Mary Hayes Allen
*Mary Hayes Allen was born on this date in 1875. She was a Black educator, administrator, and activist.
Mary Magdalene Rice was born in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She was the illegitimate daughter of former slave Malinda Rice and a white former Confederate general, John R. Jones. She attended Hartshorn Memorial College. In 1895, she married educator Gregory W. Hayes. They had seven children, five surviving infants.
In 1891, her husband became the second president of the Virginia Theological Seminary and College (now Virginia University of Lynchburg). He served as president until he died in 1906. She served as president immediately following her husband's death through 1908, when James Robert Lincoln Diggs took over. In 1911, she married William Allen, with whom she had three children. The couple settled in Montclair, New Jersey.
They sued for racial equality in the local schools, fighting a losing battle to desegregate the Montclair public school. She was active in the Montclair chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1920s through the 1930s. She died on October 10, 1935.
Her daughter, Carrie Allen McCray, wrote a biography of her mother entitled Freedom's Child: The Life of a Confederate General's Black Daughter, published in 1998. In 2018, the Virginia Capitol Foundation announced that Hayes Allen's name would be on the Virginia Women's Monument's glass Wall of Honor.
