Please join us virtually on Thursday, March 10, 7PM ET for the League of Women Voters Community Forum featuring Karen Cotton McDaniel, PH.D.

We are honored that Dr. Karen Cotton McDaniel will be sharing her knowledge of the life of Dr. Mary Britton, during the League of Women Voters of Lexington’s virtual Community Forum on March 10, 2022 at 7 PM.

Dr. Mary E. Britton (1855-1925) was a physician, educator, suffragist, journalist and civil rights activist from Lexington, Kentucky. In 1902, Mary Britton became the first woman licensed to practice medicine in Lexington. But her accomplishments went far beyond the bounds of medicine.  Dr. Britton, a Berea College alumna, taught school, advocated women's suffrage, and wrote frequently against Reconstructionist segregation.  One particularly noteworthy accomplishment was her involvement in founding the Colored Orphan's Industrial Home.  Mary Britton is buried in Lexington's Cove Haven Cemetery.

Dr. McDaniel is the founding editor of the award-winning Kentucky African American Encyclopedia, which became available in August 2015. She is also author of a forthcoming book on Kentucky’s black club women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century which investigates female community activism prior to the modern Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.  McDaniel has more than twenty other publications on black Kentuckians including book chapters, articles, and encyclopedic essays. Dr. McDaniel is Professor Emeritus at Kentucky State University where she was a tenured full professor and Director of Libraries. Following her retirement from KSU she served as “Visiting Scholar” at Eastern Kentucky University and Berea College, where she taught courses in African American history and women’s studies. She continues to teach history courses part-time at Kentucky State University.

Dr.  McDaniel received both a Ph.D. in history and a Master’s degree in Library Science from the University of Kentucky. She completed her undergraduate degree at Berea College.

Dr. McDaniel grew up in Williamsburg, Kentucky and is the mother of three adult children and grandmother of nine grandchildren.

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