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Article

Anderson, Caroline Virginia Still Wiley  

Geraldine Rhoades Beckford

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

physician, educator, and community worker, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the eldest daughter of the abolitionist movement leaders William Still and Letitia George Still. In 1850William Still became the head of the Philadelphia Underground Railroad and Vigilance Committee. He would later chronicle his experiences in the best-selling 1872 account, The Underground Railroad.

After completing primary and secondary education at Mrs. Henry Gordon's Private School, the Friends Raspberry Alley School, and the Institute for Colored Youth, Anderson entered Oberlin College. Although she was the youngest member of the graduating class of 1868, Anderson presided over the annual Ladies' Literary Society, a singular honor that had never been awarded to a student of African ancestry.

After graduating from Oberlin, Anderson returned home to teach drawing and elocution, and on 28 December 1869 she married Edward A. Wiley a former slave and fellow ...

Article

Anthony, Lucinda (Lucie), Bragg  

Charles Rosenberg

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
26 January 2023

was born in Warrenton, North Carolina, the daughter of George Freeman Bragg, a carpenter, and Mary Bragg, who generally did not work outside of the home. Her status as enslaved or free at birth is not known. She had one brother, George Freeman Bragg Jr., later an Episcopal clergyman, and two sisters, Caroline and Della. Some sources suggest an 1870 birthdate for Lucie, but this is unlikely since in 1865 the family moved to Petersburg, Virginia, where her father served as junior warden of the Episcopal Church. Her paternal grandmother, under Virginia law, had been the property of an Episcopal priest in Petersburg, and, toward the end of her life, she helped to found St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church for Negroes.

Lucinda Bragg contracted the first of three marriages on 20 November 1878 to Edward Peters who worked as a hired house servant The couple lived for a time ...

Article

Boothe, Charles Octavius  

Daniel L. Fountain

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

Baptist minister, missionary, and author, was born Charles Octavius Boothe in Mobile County, Alabama, to a Georgia‐born slave woman belonging to and carried west by the slave owner Nathan Howard Sr. Little is known of Boothe s Georgian parents but he proudly claimed that his great grandmother and stepgrandfather were Africans Boothe s description of his ancestors reflects his lifelong pride in his African heritage but he was equally effusive about the spiritual influence that these Christian elders had on his life His earliest recollections included his stepgrandfather s prayer life and singing of hymns and the saintly face and pure life of my grandmother to whom white and black went for prayer and for comfort in the times of their sorrows These early familial Christian influences were further reinforced by attending a Baptist church in the forest where white and colored people sat together to commune and to ...

Article

Brown, Lucy Manetta Hughes  

Geraldine Rhoades Beckford

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

physician and educator, was born in Mebanesville, North Carolina, one of eight children. Her parents' names are not known. There are no records of Brown's earlier education, but in 1881 she enrolled at Scotia Seminary in Concord, North Carolina, and graduated in 1885. Four years later she married David Brown, a minister, and the following year entered Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, founded in 1850 and the first medical school for women in America. When Brown matriculated at the school in 1891, it was one of the best medical colleges in the country.

After graduating from Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1894 Brown returned to North Carolina and practiced medicine in her home state for two years before going to Charleston South Carolina where she became the first female physician of African ancestry in South Carolina A year later a fellow alumna from Woman s ...

Article

Brown, Sara Winifred  

Charles Rosenberg

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
26 January 2023

was born in Winchester, Virginia, the daughter of Charles C. Brown and Mariah Fairfax Brown. Her father was a barber, sufficiently prosperous that her mother did not work outside the home. During the second half of the nineteenth century, this was a point of pride for families of African descent. Men who had had limited legal rights, if free, or no ability to protect their family, if enslaved, sought affirmation in their ability to support the family and keep it together as a unit. In addition, simply maintaining a household was a tremendous amount of labor prior to development of mechanical and electrical devices, or even municipal water systems. During her childhood, Brown’s maternal grandmother, Sarah Fairfax, born in 1809, lived with the family. Like many families in the nineteenth century, they took in boarders to supplement household income.

Little is known about Brown s early years It was ...

Article

Cunningham Kain, Mirna Kay  

Miguel Gonzalez Perez

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

was born in Bilwaskarma, in Nicaragua’s North Atlantic Autonomous Region, on 10 November 1947. She is best known for the leading role she played in promoting the peace negotiation process that in 1986 ended a ten-year military conflict that pitted the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, or Sandinista National Liberation Front) revolutionary government against the Miskito indigenous rebels who were struggling for autonomy along the Nicaraguan Caribbean coast. She is also an international advocate for the rights of indigenous peoples.

Cunningham grew up in Waspam the capital city of the Wangki River region near the border with Honduras which is considered the motherland of the Miskito people She was born to Nester Judith Kain Nelson and Wilfred Bill Cunningham Davis both from Pearl Lagoon on the southern part of the Caribbean coast She grew up in a working class family of mixed cultural heritage of Miskito African and ...

Article

Edwards, Lena  

Caryn E. Neumann

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

physician and activist, was born Lena Frances Edwards in Washington, D.C., the youngest of three children of Thomas Edwards, a professor of dentistry at Howard University, and Marie Coakley. Dissuaded from becoming a dentist by her father, the young Lena instead set her heart on a medical career. She graduated from Dunbar High School as valedictorian in 1918 and enrolled at Howard University. Her plans were nearly derailed when she fell victim to Spanish influenza during the deadly epidemic of 1918. Edwards managed to sufficiently recover to quickly resume her studies. The experience of narrowly escaping the “purple death” may have influenced Edwards to cram as much as possible into every hour of every day remaining to her. She took summer classes at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a bachelor's of science from Howard in June 1921 after only three years of study Accepted ...

Article

Edwards, Lena Frances  

Amy M. Hay

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Edwards’s service was also recognized in 1967 when she received the Poverello Medal, awarded to individuals whose lives followed the ideals of Saint Francis of Assisi. Blessed with financial and familial support, her ministry to poor European immigrants and Mexican migrants, her own life of voluntary poverty, and her service to the African American community all made her a worthy recipient of such honors. She spent a lifetime addressing the needs of the poor, women, students, and the aged.

Edwards was born in Washington, DC. Her parents, Thomas Edwards, a professor of dentistry at Howard University, and Marie Coakley Edwards, had three other children. Edwards grew up in a middle-class family, part of the capital’s elite society at the time. At an early age she decided she wanted to become a doctor. She attended Washington’s Dunbar High School, graduating in 1917 as valedictorian She attended Howard ...

Article

Elders, Joycelyn  

Dawne Y. Curry

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

On 8 September 1993, Bill Clinton, the forty-second president of the United States, selected Joycelyn Elders as the nation’s surgeon general of the Public Health Service. In this capacity, Elders argued for legislation supporting universal health coverage and advocated on behalf of President Clinton’s health care reform effort. While Elders lobbied for comprehensive health education, she also supported sex education in secondary schools. Her rather blunt opinions, especially concerning masturbation and safe sex, earned her the nickname “Condom Queen.” In 1994, after fifteen months of service, she resigned from this appointment. Elders returned to the University of Arkansas Medical Center, where she had previously served as a professor of pediatrics.

Elders was born Minnie Lee Jones in Schaal, Arkansas. Her mother, Haller, and her father, Curtis Jones were sharecroppers subject to the appalling poverty and exploitation of that position in the South Minnie the oldest ...

Article

Elders, Joycelyn  

Jennifer Jensen Wallach

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
09 February 2009
Published online:
01 December 2009

physician and U.S. surgeon general from 1993 to 1994. Born in rural Arkansas to sharecropper parents, Minnie Lee Jones received a scholarship to attend Philander Smith College in Little Rock at the age of fifteen. While in college she added “Joycelyn” to her name and ultimately used only that. After receiving a degree in biology in 1952, she worked briefly in a Veterans Administration hospital and then in 1953 enlisted in the U.S. Army, where she received training as a physical therapist.

After leaving the army in 1956, Jones attended the University of Arkansas Medical School (UAMS) and received her MD in 1960. Also in 1960 she married Oliver Elders, with whom she had two sons. In 1967 she earned a master of science degree in biochemistry and also joined the faculty of the UAMS in 1967, becoming a full professor in 1976 ...

Article

Elders, M. Joycelyn  

Deborah I. Levine

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

physician, scientist, professor, public health official, and first African American surgeon general of the United States, was born Minnie Lee Jones in the small town of Schaal, Arkansas, the oldest of eight children of Curtis Jones, a sharecropper, and Haller Reed Jones. As a child, Jones performed the hard labor demanded of Arkansas farmers and their families, and she often led her younger siblings in their work on the small cotton farm. The family home was an unpainted three-room shack with no indoor plumbing or electricity, and there was no hospital or physician for miles around. Jones watched her mother give birth seven times without medical assistance; the only memory she has of a visit to a physician was when her father took a gravely ill younger brother twelve miles by mule to the nearest doctor.

Haller Jones was determined that her children would ...

Article

Elders, M. Joycelyn Jones  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Joycelyn Elders was born Minnie Joycelyn Jones in Schaal, a poor, remote farming village of southwestern Arkansas. Her parents, Haller and Curtis Jones, were sharecroppers, and all eight of their children—Joycelyn was the oldest—worked with them in the cotton fields. The family shared a three-room cabin with no electricity, and the children walked several miles to attend an all-black school. At the age of fifteen, Elders received a scholarship to Little Rock's Philander Smith College, also a school for blacks. There, she met a doctor for the first time in her life and Edith Jones, the first black woman to attend the University of Arkansas Medical School (UAMS). Elders later credited these experiences with inspiring her to become a doctor.

Elders received a bachelor's degree in 1952 and spent the better part of the next two decades advancing in the medical profession First she served in the ...

Article

Fleming, Louise “Lulu” Cecelia  

Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

Congo missionary and physician, was born in Hibernia, Florida, on the Fleming plantation, to slave parents. Her siblings included William and Scipio Fleming, older brothers, and Thomas, Mary, Emma, Anna, and Evan Hawkins, children her mother, Cleo Fleming, bore by her second husband, Clem Hawkins. As the Civil War began, Fleming's father escaped slavery by joining the Thirty-third Colored Regiment of the Union army. He died just as the war was ending, and Lulu, as she was usually called, never knew him.

Fleming credited her mother with her early education, which by 1883 had advanced sufficiently for Fleming to teach in the public schools of Saint Augustine Florida She saw her teaching as a ministry one fruit of her religious conversion at age fifteen Looking back she judged that her conversion made her a missionary like Andrew of old from ...

Article

Franklin, Charles Sumner  

Diana Kristine Durham

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

physician, political activist, teacher, and reformer, was born in Charles City County, Virginia, to Alexander and Anna Franklin in a community known as Mattie Hunt near the banks of the Chickahominy River. Charles's father, Alexander Quincy Franklin, earned his living as a schoolteacher and a farmer and served as a representative in the Virginia legislature during the 1889–1890 session and as commissioner of revenue for Charles City County. Charles's mother, Anna Marion Brown, a housewife, was born into one of the oldest free, landowning African American families in Virginia. Charles was the second of nine children in a family of six boys and three girls.

From an early age Charles Sumner Franklin aspired to a career other than farming. He received his early education at Bullfield Academy, a one-room school in the Ruthville community. His maternal uncle, Daniel Webster Brown was his teacher ...

Article

Green, Eustace Edward  

Benjamin R. Justesen

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

teacher, physician, public official, legislator, and lay religious leader, was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, to Mary Ann Sampson, a slave, and an unnamed white father of Scottish descent. Green was raised in Wilmington by his mother, who later married Reverend Cornelius Sampson, an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion clergyman. After Wilmington's fall to invading Union forces in early 1865, Green was allowed to begin his formal education at age twenty in the local Presbyterian parochial school.

For the next two years, while working as a carpenter by day, Green attended school at night. An excellent student, he supplemented his savings with loans to enter Lincoln University in May 1867 and continued to work before being granted a scholarship in his second year. He completed his bachelor's degree in 1872 taught for a year in Lincoln s normal and preparatory schools and ...

Article

Grier, Eliza Anna  

Geraldine Rhoades Beckford

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

physician, was born a slave in North Carolina. Little else is known about her early life, including the names of her parents. In 1884 she enrolled in the normal course at Fisk University, and to pay for tuition she alternated each year of study with a year of picking cotton. She graduated in 1891.

Grier taught at Paine Normal School and Industrial Institute in Augusta, Georgia, during the 1890–1891 school year, but her long-range goal was to become a physician. In 1890, just one year before her graduation from Fisk, she wrote to Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, inquiring about aid that was available to “an emancipated slave” who wanted to enter “so lofty a profession.” No doubt Grier had heard about the school from her mentor and friend Emily Howland a Quaker teacher and suffragette from upstate New York who had gone south to participate ...

Article

Jones, Robert Emmett, Sr.  

Elvatrice Parker Belsches

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

physician, hospital founder, educator, organizational leader, and civil rights activist, was born in Greensboro, Alabama, the only son of Alice Royal, a mixed-race woman, and an unidentified white father. Jones attended private school and later graduated from the Tullibody Academy for blacks at Greensboro in 1876. This well-respected school was founded and run by William Burns Paterson, who was later appointed principal of the Lincoln Normal School, the forerunner of Alabama State University.

Because Jones's youth precluded his acceptance into several medical schools, he taught for a couple of years before entering the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor's medical school in 1878 (The Richmond Planet, 5 Jan. 1895). Founded in 1850, the medical school had graduated its first black student, Dr. William Henry Fitzbutler, in 1872 Fitzbutler would gain renown by cofounding the Louisville National ...

Article

Lambo, Thomas Adeoye  

Jonathan Sadowsky

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Nigerian physician and educator who influenced the development of medicine and psychiatry in Africa and beyond, was born in Abeokuta, in southwest Nigeria. After earning a degree in medicine at the University of Birmingham in England, he studied psychiatry at the University of London. Returning to Nigeria, he became director of the Abeokuta’s Aro Mental Hospital in 1954. Although there had been purely custodial “lunatic asylums” in Nigeria since the early twentieth century, starting in the 1930s, the British colonial government began plans for a modern, curative psychiatric hospital in Lambo’s hometown. These plans were long delayed, as the government cited budgetary limitations, but the plans were being put into action when Lambo returned to Nigeria in the 1950s. When Lambo was named director of the hospital, the physical plant was not yet completed.

The treatment plans for Aro were to use the therapies then in use in Western ...

Article

McKane, Alice Woodby  

Karen Jean Hunt

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

physician and educator, was born Alice Woodby in Bridgewater, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Charles Woodby and Elizabeth B. Frazier. As a child Alice suffered from the loss of her sight and remained blind for three years. After recovering she attended public schools in Bridgewater, less than thirty miles from Pittsburgh.

From 1884 to 1886 Woodby attended Hampton Institute in Virginia. Although she never graduated, Woodby fully embraced the Hampton principles of “education for life” and “learning by doing.” In an 1897 letter to the Southern Workman she explained her decision to leave Hampton: “Students were sent out to teach one year before graduating. Not wishing to become a teacher, I thought it best not to begin, for fear the temptation to continue might thwart my plans for obtaining my profession.”

Woodby entered the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1886 The ICY was one ...

Article

McKinney-Steward, Susan Maria Smith  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

As a child, Susan Maria Smith McKinney-Steward trained and performed as an organist. Her early training qualified her for teaching positions, and she taught school in Washington, D.C., and New York City, using the proceeds of her New York teaching to pay tuition for medical school.

McKinney-Steward began medical study at the New York Medical College for Women in 1867. She specialized in homeopathic medicine and graduated as class valedictorian after three years. After receiving her degree she achieved wealth and a local reputation as a successful Brooklyn physician with an interracial clientele. McKinney-Steward excelled especially in pediatric care and the treatment of childhood diseases. Outside her medical practice she agitated for social reform, advocating female suffrage and temperance. Until the early 1890s she remained the organist for the African Methodist Episcopal church where she regularly worshiped.

Both of McKinney Steward s husbands were ministers She was ...