before the American Civil War. After emancipation, they established a tradition of "education and decorum as a way to transcend racial restrictions". They and their descendants became part of the black elite.
Warren was born into slavery in Virginia in 1857. At emancipation he took the surname Logan. He gained an education and by 1877 worked as a teacher at Tuskegee Normal School in Alabama.
As a young educated man in the period after the Reconstruction era, he pushed against social restraints imposed by white supremacists, trying with a group of friends to use their first-class train tickets between Montgomery and Selma, Alabama. They were ordered to the Jim Crow car and ejected when they hesitated to move. Logan became the first treasurer of Tuskegee Institute in 1882, and is described as the closest confidante of institute's head, Booker T. Washington.
In 1888 Logan married Adella Hunt, also a teacher at Tuskegee. She was born May 5, 1863 in Sparta, Georgia, to an enslaved African-American mother and white farmer father. Her father maintained relations with her mother and their family of eight children. He aided Adella financially so that she could attend Atlanta University, where she graduated in 1881. She became a teacher at Tuskegee in 1883. Both the Hunts and Logans considered education the key to the advancement of people of color in society. Teaching English and social sciences, Hunt succeeded Olivia A. Davidson as Lady Principal when, in 1885, Davidson married Booker T. Washington, head of the institute.
Adella Hunt Logan is known as an educator and an administrator. She supported women's suffrage, lectured at NAACP conferences and published articles in its Crisis magazine. She is also remembered for her essay, "What Are the Causes of the Great Mortality Among the Negroes of the Cities of the South, and How Is That Mortality to Be Lessened?" (1902) In 1915, she was hospitalized for depression. Learning of Booker T. Washington's last illness, she returned to the institute. Washington died November 14 and Adella continued to struggle with depression. She committed suicide by jumping from the top floor of one of the school buildings on December 12.
Hunt and Logan had nine children; six survived to adulthood and became educated.