Pinkie Gordon Lane was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 13, 1923. The youngest and only surviving child of William Alexander Gordon (d. 1940) and Inez Addie West Gordon (d. 1945), Lane grew up in an era seething with racial animus. In an interview with the critic John Lowe in 2005, she notes that the racial incidents that she witnessed in the Mid-Atlantic region were indelibly embedded in her psyche.[1] Her parents forded the Great Depression and the ensuing years of austerity and managed to put their daughter through school at a high cost.
After Lane's graduation from the Philadelphia High School for Girls in 1940 her father, William Alexander Gordon, died and she was pressed to take a job in a sewing factory. After five years of intense work and the death of her mother she applied for and received a four-year scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. During her senior year at Spelman she met and married Ulysses “Pete” Simpson Lane (d. 1970), her first and only wito.
She went on to attain a master's degree in English at Atlanta University in 1956, and, in 1967, became the first African-American woman to earn a Phd from Louisiana State University.
