Reference
People named in this exhibition
Everyone this exhibition names, and where to find them. Grouped by what they did, because the groups say something an alphabet cannot.
Operated on without consent
Their names survive because the surgeon who used them wrote them down.
Anarcha
An enslaved teenager in Montgomery, Alabama, operated on by J. Marion Sims some thirty times without anaesthesia as he developed the repair of vesicovaginal fistula. She is the reason the procedure exists.
Chapter 10 →Betsey
Enslaved, eighteen, and among the first three women Sims operated on. Her name appears in his own account and almost nowhere else.
Chapter 10 →Lucy
Enslaved, seventeen, and nearly killed by sepsis after Sims used a sponge to drain her bladder. She survived the operation and the infection that followed it.
Chapter 10 →Mercedes Wells
Discharged from an Indiana hospital in active labor and gave birth in her truck on the side of the road. Rep. Robin Kelly announced the WELLS Act in her honor.
Chapter 17 →Kira Dixon Johnson
Died after a routine cesarean at Cedars-Sinai while her husband asked for help for ten hours. Charles Johnson founded 4Kira4Moms in her name.
Chapter 17 →The midwives who were pushed out
Black midwives attended a large share of all Southern births into the twentieth century. Licensing did what a ban could not.
Bridget “Biddy” Mason
Enslaved as a midwife, she won her freedom in court, practised in Los Angeles, and used her wealth as a landowner and philanthropist to found the city’s first Black church.
Chapter 1 →Margaret Charles Smith
Took her midwife permit in Greene County, Alabama in 1949 and attended nearly three thousand births before the state pushed her out. Her memoir is Listen to Me Good.
Chapter 1 →Onnie Lee Logan
Practised in Mobile County, Alabama from 1931 until 1984, when the state dismissed the last of its Black midwives. Her memoir is Motherwit.
Chapter 1 →Mary Coley
The midwife at the centre of All My Babies, the 1952 film the Georgia Department of Public Health made to train midwives and then used as the profession was closing.
Chapter 1 →Who named the frameworks
Each of these is defined on the terms page.
Dr. Dána-Ain Davis
Named obstetric racism and set out its seven dimensions in Reproductive Injustice (2019). Everything Chapter 12 does rests on her vocabulary.
Chapter 12 →Dr. Karen A. Scott
Built Davis’s dimensions into the PREM-OB Scale, the first validated measure of obstetric racism, developed with and for Black mothers. In her SACKRED Birth Study the scores did not vary with clinical risk.
Chapter 12 →Dr. Arline T. Geronimus
Named weathering in 1992 — the physical cost of sustained stress, and why the health gap widens through the years people are most likely to give birth.
Chapter 11 →Kimberlé Crenshaw
Named intersectionality in 1989, from employment cases in which Black women lost because the court had no category for what happened to them.
Chapter 9 →Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones
Set out the three levels of racism — personal, institutional and systemic — in the American Journal of Public Health in 2000. Chapter 13 is built on it.
Chapter 13 →Isabel Wilkerson
Applied caste to the United States in Caste (2020), describing the structure that individual acts of racism sit inside.
Chapter 7 →Robin DiAngelo
Named white fragility in 2011 — the defensive response that decides whether a concern raised in a clinical setting gets addressed or gets managed.
Chapter 14 →Kelly M. Hoffman
Led the 2016 PNAS study finding that half of white medical students and residents endorsed at least one false belief about Black patients’ bodies, and rated their pain lower.
Chapter 10 →Who went to court, and who wrote the laws
Sarah Roberts
Five years old, she walked past five white schools to reach the one Boston allowed her to attend. Her father sued. The 1849 ruling against them is the reasoning the Supreme Court later borrowed for Plessy.
Chapter 5 →Prudence Crandall
Admitted Sarah Harris to her Canterbury school, and when the town turned on her reopened it for Black girls only. Connecticut passed a law in 1833 to stop her, and she was arrested.
Chapter 5 →Elizabeth Peratrovich
Tlingit, and a mother of three. Asked by a senator who these people “barely out of savagery” were, her answer carried Alaska’s 1945 Anti-Discrimination Act — the first civil rights law passed anywhere in the country since Reconstruction.
Chapter 5 →Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon
An El Paso physician who sued Texas over the white primary, won in 1927, sued again when the state rewrote the rule, and won again in 1932.
Chapter 5 →Benjamin Rush
Remembered as an opponent of slavery, and lectured students at the country’s first medical school that Black and white bodies differed biologically.
Chapter 10 →Samuel George Morton
Penn physician whose craniometry claimed to prove the races differed in intelligence, and whose work was carried into American medical textbooks.
Chapter 10 →J. Marion Sims
Still called a father of modern gynecology. He developed the fistula repair on at least eleven enslaved women, without anaesthesia and without consent they were in a position to give.
Chapter 10 →Abraham Flexner
His 1910 report reorganised American medical education and closed five of the seven Black medical schools then operating.
Chapter 1 →Practising and building now
The twelve midwives on the portrait wall, and the people carrying the work in public.
Shafia Monroe
Founder of the International Center for Traditional Childbearing, and the source for much of what is known about how many births Black midwives once attended.
Chapter 17 →Jennie Joseph
Founder of Commonsense Childbirth and creator of The JJ Way®; her Florida clinic is a National Perinatal Task Force Perinatal Safe Spot.
Chapter 17 →Nicole Deggins, CNM
Founder of Sista Midwife Productions, and creator of the Black Midwife and Doula Directory.
Chapter 17 →Okunsola M. Amadou
Missouri’s first Black Certified Professional Midwife, founder of Jamaa Birth Village and of the African Indigenous Midwifery Museum — the first brick-and-mortar museum devoted to midwifery.
Chapter 1 →Kimberly Durdin
Co-founder of Kindred Space LA; lactation consultant and doula trainer.
Chapter 17 →Nichole Wardlaw, DNP, CNM
Founder of Jamii Birth and Wellness Services, a home birth practice in coastal Virginia.
Chapter 17 →Nikki McIver-Brown, APRN, CNM
Founder of San Antonio Nurse Midwife Birth & Wellness Center.
Chapter 17 →Rebecca Polston
Founder of Roots Community Birth Center in Minneapolis, and Minnesota’s first Black Certified Professional Midwife.
Chapter 17 →Nikia Grayson
Chief Clinical Officer at CHOICES in Memphis, which opened the city’s first birth center.
Chapter 17 →Chanel Porchia-Albert
Founded Ancient Song Doula Services in Brooklyn in 2008 — full-spectrum care on a sliding scale, community doula training, and the fight for Medicaid reimbursement.
Chapter 17 →Michelle Browder
Built the Mothers of Gynecology monument in Montgomery and is building a museum and clinic on the ground where Sims operated.
Chapter 17 →Kimberly Seals Allers
Created Irth, the review app where Black and brown parents rate the care they actually received.
Chapter 17 →Charles Johnson
Founded 4Kira4Moms after his wife Kira died following a routine cesarean, and has testified before Congress.
Chapter 17 →Elaine Welteroth
Founded birthFUND in 2024 after her own home birth, matching funders with families who cannot meet the cost of midwifery care.
Chapter 17 →Serena Williams
Her account of the day after her first daughter’s birth opens Chapter 12. She has since co-founded birthFUND.
Chapter 12 →Allyson Felix
Diagnosed with severe pre-eclampsia at 32 weeks. When her sponsor proposed cutting her pay, she refused a private deal and demanded maternal protections for every athlete.
Chapter 17 →Tatyana Ali
Founded Baby Yams, whose proceeds in part support Black and Indigenous midwives and doulas.
Chapter 17 →Carra Patterson
Director and writer of HOMEbirth, an Official Selection at the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival.
Chapter 17 →This index is not complete and is not meant to be. It holds the people the exhibition names; there are many more doing this work than seventeen chapters could carry.
See also Terms used in this exhibition.