Georgia Davis Powers, Kentucky civil rights leader, dies at 92

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Georgia Davis Powers, a giant in the fight for civil rights in Kentucky and the first African-American woman elected to the state Senate, has died. She was 92.

She died Saturday at her brother’s home in Louisville, said Louisville’s NAACP President Raoul Cunningham, a friend for five decades.

“When you think of civil rights in Kentucky, you have to start with Georgia Davis Powers,” said Kentucky State Sen. Gerald Neal, a longtime friend and colleague who said Powers inspired him into public service.

She fought for fair housing and employment rights, became a close confidant of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and served 21 years in the state Senate. She was soft-spoken, gracious and quick with a joke, Neal said. But in her battle for civil rights, she did not blink.

“She walked into the Legislature, a man’s world, a white man’s world, and she did not waver,” Neal said. “She asked no quarter and gave no quarter.”

Powers was born in 1923 in Washington County, Kentucky, the only girl among her parents’ nine children.

During Kentucky’s civil rights movement, Powers was a founder of the Allied Organizations for Civil Rights. She also helped organize a 1964 march in Frankfort – an event that attracted King, baseball legend Jackie Robinson and folk singers Peter, Paul and Mary – to push for an end to racial segregation in public accommodations.

By 1967, Powers became the first African-American woman elected to the Kentucky Senate. For 21 years she fought for African-Americans, women, the poor, the disabled and the disenfranchised.

“She was fighting for equality for all people while I was still fighting for my first Golden Gloves title,” boxing legend Muhammad Ali, a Louisville native, said in an emailed statement. “Senator Powers leaves behind a rich legacy of civic engagement and social justice.”

She was close to the icons of the civil rights movement. She gained national attention after she said in her autobiography she had a yearlong affair with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In “I Shared the Dream,” Powers said the affair started about three years after she first met King and ended when he was assassinated in 1968. Others close to King questioned her story and her motivations for telling it.