Mae Jones Street Kidd (February 8, 1904 – October 20, 1999) was an American businesswoman, civic leader, and a skilled politician in her home state of Kentucky.

Raised by her African American mother and step-father after her white father refused to acknowledge her as his daughter, she had a distinguished career in insurance and public relations, served in the Red Cross during World War II, and was a member of the Kentucky House of Representatives from 1968 to 1984, representing District 41 (Louisville).

[4] When she was two, her mother married an African American tobacco farmer, James W. (Willie) Taylor (1881–1959), who later became a chicken breeder.

[10] Millersburg's blacks lived in a section of the town called Shippsville, and Kidd went to school there until the eighth grade.

As a youngster, she realized that her light skin made it possible for her to skirt the Jim Crow laws that were a feature of life in the American South at the time: under these acts, blacks were restricted to certain schools, seating areas of public transportation, and even drinking fountains and rest rooms.

Kidd's mother eventually moved the family to Millersburg proper after asking her cousin, who was white, to purchase the house and have the deed transferred to her.

As a teenager, Kidd wanted to contribute to the household herself, but her mother refused to let her work for white families, telling her, "Mae, I have to serve other people because I don't have a choice.

"[11] Since her school only went up to the eighth grade, it was decided that she would be sent away to the Lincoln Institute in Simpsonville, created to provide a better educational opportunity in the Jim Crow era.

From 1921 to 1925 Kidd sold policies for Mammoth and collected premiums; to do so she walked all over the black neighborhoods in both Millersburg and a nearby city.

"I never had any bad experiences anywhere because everybody knew my parents in Millersburg, and in Carlisle I soon became known and the older people began watching over me," she recalled,[12] noting that she sometimes collected a hundred dollars in a day.

She shared an apartment in the Mammoth building with a friend, a young woman whose father was a board member of the insurance company.

In 1935 she became supervisor of policy issues, a job she held for eight years which entailed reviewing all applications for insurance that arrived at headquarters.

"[14] After the end of the war and her Red Cross duties in England, Kidd took a job in Portland, Maine, running its United Seaman's Service Club, a social gathering spot for merchant seamen.

In 1948, Kidd also organized the first Louisville Urban League Guild and served as President of the Lincoln Foundation.

It was her first exposure to politics, and she drew heavily on her public-relations experience to help make the campaign a successful one.

"[15] Two years later, at the dawn of a new civil rights era with federal laws barring racial discrimination in all forms, Kidd was invited by a number of Louisville Democrats to run for a seat in the House of Representatives in Kentucky General Assembly.

So Kidd agreed, and won her first election after campaigning with a carload of neighborhood children, who helped her pass out flyers nightly in different sections of her Louisville district.

In the early 1970s, she sponsored a low-income housing bill that created a state agency to provide low-interest mortgages to first-time home buyers.

Kidd struggled for some time to get this bill passed, and only with the election of a new governor in 1972 did she finally succeed in seeing it signed into law.

Kidd also introduced a bill to make Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday an official state holiday.

"[2] Kidd was active in a number of charitable organizations throughout her life, including the Lincoln Foundation, which helped disadvantaged children at the facility that had once schooled her.

Her biography, based on nearly 40 oral history interviews by Wade Hall, appeared two years before her death, and its title, Passing for Black, reflected her mixed heritage and the conflicts she often experienced because of it.