She graduated from the Mississippi Industrial Institute & College in 1905, where her classmates included librarian Nannie Herndon Rice, physician Mary Maxwell Hathorn, and home economist Connie J. Bonslagel, and her English professor was Pauline Van de Graaf Orr.

[5] Laney taught at her alma mater's summer normal program in 1909,[6] and at Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina,[7] early in her career.

[12] In 1935, as chair of the college's lecture program, she invited Robert Frost to speak on campus, which he then did annually from 1945 to 1962.

[20] In 1948 she was made an honorary member of the Agnes Scott College chapter of Mortar Board.

[16] Another sister, Corinne, was dean of women and a Latin professor at Berry College before her death in a car accident in 1936.