Georgia Tech Renames Building in Her Honor

In 1998, the Georgia Institute of Technology renamed one of its administration buildings the Lettie Pate Whitehead Administration Building, a lasting tribute to her decades of philanthropic support for education across the Southeast, including support that benefited Georgia Tech's own students and programs.

Though the exact day of the dedication ceremony is not preserved in the sources consulted, the renaming itself represents a significant posthumous honor, occurring 45 years after her death in 1953. It reflects how enduring her philanthropic footprint remained well into the late twentieth century, as institutions across the region continued to benefit from endowments and foundations established in her name.

The building's renaming placed Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans among a select group of women honored with named academic buildings at major Southern technical universities during an era when such institutions were historically male-dominated in both their student bodies and their public commemorations. Georgia Tech itself had only begun admitting women in the 1950s, making the 1998 dedication a symbolically resonant gesture: a technical university once closed to women physically enshrining, in its own administrative heart, the name of a woman whose business acumen and philanthropy had shaped opportunities for generations of Southern women in higher education.