Theodora Lacey

Theodora Smiley Lacey (born 1932) is an American civil rights activist and educator.

She helped organize the Montgomery bus boycott, fought for voting rights and fair housing, and helped lead the effort to integrate schools in New Jersey.

Lacey was born Theodora Smiley in 1932 in Montgomery, Alabama, and her parents were both educators.

At that time, Alabama was highly segregated, Jim Crow laws were in force, and Montgomery became a center of the Civil Rights Movement.

In the late 1950s, the family, with their three-year-old son, Archie Jr., relocated north from Louisiana, where she had been teaching, to escape the racism and segregation of the south.

Lacey's family was deeply involved in the movement: her mother was a childhood friend of Rosa Parks, and her father, a high-school principal, was president of the board of directors of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in 1954 when the church chose their new pastor, Martin Luther King Jr.

Lacey graduated from Alabama State College and worked as a science teacher in Alabama, Louisiana, and later New Jersey.

Lacey's first direct involvement as a civil rights activist began in 1955 when her mother's friend, Rosa Parks, was arrested for sitting in the "white" section of a public bus.

Montgomery's public transportation system had always been segregated, and other men, women and children had been arrested for similar offenses, but Parks' arrest triggered protests and calls for a boycott of the bus system.

Church member and WPC president Jo Ann Robinson and pastor Dr. King emerged as leaders of the boycott movement and the Dexter Avenue Church became their de facto headquarters.

Initially planned for just one day, the boycott lasted 381 days and ended only when the laws requiring segregated buses were struck down as unconstitutional.

Lacey, who was teaching science at George Washington Carver High School by then, was very active in the boycott, working, she says, as a "gofer."

She attended meetings and typed press releases for the movement.

Many of the participants in the boycott were domestic workers who didn't own cars and relied on the bus system for their jobs.

In addition to driving them herself, Lacey was an enthusiastic fundraiser for taxi drivers who supported the boycott by offering free or discounted rides to these boycott participants.

She sent letters all over the country seeking donations to help with maintenance of the taxis.

It was during the boycott that she met her future husband, Archie Lacey.

Archie was a science professor at Alabama State College and met Theodora through his involvement in the bus boycott.

The couple's courtship was brief, and they married on April 29, 1956, in the midst of the boycott.

Dr. King had planned to officiate at the wedding, but was called away to New York on business; he did later baptize two of their four children.

Once the boycott ended, the Laceys' civil rights activism continued.

In the summer of 1957, she and her husband traveled throughout Alabama researching voter registration and injustice in the political system.

Their research was used to support litigation against disenfranchisement of black voters in the state.

After a few years in Manhattan near Hunter College, where her husband was a professor, they moved to Teaneck, New Jersey, in 1961.

Though they had left Jim Crow laws behind in the South, they still experienced racism.

Some neighbors moved out and some did not want black children in their school; a next door neighbor sat in his yard with a shotgun while their children played outside.

They soon joined a group that worked to change discriminatory housing practices.

Their organization, the Fair Housing Council of Northern New Jersey, tested home sellers and real estate brokers by pretending to be interested in buying a house listed for sale, first sending a black family who would find the house was no longer on the market, followed by a white family who would be invited to negotiate.

Lacey recalled that they'd never found anyone willing to sell to a black family.

The policy was changed in 1964, when the Teaneck school board voted to make the Bryant School the town's central and only middle school, ending the de facto racial segregation of smaller neighborhood schools.

With that decision, Teaneck became the first town in the United States to integrate its schools through a vote.

Lacey completed her MA at Hunter College in New York City in 1965, and was a teacher for 42 years until her retirement in 2007.

The council maintained a list of sellers and brokers who participated in this discrimination, and years later, with the passage of the 1968 federal Fair Housing Act prohibiting racial discrimination in the sale and rental of houses and apartments, the Fair Housing Council used the information from the test couples in federal court as part of a major lawsuit.

They also led a group that fought discrimination in the neighborhood school, the Bryant School.

Fearing that an exodus of white families from the neighborhoods would result in a loss of resources and funding for the school, the Laceys founded the North East Community Organization (NECO), which worked to integrate the public schools.

They held meetings in their home with parents and community members, approached district officials, and attended school board meetings.

NECO advocated for an "open enrollment" policy, allowing Teaneck families to opt out of their neighborhood school and send their children to any school in the district.

Thirteen black families and one white family participated.

She is the co-chair of the county African-American Advisory Committee and the Bergen County Martin Luther King Jr. Monument Committee, which was established in 2010 to raise money and erect a life-size bronze sculpture of King in the county.

In 2014 the governor appointed her to New Jersey's Martin Luther King Jr. Commission.