| Mary Barksdale | |
| Birth Date: | 24 November 1920 |
| Birth Place: | Georgia, U.S. |
| Death Place: | Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Alma Mater: | Spelman College |
Mary Zoner Hurston Barksdale Lawes (November 24, 1920 - October 9, 1992[1]) was a prominent African-American nurse and businesswoman. She was the owner and administrator, for twenty-seven years, of the Hurstdale Rest Home, the only black-owned rest home in western Massachusetts.
Lawes was born in 1920 to John Paul Hurston and Lula Mae Taylor, in Atlanta, Georgia. She attended Spelman College[2] and migrated to the Springfield area in the 1940s.
In 1952, she graduated from a Springfield area nursing school and became a licensed L.P.N. She was one of the first Black nurses to work for the Holyoke visiting nurses program and later Springfield Hospital.
Barksdale was a past President of the Jack and Jill Club of America,[3] a national black mothers' organization. She was on the Board of Directors for both the Action for Equality and Achiever's Opportunity Corporations. She also received a certificate of excellence from Harvard University[4] for her work in gerontology. She, along with her late husband, Abraham Barksdale, was instrumental in the founding of the D. Edward Wells Federal Credit Union.[5]
Her husband's Abraham Barksdale's crowning achievement was the desegregation of Springfield Public Schools. In Barksdale v. Springfield School Committee, a de facto segregation lawsuit, Abraham Barksdale and Mary Barksdale challenged the concept of racial isolation because the school a child attended was based on the neighborhood in which you lived.[6] Barksdale won and Springfield Public Schools were desegregated in 1965.