Ms. Marie
There’s a story — undocumented but passed down at Archives and History. As it goes, the Alabama Legislature would keep a special page stationed as a lookout in the old capitol’s south entrance. This boy (there were no female pages then) had one job — to alert lawmakers when “Ms. Marie” was headed their way.
“Legislators would scatter because they knew she was coming to put pressure on them for one thing or another,” says Steve Murray, director of Archives and History.
The Alabama Department of Archives and History was the first of its kind in the country, born out of her husband’s collection of historic artifacts and documents.
Thomas McAdory Owen was an amateur historian, but approached the discipline with zeal, collecting all the maps, newspapers, diaries and genealogical records he could lay hands on. At first, he kept the records in the House and Senate chambers when lawmakers weren’t in session. Later, he stored them in old houses across the street from the capitol — properties he acquired to build a museum.
His vision was to build Alabama’s equivalent of the Library of Congress. But between collecting and fundraising, he worked himself to exhaustion, dying of a heart attack before he could see his dream come true. After his death in 1920, the department board named his wife the new director.
At 50, Marie Bankhead Owen became only the second woman to lead a state agency, and she held on to her position for the next 35 years.
Owen was a more formidable figure in Montgomery than her late husband ever was.
“Ms. Marie” is what they called her to her face. Behind her back they called her “the Tiger Lady.”
Lawmakers feared her with reason. Her married name was Owen, but Ms. Marie was a Bankhead, a name still attached today to roads and parks throughout the state. Her father, John Bankhead, had been a U.S. Senator, as was her oldest brother, John Jr. Not to be outdone, her brother William Bankhead rose to become Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and one of the most powerful American politicians during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Owen did not lack her brothers’ ambition, but she was shut off from a career in politics because she was a woman. Despite this, Owen was adamantly and publicly opposed to women’s suffrage, which she campaigned against.
Her fear was not what would happen should women get the right to vote, but rather, what would happen next — if women could vote, it was only a matter of time before Black Alabamians reclaimed that right, too.
Owen was an adamant and unrepentant racist.