Alice Dugged Cary


Alice Dugged Cary, also known as Alice Dugged Carey, 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.