Mary Ward Brown and Sara Crews Finley will be inducted into the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame on Thursday, March 9, 2017. The induction ceremony will take place at 10:30a.m. in Alumnae Auditorium on the Judson College campus in Marion, Ala.
Mary Ward Brown (1917–2013)
Mary Ward Brown graduated from Judson College in 1938, with a degree in English and journalism. She married Charles K. Brown in 1939. After her husband’s death in 1970, she devoted herself to writing.
Using the setting and characters of her Black Belt home, she wrote about race, class, religion, times of change, and family conflicts in a way that revealed the universal traits of these subjects.
In addition to stories in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies, she published three books: Tongues of Flame (1986); It Wasn’t All Dancing and other stories (2002); and Fanning the Spark: A Memoir (2009).
She won many awards, including the Pen/Hemingway Award (for best book of fiction by an American author) in 1987; the Lillian Smith Award from the Southern Regional Council; the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer in 2002; and the Hillsdale Fiction Prize from the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2003.
She was inducted into the Alabama Black Belt Hall of Fame in 2012 and the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame in 2016. Southern journalist John S. Sledge called Brown “our genius, our Chekov.” She died in 2013, one month before her 96th birthday.
Update: Longtime friend Robert Eiland gave these remarks at the induction ceremony.
Sara Crews Finley (1930–2013)
Sara Crews Finley obtained a B.S. degree from the University of Alabama and the M.D. degree from the University of Alabama School of Medicine.
She trained at the Institute for Medical Genetics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. She was on the faculty of the University of Alabama School of Medicine from 1960 to 1996. She was co-director of the Laboratory of Medical Genetics.
She and her husband founded the medical genetics program in 1962 in Birmingham, the first one in the southeastern U.S.
She was the author or co-author on more than 150 papers, abstracts and book chapters in major professional publications.
She received many awards and honors for scholarship. Included are Who’s Who in America, Alabama Healthcare Hall of Fame, Brother Bryan Humanitarian Award of the Women’s Committee of 100, Buford Word Award of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama, and American Medical Women’s Association Legends Award.
She was the first woman to serve as President of both the University of Alabama Alumni Association and the Jefferson County Medical Society. She died in 2013 at age 82.
The induction ceremony is free and open to the public. A luncheon will follow the induction ceremony. Reservations are required for the luncheon; call Beth Poole at 334-683-5167 for more information.
The Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame, founded in 1970, is housed in the A. Howard Bean Hall on the campus of Judson College in Marion, Alabama.