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  • 1877–1928: The Age of Segregation and the Progressive Era x
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Article

Adams, Numa Pompilius Garfield  

Shari Rudavsky

Article

Publication History:

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

Numa Pompilius Garfield Adams was born in Delaplane, Virginia. Little is known about Adams's family and early life. He attended a country school run by his uncle Robert Adams. Adams received additional instruction and inspiration from his grandmother Amanda, a midwife who shared with him the secrets of herbal medicine. When Adams was thirteen, his family moved to Steelton, Pennsylvania. Soon Adams taught himself how to read music and purchased a used cornet, which he taught himself to play, a skill that later helped him pay for his education.

After graduating from high school in 1905, Adams spent a year as a substitute teacher in Steelton and another year teaching seventh grade in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. These jobs helped him earn sufficient money to pay for his college education, and in 1907 he left Pennsylvania to enter Howard University in Washington, D.C. He soon joined the Lyric ...

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

Augusta, Alexander Thomas  

Dalyce Newby

Article

Publication History:

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

Alexander Thomas Augusta was born a free African American in Norfolk, Virginia, to parents whose names and occupations are unknown. Augusta received his early education from a Bishop Payne, defying a law that forbade African Americans to read or write. He continued to improve his reading skills while working as an apprentice to a barber. His interest in medicine led him to relocate to Baltimore, Maryland, where he studied with private tutors. Eventually, Augusta moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to serve an apprenticeship. Although he was denied entry to the University of Pennsylvania, Augusta caught the attention of Professor William Gibson, who allowed the young man to study in his office.

In January 1847 Augusta married Mary O. Burgoin in Baltimore Maryland They lived in California for three years before returning to the East Coast so that Augusta could pursue a medical degree Denied access ...

Article

Barnes, William Harry  

Billy Scott

Article

Publication History:

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

physician, otolaryngologist (an ear, nose, and throat specialist), inventor, and administrator, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of George W. Barnes, a laborer, and Eliza Webb Barnes and his two sisters lived poverty stricken lives on Lombard Street in a very poor area of the city Barnes decided at an early age to become a physician a decision unheard of and regarded in his neighborhood as preposterous His parents tried to discourage him from pursuing what to them seemed an impossible dream for a poor black youth hoping rather that he would focus on finding realistic employment Nevertheless determined Barnes walked ten miles every day to and from school and from his after school work as a porter and messenger for jewelry shops During summers he worked as a porter in hotels Seeing those who lived a far different and more elegant life than his own inspired ...

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

Cornely, Paul Bertau  

Edward T. Morman

Article

Publication History:

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

physician and public health activist, was born in Point-á-Pitre, Guadeloupe, French West Indies, the son of Eleodore Cornely and Adrienne Mellon. When he was three years old, his family moved to Santurce, Puerto Rico. In 1920 the family relocated to Harlem for one year and then moved to Detroit, where his father found work in an auto plant.

After attending Detroit City College, Cornely transferred to the University of Michigan. He earned his AB in 1928 and his MD in 1932 both from the University of Michigan where he was one of 4 blacks in a medical school class of 250 students Unable to get an internship in the North he spent a year at the segregated Lincoln Hospital in Durham North Carolina He intended to continue with specialty training in surgery but effectively barred from a residency he returned to the University of Michigan to study public ...

Article

Donnell, Clyde Henry  

Edward C. Halperin

Article

Publication History:

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

physician, was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, the son of Smith Donnell, a real estate developer, and Lula Ingold. Donnell was raised in Greensboro, where he attended the public schools for African Americans and the high school operated by North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University. He received an AB in 1911 from Howard University and an MD in 1915 from Harvard University. While at Harvard he studied under Milton J. Rosenau, the world-renowned scientist in preventive medicine and founder of the world's first school of public health, at Harvard in 1909. Since few hospitals would accept African Americans as interns at the time of Donnell's medical school graduation, he rotated as a fellow and observer at Boston City Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Children's Hospital from 1915 to 1916. Donnell's subsequent career was devoted to African American health education, insurance, and banking.

African ...

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, 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

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

Kenney, John Andrew, Sr.  

Elvatrice Parker Belsches

Article

Publication History:

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

physician, surgeon, hospital administrator and founder, author, and medical organizational leader, was born at Redmonds, near Charlottesville, in Albemarle County, Virginia. Kenney was the second of three children born to the ex-slaves John A. and Caroline Howard Kenney. The elder Kenney was a farmer, storekeeper, community leader, and owner of a forty-acre farm. According to unpublished autobiographical sketches in the Kenney Papers, Kenney's parents could not read or write during his youth; however, they were determined that their children would be educated. Kenney's father spearheaded building across the road from his country store a one-room log house, which became the community's first country day school for black children. In addition to school and working in his father's store, Kenney learned all the intricacies of farming, from planting to sales.

The Kenneys experienced a grave loss when John was about fourteen His father who according ...

Article

Lynk, Miles Vandahurst  

Todd L. Savitt

Article

Publication History:

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

physician, educator, and advocate for African American physicians, was born near Brownsville, Tennessee, the son of John Henry Lynk, a farmer, and Mary Louise Yancy, both former slaves. Miles's parents, members of the Colored (now Christian) Methodist Episcopal (CME) church, founded in nearby Jackson, Tennessee, named their son after the CME's first two bishops, William Henry Miles and Richard H. Vanderhorst. Miles received basic education from his mother, a country school near Brownsville, a tutor he hired with money he had earned, and a course of self-teaching, which he called attending “Pine Knot College.” At age seventeen Miles taught at an African American summer school in a neighboring county and used the money to apprentice himself to Jacob C. Hairston, a local physician and graduate of Meharry Medical College in Nashville. Robert Fulton Boyd a Meharry professor was sufficiently impressed with Lynk s ...

Article

Maloney, Arnold Hamilton  

Bridget Brereton

Article

Publication History:

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

physician and pharmacologist, was born in Cocoye Village, Trinidad, to Lewis Albert Maloney, a building contractor and grocery chain operator, and Estelle Evetta (Bonas) Maloney, a needlepoint teacher to young women. Maloney has the distinction of being the first African American professor of pharmacology in the nation and the second person of African descent to earn both a medical degree and a doctorate of philosophy in the United States.

Arnold began his career planning to become a druggist in Trinidad. He studied at Naparima College in Trinidad, a school affiliated with Cambridge University in England, where he received the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1909 Maloney had expectations of becoming a druggist in Trinadad however after receiving an unexpected letter from his uncle suggesting greater opportunities existed in the United States he migrated to New York to study medicine During this same year while attending Lincoln ...

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 ...

Article

Nash, Helen Elizabeth  

Mary Krane Derr

Article

Publication History:

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

physician, educator, and community advocate, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, third among the six children of Marie Graves, a homemaker, and Homer E. Nash, a doctor. Helen and her brother Homer E. Nash Jr. were both inspired to enter medicine by their father's example. A 1910 Meharry graduate, their father ran a private practice on Atlanta's Auburn Avenue, working up to his death at age ninety-four in 1981. Helen also grew up quite aware of a much-admired black woman physician, Georgia Dwelle, who founded and directed Atlanta's first successful, black-run private and maternity hospital, the Dwelle Infirmary, where Nash was in fact born.

A family tragedy shaped Nash s choice to specialize in pediatrics Her firstborn sibling a girl died at twenty two months from a gastrointestinal illness that caused severe diarrhea and dehydration Well into the twentieth century diarrhea related dehydration was ...

Article

Purvis, Charles Burleigh  

Dalyce Newby

Article

Publication History:

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

Charles Burleigh Purvis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Robert Purvis, Sr., a well-to-do abolitionist, and Harriet Forten, daughter of James Forten, a prosperous sailmaker and civic leader. Purvis received his early education in Quaker-administered public schools and then at Oberlin College, 1860–1863. For his medical studies he attended Wooster Medical College, which later was incorporated into Western Reserve University Medical School, in Cleveland, Ohio, graduating with an M.D. in 1865. During the summer of 1864 Purvis served as a military nurse, based at Camp Barker, a contraband hospital in Washington, D.C., which later formed the foundation of Freedmen's Hospital.

Upon graduating he petitioned to and was accepted by the U S Volunteers as an assistant surgeon for the Union army one of only eight African Americans accepted as surgeons during the war He held the rank of first ...

Article

Redmond, Sidney Dillon  

E. C. Foster

Article

Publication History:

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

physician, attorney, and political leader, was born in Holmes County, Mississippi, near the town of Ebenezer, the son of Charles Redmond, a former slave and blacksmith, and Esther Redmond, a former slave. In 1871 large numbers of blacks were elected to state and local government positions. Less than two years earlier a new state constitution had been put into effect that promised to make democracy a reality for both black and white Mississippians. Moreover, the abolition of slavery in the United States had occurred six years before Redmond's birth. After leaving the farm near Ebenezer along with the rest of his family, Redmond settled in Holly Springs, Mississippi, where he later attended Rust College. Upon graduation from Rust College in 1894 he entered the field of education and served both as a principal at Mississippi State Normal School in Holly Springs and as a ...

Article

Roman, Charles Victor  

Shari Rudavsky

Article

Publication History:

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

Roman Charles Victor was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, the son of James William Roman, a former slave, and Anna Walker McGuinn, the child of a former slave. Roman's parents met in Canada, where his father had fled about twenty years before the Civil War. After the Emancipation Proclamation a year and a half before Charles s birth they had moved back to the United States but making a living there was difficult and by the time Charles was six the family returned to Ontario where his father worked as a broom maker From an early age Charles knew he wanted to be a physician Soon after the move to Canada he apprenticed himself to a local herbalist possibly his grandmother His practice ended when one of his patients parents became nervous about the treatment Roman had administered and called in the local doctor who ...