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A Pictorial Review of One-Tenth of a Nation -Presenting the Negro Contribution to American Life Today
Published 1957

RALEIGH (WTVD) -- When WakeMed pediatrician Rasheeda Monroe volunteered as a COVID-19 vaccinator last month, she saw something was missing.

"I noticed that it was an amazing event, over 1,100 people got vaccinated. But, I thought where are the people of color," she said.

“[Annie Daugherty] was the midwife of the entire town. She delivered most of all the children in [Black Mountain] for the people who couldn’t afford to go to the hospital or have a doctor no matter if they were black or white. That was my grandmother,” Katherine Daugherty Debrow told a local filmmaker in 2001.

These are not all of the Black People who forged paths through racism to become change agents in the American Medical Field.

On 05/25/2012, a DNA study in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy was released.

On 05/25/2012, a DNA study in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy was released.

Only in the last fifty years has access to Asheville’s hospitals been available to every citizen. Before the 1950s a third of the population was legally segregated from seeking medical treatment.

Descendants of Tuskegee Syphilis Study Survivors Say It Was Nothing Like the Covid-19 Vaccine
They want to set the record straight on their fathers’ legacies and the ahistorical information. Though this article/interview is aboutThe Tuskegee Syphilis Study, we feel it's relevant to NC Black Health care history. American systemic racism structures have created injustices for Black Americans no matter which state we are from or live in now.

Carolyn Robertson Payton was born May 13, 1925. She was an African American Psychologist and global peace administrator and advocate. She was born in Norfolk, Virginia to Leroy Solomon Robertson and Bertha Flanagan Robertson.

Biography of Carrie Early Broadfoot - Founder, North Carolina Association of Negro Registered Nurses. Born June 13, 1870 in Lynchburg, VA, died January 8, 1945

When Charlie Kennedy was a kid, his hopes for a medical career seemed an impossible dream.

But with the help of benevolent strangers along the way, scholarships and a fervent determination for greatness, Kennedy would become the first black resident at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and, later, the first black pediatrician in Winston-Salem.

Dr. Chester Middlebrook Pierce (B. March 4, 1927 – D. September 23, 2016) was an American psychiatrist who was a tenured professor of education and psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Top photo: chief nurse, Lieutenant Della Raney,
Bottom photo: The 17 nurses who were under the charge of chief nurse, Lieutenant Della Raney, were in the 1942 yearbook of Tuskegee Army Flying School. They were part of the station hospital’s medical department for the Alabama base used for the advanced training of black men learning to fly military planes.

From Wilson, NC,
Dinah Scarborough Darden and her elder sons, pharmacist James B., lawyer Charles S., and physician John W. Darden.

Photograph of doctors attending a conference held by the Division of Cooperation in Education and Race Relations

Dr. Austin Maurice Curtis, Sr. was born either in June or January 15, 1868 in Raleigh, NC. He was a prominent turn-of-the-century physician and protégé of Dr. Daniel Hale Williams

Dr. Charles Richard Drew was born on June 3, 1904, in Washington, DC. Drew was a famous physician, surgeon, racial justice activist, and medical researcher who excelled in the area of blood transfusions. Dr. Charles R. Drew died on April 1, 1950, at Alamance General Hospital in Burlington, North Carolina at age 45 after being involved in an automobile accident while traveling through the area.

A Medical Perspective For African Americans

The birth of Thomas C. Unthank on Monday, 01.22.1866 is celebrated on this date. He was an African American Physician.

NOTE: We found different accounts concerning Eliza Simmons Bryant's ethnicity. Also there are different accounts concerning whether she was a free Black woman or enslaved. We give both accounts in this post.
Below: We also added the history about The Eliza Bryant Nursing Home In Ohio .

Eliza was the baby nurse for many Goldsboro children. She was the first Black person to be buried in Willowdale Cemetery. She was buried by white friends as a Testimonial Token, Loyalty, and Faithfulness. She died 10-10-1910; aged ca. 96 years.

Emma Dupree (1897-1992) was an influential black herbalist from Falkland and Fountain, in Pitt County in North Carolina. She was known locally as “granny woman.” She was the daughter of freed slaves and grew up on the Tar River. She was known for her work with native herbs: Sassafras, white mint, double tansy, rabbit tobacco, maypop, mullein, catnip, horseradish, and silkweed.

Mrs. Emma Dupree was an herbalist and was given the loving moniker of "granny woman" .She was a traditional healer in Falkland, Pitt County, North Carolina.

Henrietta Phelps Lawson Jeffries died on August 22, 1926 in the town of Milton in Caswell County, North Carolina. She is buried at Macedonia A.M.E. Church on Yarborough Road in Milton, North Carolina.

Photograph description with article: Charlotte's Hester Ford, the oldest person in the United States, celebrated her birthday with a drive-through parade due to the coronavirus pandemic. (She is sitting in an opened door, wearing a pink crown with happy birthday on it, and wearing a pink sash. On a tray in front of her is a birthday cake. ) - Photograph credit: Jessica Koscielniak

A Charlotte, NC woman, Mrs. Hester Ford with 260 descendants, celebrates August 15, 2020 as her 116th Birthday! Records say she's the oldest living American.

Photo description: A photo of nine African American nurses, standing on the steps of a building, who worked at the Camp Sherman Base Hospital in Ohio during World War I.
From the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst Libraries.

DR. JOHN CLEMON WILLIAMSON.
Born near Lucama in 1876 to Alex and Gracie Shaw Williamson, John Clemons Williamson attended Slater Industrial (the precursor to Winston-Salem State University), then Leonard Medical School. He returned to Winston-Salem to practice medicine and founded a private sanitarium in 1914.

James Francis Shober was an African American doctor and the first Black physician in North Carolina.

The Indiana History Blog published Nicole Poletika's detailed look at Dr. Joseph H. Ward's role in challenging segregation as the head of Tuskegee, Alabama's Veterans Hospital No. 91 in the 1920s and '30s.
Dr. Ward is on the front row, center (next to the nurse) in this 1933 photograph of Veterans Hospital staff.
Photo courtesy of VA History Highlights, "First African American Hospital Director in VA History,".

This is Julia Roberts, she was born in 1908. She was 96 when she died in 2004. Mrs. Roberts’ grandmother was enslaved on a plantation in Virginia, and Julia remembered her talking about having to "tend to white babies as a child." Roberts who was a midwife in the Kings Mountain, North Carolina, area for many years was described by many as the backbone and matriarch of her small, rural Black community of Ebenezer.

Leonard Hall, left, was constructed in 1881 and served as the base of operations for the Leonard Medical School. The "new" hospital, shown right, was completed in 1910, just 8 years before the school's closing.
Courtesy State Archives of North Carolina.

Photograph: Leonard Medical School At Shaw University alumnus Lt. Urbane F. Bass was willing to give his life to save others. He was killed in action on Oct. 17, 1918. Courtesy U.S. National Library of Medicine.

THE FIRST Lincoln Hospital was erected on the corner of Proctor Street and Cozart Avenue with a gift of $8,550.00 from Mr. Washington Duke. The plant was completed in July 1901 and was opened for patients in August of the same year. Mr. Washington Duke first had in mind the erection of a monument, on the campus of Trinity College, now Duke University, to the memory of the Negro slaves for the part they played in the dark days of the Civil War. The late Dr. A. M. Moore, Durham's first Negro physician, together with Mr. John Merrick and Dr. S. L. Warren, convinced Mr. Duke that a hospital for the descendants of the slaves would be more serviceable.

Lincoln Hospital (1901-1976) was a medical facility located in Durham, North Carolina founded to serve the African Americans of Durham County and surrounding areas. With original hospital construction financed by the Duke family, Lincoln served as the primary African American hospital in Durham until 1976, when it closed and transferred its inpatient services to Durham County General Hospital.

Louise Cecelia Fleming was a graduate of Shaw University in Raleigh, NC, and she was the first Black woman to graduate from the Women’s Medical College at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Dr. Manassa Thomas Pope was born in 1858 in Northampton Co., NC and died in 1934 at age 76. He is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, Raleigh, NC.
Manassa T. Pope was born free.

Photograph: Black Mountain, NC Midwife "c1942-Mary Hayden, 84, with her granddaughter, Mary O. Burnette, about 1942 and two of Hayden's great-grandchildren.
(Photo: SPECIAL TO BMN)

Photograph: Mary Hayden, about 1919, with her daughter-in-law Hattie Payne Burnette and two of her oldest grandchildren, Lorenzo and infant Juanita. (Photo: SPECIAL TO BMN)

Image-Painting, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Harmon Foundation. S/NPG.67.19

In all likelihood only one individual has been awarded both Lebanon’s Order of the Cedar and North Carolina’s Order of the Longleaf Pine. Mary (Margaret) Lee Mills, at first glance, may seem like an unlikely candidate for that distinction. Born in rural Pender County, North Carolina in August 1912, Mills hailed from the disenfranchised African-American community of one of the poorest parts of NC. How did she come to travel to Lebanon, much less win the highest award bestowed by the Lebanese government?

"Minnie Wood Perkins was born in Northampton County on January 31, 1910, to Will and Jane Flood Wood. She attended Waters Training School in Winton. She married Claude Deans in 1929 and their only child, Iris, was born in 1931.

She was born in Burke County in 1856 and died in 1943.. She lived near Magnolia her entire life
She is holding Nan Fleming Jeter, born 1905 and died in 1991

— Landmark study forced all but two Black U.S. medical schools to close

Saint Augustine's College established St. Agnes Hospital and Training School for Nurses to provide medical care for and by African Americans. It was the “first” school of nursing in the state of North Carolina for African American students and served as the only hospital that served African Americans until 1960.

Located on St. Augustine's College campus in Raleigh, NC, St. Agnes Hospital first opened its doors in October 1896 and served as a hospital and nurse training center for African Americans.

The site bears a Raleigh Historic Property designation, but being on that registry now puts some constraints on what can be done with property. The Department of the Interior, as well as other local groups and St. Augustine University alumni are looking for ways to restore the building as a medical school and museum.

Located on St. Augustine's College campus, St. Agnes Hospital first opened its doors in October 1896 and served as a hospital and nurse training center for African Americans. The hospital was expanded in 1903 to include new facilities, including an operating room.

In June of 2015, Penelope Johnson Brown of Pikesville, MD, identified her mother, Madie L. Johnson White (Green), as being the nurse in the middle of the front row of three sitting in the grass. Madie L. Johnson White (Green) was born and raised in Chester, Maryland (Kent Island).

Red Cross nurses deliver food to a Charlotte home where a young mother had just died.

Before the Civil War, Avery was owned by Nicholas Woodfin, a state senator and the largest slave owner in Buncombe County, NC. Tempe was a famous nurse who delivered many babies in Asheville, both black and white. In return for her loyalty and service to his family, Nicholas Woodfin gave Tempe several lots in Montford, which she passed on to her descendants when she died in 1917.

The 1919 law was the first foray for North Carolina into eugenics; this law, entitled "An Act to Benefit the Moral, Mental, or Physical Conditions of Inmates of Penal and Charitable Institutions" was quite brief, encompassing only 4 sections. Provision was made for creation of a Board of Consultation, made up of a member of the medical staff of any of the penal or charitable State institutions, and a representative of the State Board of Health, to oversee sterilization that was to be undertaken when "in the judgement of the board hereby created, said operation would be for the improvement of the mental, moral or physical conditions of any inmate of any of the said institutions".

Photo Collage Description: Left image- A page from a eugenics pamphlet in the 1930s Handout Pamphlet- Courtesy of the UNC Wilson Library, NC Collection- Transcript of words on pamphlet At bottom of Post*
Right Image: In this June 22, 2011 photo, Elaine Riddick has her face in a handkerchief and wipes tears from her eyes as she listens to other victims testify before the Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation task force compensation hearing in Raleigh, N.C. Between 1929 and 1974, North Carolina sterilized more than 7,600 individuals in the name of “improving” the state’s human stock. Jim R. Bounds- AP

Photo description: A Public health doctor giving tenant family- a Black mother and her children who are standing on the steps of their front porch-- medicine for malaria near Colombia, South Carolina, 1939 (Photo: Marion Post Wolcott, Library of Congress).

Over 100 midwives existed in Pitt County, NC in the 1920s and only 4 were left in 1968.