Alice Dugged Cary

Alice Dugged Cary, also known as Alice Dugged Carey (September 1859 – September 25, 1941), was an American educator and librarian.

Biography

Alice Dugged Cary was born in New London, Indiana, in 1859. She attended Wilberforce University and began her teaching career in the public schools of Kansas in 1882. She became assistant principal at Lincoln High School, Kansas City, Missouri, in 1884, and the following year she married the Rev. Jefferson Alexander Carey Jr, a minister of the A.M.E. Church, and moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where she accepted an appointment in 1886 as the second principal of Morris Brown College. In 1887 she was the first principal of the Mitchell Street School, a position she held concurrently with her university role.

In 1921 she was appointed the first librarian of the Auburn Carnegie Library in Atlanta, the first library in the city accessible to African Americans under segregation. She also established the second branch of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority in that year. Cary was politically active, serving as the Georgia State Chairman of the Colored Woman's Committee, and as president of the Georgia State Federation of Coloured Women.

She died in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1941.

Sources

• N. Brown, Private Politics and Public Voices: Black Women's Activism from World War I to the New Deal, Indiana University Press, 2006
• D. C. Dickerson, African American Preachers and Politics: The Careys of Chicago, University Press of Mississippi, 2010
• T. Khalayi, Finer Women: The Birth of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority 1920-1935, Harambee Institute Press, 2012
• H. S. Mason, Politics, Civil Rights, and Law in Black Atlanta, 1870-1970, Arcadia Publishing, 2000
• H. S. Mason, Black Atlanta in the Roaring Twenties, Arcadia Publishing, 1997
• G. A. Sewell and C. V. Troup, Morris Brown College, the First Hundred Years, 1881-1981, Morris Brown College, 1981(?)