Alice Lacy, of New Harbor, died on May 20 at the Freeport Nursing Home with her husband, John, and son John Eben at her side.
Alice Blades Lacy was born in Baltimore 92 years ago. Alice and John lived in the Midcoast for a quarter century. They settled in Bath until they designed and built their home on the Pemaquid cliffs in New Harbor in 1993.
Alice received her BA degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She earned an MA and PhD in sociology from the University of Maryland where her fields were race relations, juvenile delinquency and women’s studies.
In 1956, she was appointed professor of sociology at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and was named a member of the professional association, American Men and Women of Science. She was a popular classroom teacher as well as a frequent consultant in her field, principally serving on a U.S. Senate sub-committee on juvenile delinquency. In 1961 she was appointed to President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. Alice liked to share her memories of the group’s gatherings with Mrs. Roosevelt at Hyde Park.
During the 1960s she became an activist in the Civil Rights Movement, meeting and working with many of its leaders. She was designated a Marshal of the 1963 March on Washington led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and two years later participated in the historic Selma to Montgomery March in Alabama.
The couple left Washington, D.C. when John Lacy was named Chief Counsel for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Cocoa Beach, Fla. In 1980 they both retired from their professional work and ‘went to sea.’ Following a lifelong love of sailing, they qualified to captain their own 41-foot ketch, the Outrageous. For four years they lived on and sailed the Outrageous in the Caribbean Sea, often providing charter tours.
In Maine, Alice pursued a lifelong interest and talent as an artist. She taught and worked in oil, watercolor, and collage. She was a member of Round Top Artists Center in Damariscotta.
Alice was a member of the Midcoast Friends Meeting, devoted to the spiritual practice of Friends and an active member of the Peace and Social Concerns Committee.
Alice was predeceased by her daughter, Jill.
She is survived by her children, Annie Luzzatto of New York, Nina Robin Lacy of North Carolina, and John Eben Lacy of Bangkok, Thailand; five grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
A memorial is being planned for a future a date.
