Georgia Davis Powers
| Georgia Davis Powers | |
|---|---|
Powers (right) in 2010
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| Member of the Kentucky State Senate | |
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In office January 1968 – January 1989 |
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| Personal details | |
| Born |
Georgia Montgomery October 19, 1923 Springfield, Kentucky, U.S. |
| Died | January 30, 2016 (aged 92) Louisville, Kentucky, U.S. |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouse(s) |
Norman F. Davis (m. 1943–68) James L. Powers (m. 1973) |
| Children | William "Billy" Davis |
| Parents | Frances Walker and Ben Gore Montgomery |
| Occupation | Politician, civil rights activist |
Georgia Davis Powers (née Montgomery; October 19, 1923 – January 30, 2016) was an American politician, who served for 21 years as a member of the state Senate in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. When elected in 1967, she became the first person of color and the first woman elected to the Kentucky State Senate.
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.
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