Background
Lawes was born in 1920 to John Paul Hurston and Lula Mae Taylor, in Atlanta, Georgia.
Lawes was born in 1920 to John Paul Hurston and Lula Mae Taylor, in Atlanta, Georgia.
She attended Spelman College 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.
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 had one child, Michelle Zonee Barksdale Hurston, born in 1957. Barksdale was a past President of Jack and Jill Club of America, 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 for her work in gerontology. In Barksdale v. Springfield School Committee, a de facto segregation lawsuit, Barksdale challenged the concept of racial isolation because the school a child attended was based on the neighborhood in which you lived.