secrethistoriesproject:

23. Dr May Edward Chinn

May Chinn’s father, William Lafayette Chinn, was born into slavery and escaped at the age of eleven. Her mother, Lula Ann Evans, was born on the Chickahominy Indian Reservation near Norfolk, Virgina to a family that included people who were Native American, Black and white. Their daughter would become a medical doctor and one of the foremost cancer specialists in New York City.

And she was kind of amazing. 

After a childhood in which her mother (who worked as a housekeeper to some very well-off white people) made huge sacrifices to obtain a good education for her, Chinn first trained as a musician: she started at Columbia University Teachers’ College in 1917 as a music major. She began to play the piano as a professional accompanist before graduating, and even accompanied the amazing opera singer Paul Robeson (go read about him too, he’s worth it!) on more than one occasion. However, one of her professors persuaded her to change her major to science — for somewhat disturbing reasons: in her unpublished autobiography (now held in the New York Public Library), Chinn wrote that she was told that ”because I was of African descent… unless I could afford to go to Europe for final ‘polishing’ in my music, I would probably end up singing in a cabaret in America. If I chose science, my chances were better for a good future.” On that note, it’s difficult to know whether to talk about Chinn as Black or Black/Native American/white — given that in the quotation above she seems to have identified as Black and been treated as a Black woman by the world around her, that’s what I’ve gone with here for brevity’s sake, but I think that both sides of her ancestry need recognition.

Chinn applied to Bellevue Medical School, and was admitted. She gained her MD in 1926, and became the first Black woman to intern at Harlem Hospital (now Harlem Hospital Center). However, after finishing her internship in 1928 she was unable to get admitting privileges (ie. a job) at the hospital at which she’d interned. This certainly wasn’t because she hadn’t done a good job: she was an excellent medical practitioner, and the prestigious Rockefeller Institution offered her a research fellowship — then withdrew it when they discovered that their assumption that she was Chinese was incorrect (James, p.119). Horrible, but true.

Through interviews conducted while she was alive and through the above-mentioned autobiography, we’re lucky enough to have quite a lot of Chinn’s own words about her progress through medical school and work as a doctor. Here’s some of what she says: 

We doctors in Harlem had many problems… Chief among them was that Negro doctors were denied any hospital connection whatever. There was not a City Hospital in New York City where we could attend an Out-patient Clinic or a Ward Service for [the] study and observation of the newer diseases and the effects of the newer drugs… Even if a hospital was around the ‘bend of the road’ it was useless to us who were denied any privilege whatsoever of its faculties. We managed the best we could.

In 1928, Chinn joined a collective of other Black doctors who worked together out of the Edgecombe Sanitarium, which functioned as an alternative to the largely-segregated New York hospital system (Warren, p.27). Later (much later - around 1940) she was finally given admitting privileges at Harlem Hospital, where she worked at the Strang Clinic. As her practice grew, she became more and more interested in cancer, and its diagnosis and treatment. In 1933 she embarked on a Masters at Columbia, where she worked closely with Dr Georgios Papanikolaou, inventor of the Pap smear — when he later moved to Cornell, she continued to work with him, and there’s some evidence that her research helped with his discoveries. Chinn continued to work on methods of early-detection for cancer, and in 1957 received an honourable citation from the American Cancer Society for her work. 

Throughout her entire life, Chinn was also deeply devoted to helping others. She was active in the campaign for women’s votes and marched in at least one suffrage parade in 1919 (see image here), and her work at the Edgecombe Sanitarium was strongly oriented towards helping the Harlem community. In 1975, she helped to found the Susan Smith McKinney Steward Medical Society, an organisation to help Black women in medical school and document the achievements of Black female doctors. She also worked with the Phelps-Stokes Fund, an educational foundation designed to help students from Africa and other parts of the world to study medicine in the United States.  

Chinn didn’t retire from medical practice until she was eighty-one years old. In December 1980, she collapsed and died at the age of eighty-four — at a reception at Columbia which had been organised to honour her. I hope that by then she knew exactly how much she’d done to make the world a better place.  

More: 

Biography at the National Library of Medicine: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_61.html

Biography from the San Diego ‘Women in Science’ series: http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/chinn.html

Wikipedia bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Edward_Chinn

Google Books link: Wini Warren, Black Women Scientists in the United States : http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=75bnncOVqEIC&lpg=PA28&ots=xKGbC9K7rT&dq=may%20edward%20chinn&pg=PA26#v=onepage&q=may%20edward%20chinn&f=false

Google Books link: Edward James et al, Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=WSaMu4F06AQC&lpg=PA119&dq=may%20edward%20chinn%20notable%20american%20women&pg=PA119#v=onepage&q=may%20edward%20chinn%20notable%20american%20women&f=false

stewmire85:

Ever wonder why Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team is called the “Indians”? Well, it’s in honor of Louis “Chief” Sockalexis, pictured above, the first Major Leaguer with confirmed Native American ancestry. He played 94 games with Cleveland’s Major League team (then called the Spiders) from 1897 to 1899, and he had great potential both on offense and defense, but as with many other baseball talents, such as Lewis “Hack” Wilson, Stuart “Slim” Jones and Robert “Bo” Belinsky, hard living (alcohol, in Sockalexis’s case) got the better of him, so his career never took off as it might have, and he passed away in 1913 at the age of 42.

His legacy has outlasted him, however, as in 1914 a Cleveland newspaper held a contest to rename the team, since calling them the “Napsters” no longer made sense with star player Nap Lajoie gone. The winning entry was “Indians”, and the person who sent in that entry explained that it was as a tribute to the recently deceased outfielder whose social accomplishments, most notably his indifference to racist taunts from opposing fans, give him a special place in baseball history.

Moreover, since him, Native Americans have made great contributions to the game. Many were nicknamed “Chief”, but despite the limited imagination of white sportswriters of the era, Charles Albert “Chief” Bender was an accomplished pitcher (212 wins vs. 127 losses, inducted in baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1953) whose greatest feat was inventing the pitch we now call the “slider”. But Bender, like all other Native American players, has Louis Sockalexis to thank for paving the path on which he walked.

blacknessuniversity:

DEEP THOUGHT OF THE DAY: “What is the QUALITY of your INTENT?

Certain people have a way of saying things that shake us at the core. Even when the words do not seem harsh or offensive, the IMPACT is shattering. What we could be experiencing is the INTENT behind the words. When we INTEND to do good, we do. When we INTEND to do harm, it happens. What each of us must come to realize is that OUR INTENT ALWAYS COMES THROUGH. We cannot sugarcoat the feelings in our heart of hearts. The emotion is the energy that motivates. We cannot ignore what we really want to create. We should be honest and do it the way we feel it. What we owe to ourselves and everyone around is to examine the reasons of our true intent. My intent will be evident in the results.” — Thurgood Marshall

On this day in 1967, Thurgood Marshall, U.S. solicitor general, was named to the Supreme Court by President Johnson. He was confirmed by the Senate on August 30 and became the first Black Supreme Court justice.

specialnights:

On March 25, 1931, nine unemployed young black men, illegally riding the rails and looking for work, were taken off a freight train at Scottsboro, Alabama and held on a minor charge. The Scottsboro deputies found two white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, and pressured them into accusing the nine youths of raping them on board the train. The charge of raping white women was an explosive accusation, and within two weeks the Scottsboro Boys were convicted and eight sentenced to death, the youngest, Leroy Wright at age 13, to life imprisonment.

And this is now a Broadway musical? Someone help me understand.

specialnights:

In 1981 the trial of Josephus Andersonan, an African American charged with the murder of a white policeman, took place in Mobile. At the end of the case the jury was unable to reach a verdict. This upset members of the Ku Klux Klan who believed that the reason for this was that some members of the jury were African Americans. At a meeting held after the trial, Bennie Hays, the second-highest ranking official in the Klan in Alabama said: “If a black man can get away with killing a white man, we ought to be able to get away with killing a black man.”

Nineteen-year-old Michael Donald was on his way to the store in 1981 when two members of the United Klans of America ( Bennie Hays’s son, Henry Hays, and James Knowles) abducted him, beat him, cut his throat and hung his body from a tree on a residential street in Mobile, Ala.

A short investigation took place with the local police claiming that Donald had been murdered over a disagreement with a drugs deal. Donald’s mother, Beulah Mae Donald, knowing her son didn’t involve himself with drugs, was determined to get justice. She contacted Jessie Jackson who came to Mobile and led a protest march about the failed police investigation.

vintageblackglamour:

Composer, Producer, Singer and pianist Patrice Rushen in the early 1980s, photographed by Bobby Holland. A child prodigy and classically trained pianist, the 1976 University of Southern California graduate is best known for her hit songs (all of which she wrote or co-wrote) “Forget Me Nots” “Haven’t You Heard,” and “Remind Me” and yes, her beautiful headful of braids! All of these songs and many others have been sampled countless times, most notably by Will Smith (“Men In Black”) and Mary J. Blige’s “You Remind Me”, which is based on “Remind Me.” According to her official website, Ms. Rushen receives about thirty requests every week to sample her music. Beyond her own stellar music career, Ms. Rushen has broken many barriers behind the scenes. She was the first woman to serve as Musical Director for the Grammy Awards, the Emmy Awards, the NAACP Image Awards and the People’s Choice Awards. She was also the Musical Director for Janet Jackson’s “janet.” Tour. Ms. Rushen has also composed many musical scores for film and television including “The Women of Brewster Place,” “Ruby Bridges,” and the theme song for “The Steve Harvey Show” (the sitcom, not his current talk show). Ms. Rushen has said that she has modeled her career after her friend and mentor Quincy Jones and she has recorded with him and many other musical legends like Prince, Minnie Riperton, Al Jarreau, George Benson, Chaka Khan, Carlos Santana and more. In 2005, she received an honorary doctor of music degree from Berklee College of Music in Boston and in 2008, she accepted the newly created position of Ambassador for Artistry in Education at the school. Ms. Rushen is still composing and performing today and also works with several organizations that focus on music education programs for inner-city youth. Photo: Bobby Holland/Michael Ochs Archives.

Under the palm trees and stars at LACMA