 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.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.