Long before it became the slogan of the presidential campaign for Barack Obama, Dorothy Ferebee (1898–1980) lived by the motto YES, WE CAN. An African American obstetrician and civil rights activist from Washington DC, she was descended from lawyers, journalists, politicians, and a judge. At a time when African Americans faced Jim Crow segregation, desperate poverty, and lynch mobs, she advised presidents on civil rights and assisted foreign governments on public health issues. Though articulate, visionary, talented, and skillful at managing her publicity, she was also tragically flawed.
Ferebee was president of the Alpha Kappa Alpha black service sorority and later became the president of the powerful National Council of Negro Women in the nascent civil rights era. She stood up to gun-toting plantation owners to bring health care to sharecroppers through her Mississippi Health Project during the Great Depression.
A household name in black America for forty years, Ferebee was also the media darling of the thriving black press. Ironically, her fame and relevance faded as African Americans achieved the political power for which she had fought. In She Can Bring Us Home, Diane Kiesel tells Ferebee’s extraordinary story of struggle and personal sacrifice to a new generation.
Long before it became the slogan of the presidential campaign for Barack Obama, Dorothy Ferebee (1898–1980) lived by the motto YES, WE CAN. An African American obstetrician and civil rights activist from Washington DC, she was descended from lawyers, journalists, politicians, and a judge. At a time when African Americans faced Jim Crow segregation, desperate poverty, and lynch mobs, she advised presidents on civil rights and assisted foreign governments on public health issues. Though articulate, visionary, talented, and skillful at managing her publicity, she was also tragically flawed.
Ferebee was president of the Alpha Kappa Alpha black service sorority and later became the president of the powerful National Council of Negro Women in the nascent civil rights era. She stood up to gun-toting plantation owners to bring health care to sharecroppers through her Mississippi Health Project during the Great Depression.
A household name in black America for forty years, Ferebee was also the media darling of the thriving black press. Ironically, her fame and relevance faded as African Americans achieved the political power for which she had fought. In She Can Bring Us Home, Diane Kiesel tells Ferebee’s extraordinary story of struggle and personal sacrifice to a new generation.
She Can Bring Us Home: Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, Civil Rights Pioneer
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Overview
Long before it became the slogan of the presidential campaign for Barack Obama, Dorothy Ferebee (1898–1980) lived by the motto YES, WE CAN. An African American obstetrician and civil rights activist from Washington DC, she was descended from lawyers, journalists, politicians, and a judge. At a time when African Americans faced Jim Crow segregation, desperate poverty, and lynch mobs, she advised presidents on civil rights and assisted foreign governments on public health issues. Though articulate, visionary, talented, and skillful at managing her publicity, she was also tragically flawed.
Ferebee was president of the Alpha Kappa Alpha black service sorority and later became the president of the powerful National Council of Negro Women in the nascent civil rights era. She stood up to gun-toting plantation owners to bring health care to sharecroppers through her Mississippi Health Project during the Great Depression.
A household name in black America for forty years, Ferebee was also the media darling of the thriving black press. Ironically, her fame and relevance faded as African Americans achieved the political power for which she had fought. In She Can Bring Us Home, Diane Kiesel tells Ferebee’s extraordinary story of struggle and personal sacrifice to a new generation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781612347585 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Potomac Books |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Diane Kiesel is an acting justice of the New York State Supreme Court. She presides in the Bronx County Criminal Term. A former journalist, she is a winner of the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism and is the author of Domestic Violence: Law, Policy, and Practice. She lives in New York City.
Diane Kiesel is an acting justice of the New York State Supreme Court. A former journalist, she is a winner of the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism and is the author of Domestic Violence: Law, Policy, and Practice. She lives in New York City.
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She Can Bring Us Home
Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, Civil Rights Pioneer
By Diane Kiesel
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of NebraskaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61234-758-5
CHAPTER 1
Push, Pluck, Prominence, and Merit
In a crumbling cardboard box of memorabilia gathering dust in her granddaughter's attic is a sepia-tone picture of a young Dorothy Celeste Boulding, circa 1906. She wears a white pinafore, tights, and leather ankle boots — the uniform of privileged little girls — and a self-assured, almost smug expression. About the time the picture was taken, Dorothy had begun her backyard medical career. "I would nurse and rub the birds that fell out of trees, the dog that lost a fight," she recalled. Her mother and grandmother encouraged her dream of becoming a doctor every step of the way.
Sometimes Dorothy claimed she was inspired to enter medicine after helping stuff and stitch the Thanksgiving turkey: "Stitches in the well-stuffed birds for baking were stitches in mending broken bones and open wounds — a considerable stretch of the imagination, but children have no brakes on theirs." Given her lifelong aversion to the kitchen and her lack of culinary skill when she ventured into one, her wounded-bird story has more of the ring of truth.
Whatever led Dorothy to dream of becoming a doctor, it was unlikely a "colored girl" of her day would get her wish. In 1890 there were all of 909 black doctors in the United States — 115 of them women. When she entered medical school in 1920, and Jim Crow had taken its toll the numbers of black women doctors in the nation had dwindled to sixty-five.
But Dorothy was oblivious to barriers and fortunate enough to occupy a sliver of the universe inhabited by the successful black elite, the so-called Talented Tenth. The phrase was coined by NAACP founder W. E. B. Du Bois, who described the Talented Tenth as those upper-crust Negroes destined to lead the rest of the race out of its misery: "From the very first it has been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and elevated the mass." Dorothy would cling to the philosophy of the Talented Tenth all her life.
The spoon in Dorothy Boulding's mouth at birth was solid silver. She was the youngest of three children born in Norfolk, Virginia, to the privileged Florence Cornelia Paige, called Flossie, and Benjamin Richard Boulding. Flossie's formidable father, Richard Gault Leslie Paige, known by his initials, R.G.L., began life a slave and ended it a wealthy businessman. In between he was elected to the Virginia legislature and fought fearlessly for his race. On the floor of the General Assembly in 1880 he angrily (and futilely) demanded that the governor investigate a local lynching. His incendiary remarks were reported in the New York City papers. Flossie's mother, Lillie Ruffin, was descended from the Boston Ruffins, a premier black family that included a judge, writers, lawyers, a professional musician, and one noisy suffragette.
In an oral history she gave shortly before she died of congestive heart failure Dorothy claimed her great-grandfather was Thomas Paige, a white governor of Virginia, but there was no such governor. She may have been repeating family lore, or she may have been confused by her disease, which can cause extreme fatigue, or by high doses of digitalis, the standard drug for the condition, which also can cause confusion. There was a slave-owning Dr. Thomas Page (the "Page" surname is sometimes spelled with an "i") who lived in Norfolk before the Civil War, but whether the shared surname constituted parentage or merely ownership of her ancestors is unknown, assuming there is any family connection between Dr. Page and her grandfather.
Dorothy's grandfather was one of four brothers, all of whom were born slaves. R.G.L. was born on May 31, 1846, and died from peritonitis on September 21, 1904.9 He and his older brother, Thomas, who became a Norfolk business leader after the war, escaped slavery with the help of the Underground Railroad. Dorothy's grandfather was ten when he stowed away on a cargo ship bound for Philadelphia, where the local antislavery society arranged for him to go to Boston to join an aunt who had escaped earlier. To honor a Professor Lesley who assisted him on his perilous journey, R.G.L. took the man's name as one of his middle names, with a different spelling. In Boston he got lucky, living with his aunt under the roof of a pair of kind and generous abolitionists, the Harvard-educated lawyer George Hillard and his wife, Susan. Hillard had been a law partner of Senator Charles Sumner, and his wife was active in the Underground Railroad along with the poet William Wadsworth Longfellow and others.
Dorothy's grandfather was not the first black man to graduate from Harvard Law School, as she bragged. That honor belonged to his future brother-in-law, George Ruffin, who graduated in 1869 and married the famous suffragette, political journalist, and women's organizer, Josephine St. Pierre. Ruffin became the first black judge in Massachusetts, a family connection of which Dorothy was very proud. R.G.L. either apprenticed with a practicing lawyer — perhaps Hillard or Ruffin — or was self-taught and hung up a shingle once he returned to Norfolk. At other points in his life he was a craftsman, and Norfolk's assistant postmaster.
While in Boston R.G.L. met the high-class Ruffins, probably in a pew at the Twelfth Baptist Church, an African American parish populated by many runaway slaves, and in 1868 married Judge Ruffin's baby sister, Lillie. R.G.L. began amassing real estate, probably from his earnings as a craftsman. The first two of their nine children, including Dorothy's mother on December 19, 1871, were born in Massachusetts. R.G.L. then moved his family back to Norfolk, where postwar political coalitions formed, making it possible for former slaves like him to hold political office.
Once in Norfolk, Lillie, and later, her daughter Flossie, were "club women," who were held in high esteem in the African American community in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They joined forces with other like-minded ladies to help less fortunate families of color, filling the void occupied in more enlightened times by government agencies and paid social workers. In bustles, slender boots, and feathered hats they gathered in church basements to organize neighborhood improvement associations.
Florence Paige Boulding's power base was Norfolk's Grace Episcopal Church, home to black worshippers since 1883.17 One of her "club woman" projects was to help find jobs for Negro teachers in Virginia's segregated schools. Flossie also enjoyed singing in public, much as her daughter, Dorothy, would later enjoy speaking.
Dorothy claimed not to know the day or year she was born. When the census taker came knocking on the family's door on June 1, 1900, someone told him little Dorothy was born in 1897.20 When she was middle-aged and sought an appointment by the State Department as a public-health consultant in Europe, she said she was born in 1900.21 She fibbed on her marriage license application, saying she was born in 1901, perhaps fooling her younger husband-to-be into thinking they were the same age, when she was really four years older.
At the time Dorothy was born, Virginia had no registration requirements for the birth or death of anyone, black or white. Dorothy said her "official" birthday, October 10, 1898, was one her father chose and was a source of disagreement between her parents. It is hard to believe her educated, well-to-do mother and father did not know when their only daughter was born. Dorothy's claim that she was unsure about her birth date provided the cover she needed to pick the date that best suited the occasion.
There was no controversy about when Dorothy's two older brothers were born. Ruffin Paige Boulding was born on January 4, 1895; Benjamin Richard Boulding, named for his father and grandfather, was called Richard and was born on June 10, 1896.25 Ruffin graduated from the prestigious law school at Howard University in 1925.26 During those years of strict segregation in education, Howard was known as "the black Harvard."
Family fortune took a downward slide when Dorothy's wealthy grandfather died in 1904. It declined further with the early death in 1910 of her forty-two-year-old father and then went into a free fall when R.G.L.'s bereft widow, Lillie, died in 1913 and left the bulk of her estate to her favorite son, R.G.L. Jr., a lawyer known as Leslie. Lillie moped and mourned a full decade after her husband's death — to the point where it was listed as a secondary cause of her own death. In his honor she erected a twelve-foot obelisk in the Norfolk cemetery he owned and where he and many family members were buried. It was only because Dorothy's brother Ruffin selflessly deferred his own schooling to finance her medical training that she got an education.
Brother Richard's station in life was less lofty. He worked as a laborer, ran a pool hall, and sold insurance. He was a steward at the whites-only Monticello Hotel and a bartender serving the white patrons of the Norfolk Yacht and Country Club. He was briefly employed at the Norfolk Naval Base and logged some time as a postman. At age forty-five he was a bachelor, still living at home in Norfolk with his widowed mother.
Dorothy sanitized and upgraded Richard's professional life when speaking about him. The year before she died, in her interview for the Black Women Oral History Project, she said Richard graduated from Hampton Institute, the segregated trade school near Norfolk attended by her parents and Booker T. Washington that expanded to a full-scale accredited college. She also claimed he was a high school chemistry teacher who later had a stable career with the postal service. None of that checks out.
When Richard died in February 1980, seven months before Dorothy, his obituary noted his forty-five-year career as a postman in Norfolk. Dorothy was his closest living relative and the likely source of the story. He was hired as a temporary postal clerk in September 1943, probably to fill a wartime manpower shortage, but he resigned less than a year and a half later, after having racked up petty infractions like showing up late and going AWOL from his workstation. Similarly when Dorothy's mother died in 1959 the headline of her obituary — the source of which was most certainly Dorothy — referred to Flossie as an "ex-teacher." Alumni records from Hampton Institute describe Flossie as "having taught," but she hardly had much of a classroom career. Year after year in Norfolk's city directories she was listed as a "domestic."
Dorothy's father could have given her bragging rights, yet she rarely spoke of him. That may be because she hardly knew him; he died when she was only twelve, and she spent most of her childhood in Boston. Her most extensive reference to her father was to boast that she was the apple of his eye. She heaped credit for her accomplishments on her mother, her grandmother, and her grandmother's sister, Emma, with whom she lived as a student in Boston. But Dorothy was a chip off the old man's block.
Benjamin Boulding was born in 1868 in either Crewe or Burkeville, Virginia, tiny towns about 110 miles west of Norfolk. He was the oldest son of Benjamin Richard and Angelina Boulding. Boulding would rank among the Talented Tenth, but his own parents were simple country folk. His father called himself a farmer; his wife of forty-six years was described in the 1900 census as a "wash woman." Despite these modest beginnings, at the time of his death Dorothy's paternal grandfather owned thirty-five acres of land in Nottoway County that he left to his heirs. Benjamin Boulding graduated in 1888 from Hampton Institute, and Flossie Paige graduated in 1892.38 He became a school principal in the Nottoway County public schools, resigning in 1891 to work as a clerk for the U.S. Railway Mail Service, making one thousand dollars a year. When the average annual wage for non–farm laborers was $480 a year, Boulding's princely salary placed him solidly in the upper middle class, particularly among members of his race. By 1893 he was promoted to senior clerk in charge of all mail transported along a 208-mile stretch of the Southern Railway. In Norfolk on December 27, 1893, he married Florence Cornelia Paige. In anticipation of their marriage he plunked down two hundred dollars for a nice piece of property in Huntersville, part of Norfolk County.
Like George Bailey in Frank Capra's Christmas chestnut, It's a Wonderful Life, Boulding was the neighborhood go-to guy for those of his race in need. When St. Vincent's, the local black hospital, burned to the ground it was Boulding who led the fund-raising drive to rebuild it. When Norfolk's four thousand African American children — including his own — had no high school, it was Boulding who took up the battle to build one. He sat on the boards of segregated newspapers, banks, and savings and loans. He was the director of a savings bank and was active in the National Negro Business League, started by Booker T. Washington in 1900.46
Reporters from the African American press wrote glowingly of Boulding, as they would one day of his daughter. They described him as a man of "push, pluck, prominence and merit" and took note of his "military carriage, which, added to a magnificent physique, [made] him a notable figure in any gathering." Significantly, the same words could have been used to describe his daughter's future beaux.
Boulding's greatest claim to fame was the heroism he showed during the Southern Railway train wreck outside Danville, Virginia, on September 27, 1903. The incident was immortalized in the song "Wreck of the Old 97." The four-car train, Number 97, was speeding southbound from New York to New Orleans when it jumped a seventy-five-foot trestle, killing nine of its sixteen crew members and seriously injuring the rest. Sitting at his window at the postal station in Danville, Boulding suspected disaster when he heard the fire alarm. He ran out of the station and arrived at the wreck, where he took charge of rescuing the injured and salvaging the mail. The Richmond Planet called him a "hero."
The Norfolk that was home to Boulding and his family was a rapidly growing port three hundred miles by boat from New York City and one hundred miles southeast of Richmond. The population was 46,615 when Dorothy was born, 20,230 of whom were listed as Negro. There were many educated, entrepreneurial blacks in Norfolk — like the Paiges and the Bouldings — who, as the nineteenth century wore on, were steadily being marginalized by the emergence of officially sanctioned segregation, commonly called Jim Crow after a character in a minstrel song, "Jump Jim Crow," that was routinely performed by white comedians in blackface.
Once federal troops and carpetbaggers pulled out of the South after the Civil War, the "Black Codes" sprang up, first in Mississippi in 1890 and then throughout the southern states like the boll weevil through a cotton crop. These were laws written to stop blacks from voting, serving on juries, or intermingling with whites. Virginia passed its own Black Code in 1902.
Dorothy's grandfather went from being a legislator who made the laws to being just another black man oppressed by them. Prominent men of color were pushed out of elective office, professional positions, and mainstream life. Their race was their destiny, which they wore like an identity card, to the point where the names of persons of color were flagged by an asterisk in the official Norfolk city directory. But regardless of how far their standing slipped with the white community, the Bouldings remained on the top rung of the ladder among black families in Norfolk and held their heads high.
By February 1900, however, it all threatened to fall apart when Flossie filed for divorce. The pending divorce answers at least one question about Dorothy's recollection of her childhood. When she was young she was sent to Boston to live with her mother's extended family. The excuse she gave was an unnamed health problem suffered by her mother: "My mother was very ill following my birth. Her illness was quite extended and my Great Aunt Emma was really the one who took charge." But it was not Flossie's health that was ailing; it was her marriage.
Dorothy never described the mysterious health crisis that overtook her mother, adding to the dubiousness of her claim. Flossie's granddaughter, Dorothy Ruth Ferebee, a socially accepted single mother in the twenty-first century, overheard whispered conversations as a child to the effect that Flossie had provoked a marital breakup by taking a lover. Flossie finessed the situation by telling folks her husband was dead. Verbally killing him off was a lesson her precocious daughter, Dorothy, learned well; it was the same tale she told after she divorced her own straying husband in 1950. Whatever illness Flossie suffered was cured because she managed to live well into her eighties, dying in 1959 at the Washington DC home of her then famous daughter.
Other reasons may exist for Dorothy's Boston hiatus. A black girl with pie-in-the-sky dreams of becoming a doctor had no chance of realizing them in Virginia. The segregated school system of her day was inferior and would prepare her for little more than manual labor. In contrast, Boston established an elementary school for black children as early as 1820. By 1855 the city's public schools were integrated, which would not happen nationwide for another one hundred years. Dorothy was enrolled in school in Boston in 1904 and lived on Beacon Hill. She stayed in Boston until 1908.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from She Can Bring Us Home by Diane Kiesel. Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Preface,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction: Compassion, Cussedness, and Class,
Prologue,
1. Push, Pluck, Prominence, and Merit,
2. Among the Favored Few,
3. As If I Had Thrown a Bomb into the Room,
4. The Count,
5. Petunia Ticklebritches,
6. Everything Was Precise,
7. We Went, We Saw, We Were Stunned,
8. Stupid, Vacant, and Void of Hope,
9. As the Moonlight Turned Barn Roofs to Silver,
10. Tell Claude Ferebee to Keep His Shirt On,
11. Madeline, My Concerto,
12. The Skipper,
13. Some Stuff,
14. Every Bone in the Body,
15. A Matter for Grave Concern,
16. One of the Coldest Winters We Ever Had,
17. As Good as I Could,
18. You Were Grand as Ever,
19. A Bad Bitter Pill,
20. A Citizen Concerned with International Affairs,
21. Woman Power,
22. I Should Not Be Here but I Had to Come,
Epilogue: Going Home,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,