Rise Vol. 2 Issue No. 2

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REBECCA LEE CRUMPLER, born February 8, 1831

Rebecca Lee Crumpler challenged the prejudice that prevented African Americans from pursuing careers in medicine to became the first African American woman in the United States to earn an M.D. degree, a distinction formerly credited to Rebecca Cole. Although little has survived to tell the story of Crumpler’s life, she has secured her place in the historical record with her book of medical advice for women and children, published in 1883.

Crumpler was born in 1831 in Delaware, to Absolum Davis and Matilda Webber. An aunt in Pennsylvania, who spent much of her time caring for sick neighbors and may have influenced her career choice, raised her. By 1852 she had moved to Charlestown, Massachusetts, where she worked as a nurse for the next eight years (because the first formal school for nursing only opened in 1873, she was able to perform such work without any formal training). In 1860, she was admitted to the New England Female Medical College. When she graduated in 1864, Crumpler was the first African American woman in the United States to earn an M.D. degree, and the only African American woman to graduate from the New England Female Medical College, which closed in 1873.

In her Book of Medical Discourses, published in 1883, she gives a brief summary of her career path: “It may be well to state here that, having been reared by a kind aunt in Pennsylvania, whose usefulness with the sick was continually sought, I early conceived a liking for, and sought every opportunity to relieve the sufferings of others. Later in life I devoted my time, when best I could, to nursing as a business, serving under different doctors for a period of eight years (from 1852 to 1860); most of the time at my adopted home in Charlestown, Middlesex County, Massachusetts. From these doctors I received letters commending me to the faculty of the New England Female Medical College, whence, four years afterward, I received the degree of doctress of medicine.”

Dr. Crumpler practiced in Boston for a short while before moving to Richmond, Virginia, after the Civil War ended in 1865. Richmond, she felt, would be “a proper field for real missionary work, and one that would present ample opportunities to become acquainted with the diseases of women and children. During my stay there nearly every hour was improved in that sphere of labor. The last quarter of the year 1866, I was enabled . . . to have access each day to a very large number of the indigent, and others of different classes, in a population of over 30,000 colored.” She joined other black physicians caring for freed slaves who would otherwise have had no access to medical care, working with the Freedmen’s Bureau, and missionary and community groups, even though black physicians experienced intense racism working in the postwar South.

“At the close of my services in that city,” she explained, “I returned to my former home, Boston, where I entered into the work with renewed vigor, practicing outside, and receiving children in the house for treatment; regardless, in a measure, of remuneration.” She lived on Joy Street on Beacon Hill, then a mostly black neighborhood. By 1880 she had moved to Hyde Park, Massachusetts, and was no longer in active practice. Her 1883 book is based on journal notes she kept during her years of medical practice.

No photos or other images survive of Dr. Crumpler. The little we know about her comes from the introduction to her book, a remarkable mark of her achievements as a physician and medical writer in a time when very few African Americans were able to gain admittance to medical college, let alone publish. Her book is one of the very first medical publications by an African American.

https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography_73.html

BEULAH LOUISE HENRY, born February 11, 1887

Beulah Henry became known as “Lady Edison” for the number and variety of devices she invented that made daily life easier. The first of her inventions, a vacuum-sealed ice cream freezer, was patented in 1912. Henry went on to be considered the most prolific woman inventor of the 1920s, and continued to innovate for several decades.

Henry’s wide array of inventions included the “protograph,” a typographical device that produced an original and four typewritten copies without carbon paper; a lockstitch bobbinless sewing machine; an umbrella with interchangeable snap-on covers to coordinate with the user’s outfit; the “Kiddie Clock,” which helped children learn to tell time; the “Miss Illusion” doll, with eyes that changed colors at the touch of a button; and continuously attached envelopes for original and return mailings.

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Henry was self-educated, crediting her inventiveness to inspiration. The inventor said that she had a complete picture of each finished product in her mind before she began the difficult task of describing her idea clearly enough to enable a model maker to reproduce each device as she envisioned it. In all, Henry was granted 49 United States patents over the course of her career and is responsible for over 100 inventions.

https://www.invent.org/inductees/beulah-louise-henry

ADA OVERTON WALKER, born February 14, 1880

Ada Overton Walker, buck-and-wing and cakewalk virtuoso and choreographer regarded as one of the first choreographers on the American stage was born Ada Wilmon Overton on St. Valentines Day in Greenwich Village, New York City, the second child of Pauline Whitfield, a seamstress, and Moses Overton, a waiter. She was a child who seemed to have danced before she walked, fond of dancing ibn the streets with a hurdy-gurdy, until her parents decided she would receive formal dance training from a Mrs. Thorp in midtown Manhattan. Around 1897, after graduating from Thorp’s dance school, she toured briefly with Black Patti’s Troubadours. A new opportunity came when a girlfriend invited her to model for an advertisement with Bert Williams and George Walker, who had just scored a hit in their vaudeville debut at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall. She agreed to model for the ad and subsequently joined the men in the cakewalk finale. She then joined the cast of Octoroons, in which once critic declared of her performance, “I have just observed the greatest girl dancer.”

In 1898, Overton rejoined Williams and Walker at Koster and Bial’s in the second production of In Gotham with a cast of forty, in a program of songs and dances. With Grace Halliday she then formed the sister act of Overton and Halliday, considered the biggest of any sister acts of the time. Overton and Halliday performed as the pair of Honolulu Belles in the Williams and Walker production of The Policy Players (1899), and from there, Overton decided to develop as a soloist with more substantial roles. In The Sons of Sam (1900), she sang and danced “Miss Hannah from Savannah” and “Leading Lady.” James Weldon Johnson recalled in his autobiography that Ada Overton “had a low-pitched voice with a natural sob to it, which she knew how to use with telling effect in putting over a song.” Tom Fletcher remembered that she was a dancer “who could do almost anything, and no matter whether it was a buck-and-wing, cakewalk, or even some form of grotesque dancing, she lent the performance a neat gracefulness of movement which was unsurpassed by anyone.”

In 1899 Overton married George Walker and they became the leading cakewalking couple of the new century; in the cakewalk, they had found a quintessential black modernist expression—a high art worthy of being performed before royalty, for the white elite, and on the concert stage. In 1903, Williams and Walker production of In Dahomey was one of the first to realize the cakewalk’s transformation. Ad soon changed the spelling of her name, from Ada to Aida, the name of the Haitian loa (spirit) of fertility, rainbows, and snakes and the wife of the snake god Danbala. In that production, Ada and George’s cakewalk was one that has never been matched. As the writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten noted of their performance, “The line, the grace, the assured ecstasy of these dancers, who bent over backward until their heads almost touched the floor, a feat demanding an incredible amount of strength, their enthusiastic prancing, almost in slow motion, have never been equaled in this particular revel, let alone surpassed.” In 1903, Dahomey was presented as a command performance before Edward VII at Buckingham Palace, in the private quarters of the royal family. British high society followed the royal family for a gushing enthusiasm for cakewalking. When Overton Walker returned to New York, she used her reformed cakewalk choreography as entrée to elite white society. She promoted cakewalk’s grace and eloquence by terming it “the modern cakewalk.” She provided the dance with a new gloss, converting it from its past in a lower-class black “dance halls” that referenced the old slave culture to being an icon of the modern concert hall.

Overton Walker used the performing arts as a vehicle for upward mobility in the “racial uplift” movement of middle-class blacks. Influenced in part by W. E. B. Dubois’s idea that the “talented tenth” among African Americans rose and pulled all that were worth saving up to their vantage point, many turn-of-the-century African American women became social activists and—in their commitment to improving the social, cultural, moral, and material conditions of women—feminists. That commitment was formly resounded when Overton Walker argued that her performances were a reaction against the long standing image of actresses as morally unfit.

In 1908 Overton Walker was featured in Williams and Walker’s Bandanna Land, and her dancing continued to draw attention for its gracefulness. Soon after Bandanna Land opened, a new solo, “the Dancing of Salome,” was added for her. One evening in 1908 while onstage in Bandanna Land, George Walker, playing the role of Bud Jenkins, became ill. He was later diagnosed as having syphilis. He left the show in 1980 and his role was rewritten for Overton Walker, who donned his flashy male clothes and sang his numbers. While renewing her contract with Williams and Walker, she joined the cast of Bob Cole and J. Rosamand Johnson’s Red Moon, in which she was featured in two numbers, “Pheobe Brown” and “Pickaninny Days.” She next opened at the American Theater in 1909 with a vaudeville act featuring herself and eight girls of color.

By July 1911, six months after her husband died, Overton Walker had formed a new vaudeville act with one male and eight female dancers, in which she sang “Shine” as a male, impersonating her late husband, and she performed the new dance craze “The Barbary Coast” in close embrace with her new male partner. From 1912 until her heath in 1914, Overton Walker continued to choreograph for two black female dance group[s, the Happy Girls and Porto Rico Girls, who dancers included Lottie Gee, who would later star in the musical revue Shuffle Along (1921); and Elida Webb, who would star at the Cotton Club in the 1920s.

In 1912, Overton Walker danced “Salome” in a spectacular vaudeville performance at Oscar Hammerstein’s Victoria Theater in New York. She also rejoined Bert Williams for the annual Frog’s Frolic, appearing onstage with Bill Robinson. In 1913, Overton Walker’s dream to produce her own show was realized with a company of twelve at ther Pekin Theatre in Chicago. In 1914, she switched from African-style dance to ballroom dance in her vaudeville act, with her new partner Lackaye Grant. The tango picnic, in July of that year, she and partner Grant performed their ballroom dance act to much acclaim. The tango picnic was Overton Walker’s last public appearance. She died in October of 1914 of kidney disease.

Mourned as the foremost African American female stage artist, Overton Walker’s interest in both African American indigenous material and her translation of these to the modern stage anticipated the choreographic work of modern dance pioneers Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus. Both in her solo work for women and in the unison and precision choreographies for the female chorus, she claimed a female presence on the American theatrical stage. By negociating the narrow white definitions of appropriate black performance with her own version of black specialization and innovation, Overton Walker established a black cultural identity onstage that established a model by which African American musical artists could gain acceptance on the professional concert stage.

http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.music.tdabio.182/default.html

ZITKALA SA, born February 22, 1876

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin’s, or Zitkala-Sa – Red Bird, writings and work as an Indian rights activist are a vital link between the oral cultures of tribal America and the literate culture of contemporary American Indians.

Born on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, Red Bird was the third child of Ellen Tate Iyohiwin Simmons, a full-blood Dakota Sioux. Little is known of her father, a white man.

Her mother brought up the children in traditional Indian ways.

At the age of eight, Zitkala-Sa left the reservation to attend a Quaker missionary school in Wabash, Indiana.

She returned to the reservation but was culturally unhinged, “neither a wild Indian nor a tame one,” as she described herself later in The Schooldays of an Indian Girl.

After four unhappy years, she returned to her school, graduated, and at age 19 enrolled — against her mother’s wishes — at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana.

She later taught at Carlisle Indian School. Having become an accomplished violinist, she also studied at the Boston Conservatory of Music.

Meanwhile, the estrangement from her mother and the old ways of the reservation had grown, as had her resentment over the treatment of American Indians by the state, church and population at large.

Around 1900, she began to express her feelings publicly in writing.

Zitkala-Sa struggled with the issues of cultural dislocation and injustice – which brought suffering to her people. But her authorial voice was not merely critical.

She was earnestly committed to being a bridge builder between cultures, for example, by writing Old Indian Legends, published in 1901.

“I have tried,” she says in the introduction to that work, “to transplant the Native spirit of these tales into the English language, since America in the last few centuries has acquired a second tongue.”

In the following decades, Zitkala-Sa’s writing efforts were increasingly part of -and finally succeed by – her work as an Indian rights activist.

She had accepted a clerkship at the Standing Rock Reservation, where she met and married Raymond T. Bonnin, another Sioux employee of the Indian service.

The Bonnins then transferred to a reservation in Utah, where they became affiliated with the Society of American Indians.

Zitkala-Sa was elected secretary of the Society in 1916, and the Bonnins moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked with the Society and edited the American Indian Magazine.

In 1926, she founded the National Council of American Indians and continued to pursue reforms through public speaking and lobbying efforts.

She was instrumental in the passage of the Indian Citizenship Bill and secured powerful outside interests in Indian reform.

Zitkala-Sa died in Washington, D.C. in 1938 and was buried in Arlington Cemetery. Her autobiographical work makes her perhaps the first American Indian woman to write her own story without the aid of an editor, interpreter or ethnographer.

http://aktalakota.stjo.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8882

AUGUSTA SAVAGE, born February 29, 1892

Sculptor Augusta Savage once said: “I was a Leap Year baby, and it seems to me that I have been leaping ever since.” Savage leapt from the Jim Crow South to public attention in the Harlem Renaissance, but is little known today.

Savage grew up in Green Cove Springs, a brick-making town in Florida. “It had all of this natural red clay, and so Savage would seek out those red clay pits as a child,” explains Ikemoto. But before long, “she stopped making mud pies and started making things.”