Bridging Archival Gaps With Black Women's Oral Herstory

• In Event: "How We Get Over": Methodological Approaches for Black Herstory in Education

Abstract

What becomes of the Black woman who enters a historically white supremacist patriarchal profession such as western medicine in the United States? When and where does her life’s work enter the histories of medical education? Although there is seminal literature that centers early twentieth century Black women in medicine, such texts detail their family background, educational attainment and individual accomplishments bereft of contextualization of structural oppression within U. S. medical education. Furthermore, the seminal literature that centers Black women in medicine focuses on those who lived in the South, Midwest, and East. There continues to be a gap in knowledge and archives surrounding the experiences of early twentieth century Black women physicians of the American West. As an institutionally academic body of work, the study of the history of medical education emerged in the 1970s from the histories of medicine that analyze the creation of eighteenth century U. S. medical education through early twentieth century medical education reform. And while discourse on the development of U. S. medical education has been growing over the past fifty years, the dominant narratives that undergird the field lack the counternarratives of Black women in the American West. Again, when and where do Black women enter the histories of medical education?
Oral histories offer historical data that is critical in promoting counternarratives, especially from those who have been historically marginalized. The rich historical data within the Black Women Oral History Project (1977-1981) fills gaps where archives are silent. Grounded in Collins’ Black Feminist Thought (BFT), this study prioritizes oral histories of California’s earliest Black women physicians within the context of structural oppression to problematize and nuance understandings of early twentieth century U. S. medical education. California’s Black women in medicine were seemingly never meant to survive exclusionary and even revisionist histories of medical education. Centering and historicizing Black women’s knowledge production pushes back on the ahistorical ethos within the histories of U. S. medical education. The geographic concentration of Black women physicians in the rural South and urban Northeast can be attributed to high population density of African Americans in those regions from the colonial era through the beginning of the Great Migration in 1916. As Black people migrated West, the number of Black women physicians in this region began to slowly increase. Accordingly, the advent of Black women physicians in the American West emerged closer to the 1920s. In California, Ruth J. Temple led the first generation of Black women physicians when she completed medical school in 1918 at the College of Medical Evangelists (CME), present-day Loma Linda University. Twenty years later, Edna L. Griffin becomes California’s second Black woman physician when she moves to Pasadena after completing her medical education at Meharry Medical College in Tennessee. The oral histories of Temple and Griffin reveal possibilities to bridge archival gaps and further study the juxtaposition of multiple marginalized identities and medical education in a society that is grounded in definitive racial, gender, and class barriers.

Author

• Monica Ugwu Perkins, Claremont Graduate University
  Presenting Author