W. Burlette Carter

In 1864 — while the Civil War was still being fought, a woman became the first Black female doctor in the United States. She was buried in 1895 in an unmarked grave, and it stayed unmarked for a hundred and twenty-five years. Dr Rebecca Lee Crumpler. She was raised in Pennsylvania by an aunt who cared for sick neighbours, which she said was where she learned that this was what she wanted to do. She worked as a nurse for eight years without formal training, because no nursing school would take her. She got into the New England Female Medical College on the recommendation of the doctors she had nursed for, and graduated in 1864 as the first African American woman in the country to hold a medical degree. When the war ended she went to Richmond, which she described as the best possible place to learn about the diseases of women and children, and worked with the Freedmen's Bureau treating formerly enslaved people who had no access to any other care. She was mocked by white physicians and had pharmacists refuse to fill her prescriptions. In 1883 she published A Book of Medical Discourses— advice on the care of women and children, aimed at mothers and nurses. It is among the first medical texts published by a Black American. She died in 1895 in Hyde Park, Boston. Her grave had no marker until 2020, when local historians raised the money. The first Black woman doctor in America spent a hundred and twenty-five years under grass with nothing on it.

The sheriff jabbed her in the neck with his club while she queued to register to vote. She was fifty-four years old. She turned round and punched him so hard he went down. Three deputies put her on the ground. Annie Lee Cooper. She had tried to register before. She had already been sacked from her job at a nursing home for trying. On that morning in January 1965 about a hundred and fifty people were queuing outside the Dallas County courthouse in Selma. Sheriff Jim Clark was working the line as he always did, moving people on. He pushed her. She told him he should not have done that. He jabbed her with the billy club. And she hit him. Properly. He went to the pavement. The photograph of her being held down by three men while Clark stood over her with his club raised ran nationally and is one of the images that moved Selma onto the front pages in the weeks before the bridge. She was jailed for eleven hours. She lived in Selma for another fifty years, voted in every election she could, and in 2008 stood in line again, at ninety-six, to vote for a Black president. She said she would have waited all day. She died in 2010 at ninety-nine. Fifty-four years old, in a queue, with a club in her neck. And she swung.

In 1923 a white mob destroyed an entire Black town in Florida and the survivors scattered and said nothing about it for sixty years. Then in 1994, the state of Florida did something no American state had ever done: it paid them. Rosewood. The town was burned over several days in January 1923 after an accusation against a Black man that was almost certainly false. Homes, churches, everything. Families hid in the swamps in winter. Some children were smuggled out on a train. The survivors dispersed across the country. Most never told their own children where they were from. There were families who learned the name "Rosewood" only when the lawyers came looking in the 1990s. No one was ever charged. A grand jury in 1923 found insufficient evidence. If Rosewood was nearly erased from memory, how many other stories are still waiting to be uncovered? We uncover this and more in our Ebook savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…