In honor of the University’s 125th anniversary, we offer an in-depth narrative of the extraordinary life and bold leadership of Class of 1920 alumna Dr. Dorothy Celeste Boulding Ferebee.
Obstetrician, physician, and civil rights activist Dr. Dorothy Celeste Boulding Ferebee, Class of 1920 (1898–1980), “was the most recognizable African American woman in America [from the mid-1930s to the early 1970s],” writes Diane Kiesel, Acting Supreme Court Justice of the New York State Unified Court System, in her biography, She Can Bring Us Home: Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, Civil Rights Pioneer (University of Nebraska Press, 2015).
An early proponent of reproductive rights and a courageous advocate of racial, socioeconomic, and gender equity decades before the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements, Ferebee was a visionary leader ahead of her time.
Finding Her Voice at Simmons
Ferebee (née Boulding) was born in Norfolk, Virginia to a well-respected and mixed-race family. Her maternal grandfather, Richard Gault Leslie Page, escaped enslavement via the Underground Railroad. Thereafter, he became a prosperous businessman and member of the Virginia state legislature. Ferebee’s great uncle, George Lewis Ruffin, was Harvard Law School’s first Black graduate. Ferebee’s lifespan coincided with women’s suffrage. She attended school in Boston, graduating at the top of her class from The English High School in 1915.
In 1916, Ferebee came to Simmons to pursue a medical secretarial course (akin to specialized receptionist training for a physician’s office). According to Kiesel, “[Simmons College] was the right spot for Dorothy.” She was known as “Dot” to her Simmons sisters.
Ferebee’s undergraduate years overlapped with World War I. While her older brother Ruffin was drafted by the military, the rapid entry of women into the labor force emboldened her to further her education and address civil rights.
A powerful 1920 essay that Ferebee wrote for one of her Simmons courses is preserved in Howard University’s Archives. (The Ferebee Papers belong to Howard’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, “the largest and most comprehensive repository of books, documents, and ephemera on the global Black experience.”) Entitled “Lynching as an Expression of Americanism,” her essay delivered a blistering critique of the persistence of hate crimes in the United States and their incongruity with American values. Ferebee wrote, “America is just now allied to the cause of national and individual emancipation, of [justice] and freedom to the entire world, when, at the same time, her Americanism — her ideal of justice — and mercy meted out to all mankind — has been shamefully besmirched upon her own free soil.” The essay was later published in a local newspaper.
In the 1920 issue of Microcosm (Simmons’ student yearbook), Ferebee’s friends included a customized inscription adjacent to her photo, extolling her ambition, intellectual acuity, and athletic prowess: “Who else but Dot could trace the course of the leukocytes [white blood cells] and simultaneously learn the intricacies of the Edison rotary mimeograph! Her high jumping is another feat worthy of note. The only attendant difficulty is the restricted sand area.”
After Simmons, Ferebee was accepted into Tufts Medical School as the only Black woman in her cohort. By some accounts, she graduated first in her class in 1924. Ferebee also engaged in co-curricular activities and dressed in flapper fashions for special events that the med school hosted.
A Trailblazer in Equitable Health Care
Given that Boston’s hospitals were then White-dominated, Ferebee moved to Washington D.C. in 1925 to take a position as an obstetrician at the Black-owned Freedmen’s Hospital (now Howard University Hospital). In 1927, Ferebee became a Clinical Instructor in Obstetrics at Howard University Medical School. Eventually, she also taught medicine at Tufts and started a private practice. As Kiesel writes, “sexuality, birth control, and abortion were among her favorite subjects.”
Washington D.C. was racially segregated at the time; this society bestowed certain privileges onto fairer-skinned people among the greater Black community. As Kiesel explains, some individuals passed as White. Due to Ferebee’s affiliation with Howard — then considered “the Black Harvard,” the most prestigious of the historically Black Colleges and Universities — along with other factors, D.C.’s stratified culture afforded her certain advantages that other BIPOC individuals could not access. However, Ferebee remained committed to helping marginalized populations.
One of Ferebee’s earliest triumphs in facilitating equitable access to medicine was the Mississippi Health Project (MHP), which she directed from 1935 to 1942. “The U.S. Public Health Service lauded it as one of the most successful volunteer public health programs in history,” Kiesel notes.
For this project, Ferebee and a team of volunteer nurses traveled to the Deep South and set up impromptu clinics for underserved Black individuals. The Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. (AKA), the prestigious and first Black collegiate sisterhood founded at Howard University in 1908, sponsored the MHP. The society’s motto, “By Culture and by Merit,” corresponded with its propensity toward social justice projects. Ferebee first joined AKA as a Simmons student and later described the collective as “dedicated to the making of a democratic America in which racial hatred will have no place.”
In the Depression-era Deep South, Ferebee encountered extreme poverty among the Black tenant farmers and sharecroppers. She was appalled by the living conditions and brute indigence of these populations, later writing, “We went, we saw, we were stunned!” The Black communities were poorly educated; it was not uncommon for children to leave school as young as eight years old to work in the fields during cotton-picking season. Ferebee and her colleagues also observed poor health and the presence of diseases — including pellagra, rickets, and smallpox — that should have been relics of nineteenth-century America. Malnutrition and tooth decay were rampant, and the Black infant mortality rate was especially high.
Ferebee focused first on inoculating children against diphtheria and smallpox. However, oppressive weather conditions added to the challenge, and Ferebee and her colleagues were met with suspicion; White plantation owners assumed they were agitators, whereas Black sharecroppers were wary of modern medicine. At the time, as the center of the Jim Crow-era Deep South, Mississippi was notorious for lynchings and Ku Klux Klan-generated terrorism.
Despite her background as a sophisticated “city girl,” Ferebee navigated the unforeseen challenges (racial, socioeconomic, and geographical) of the rural South with deftness and grace. In fact, the title of Kiesel’s book, She Can Bring Us Home, derives from a quote from Ferebee’s MHP colleagues, in reference to her shrewd intuition and compass-like precision. As Ferebee later recounted in a 1979 interview for the Radcliffe Institute’s Black Women Oral History Project:
It was then [in 1935] that we initiated the first mobile health clinic in the country … Those at home who thought we were down in Mississippi having a big time should have been there to see what difficulties we experienced. This was before the days that the WPA [Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency dedicated to public works projects] built decent roads in Mississippi. The roads were nothing but mud or shale and sand and rock — little rocks and gravel. And when we traveled, we encountered nothing but dust. One couldn’t see the car in front. No routes were marked; you didn’t know where you were. But fortunately, there’s been something about me that I can always come back from where I’ve been. So, when the members of the team noticed that even without markings or signs, I could always get home, they made me the leader of the group. Because they said, “Wherever we’ve been, she can bring us home.”
Surpassing all expectations, Ferebee’s indomitable leadership enabled the MHP to be regarded as an exemplary experiment in community service. A handwritten letter to Ferebee from Ida Jackson, her AKA soror, reads: “I think God has wonderfully blessed me, in that he pointed you out to Direct and plan this most important part of the work of the Sorority — the greatest thing ever done. You’re great and we are justly proud of you.”
Leading on the National Stage
Following the success of the MHP, Ferebee became a fixture in civil rights and government-related activism. In 1939, she became President (or “supreme basileus”) of AKA. In 1949, she succeeded Mary McLeod Bethune as the second President of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). She also served as Vice President of the Girl Scouts of the USA, where she aimed to improve the representation of, and resources for, African American Girl Scouts. In later years, she became involved with UNICEF, the International Council of Women, and the World Health Organization.
As an overtly public figure, Ferebee was in high demand. She seemed equally at ease speaking at glamorous venues within the nation’s capital and at humble churches in Selma, Alabama. Despite her many speaking engagements, Ferebee never had a personal assistant or publicity agent and wrote her own speeches.
She met with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House on several occasions, and met or corresponded with First Lady Mamie Eisenhower, President John F. Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson, and First Lady Patricia Nixon. Among the many historic events she attended was Black opera singer Marion Anderson’s iconic 1939 performance at the Lincoln Memorial.
Over the course of her decorated career, Ferebee socialized with the likes of Josephine Baker, Nelson Rockefeller, and countless civil rights leaders. The Anacostia Community Museum (a D.C.-based arts institution that highlights civil rights and Black history), possesses a crayon portrait of her in their collection. For Vogue magazine (May 1969 issue), Irving Penn photographed Ferebee as part of a special photo spread spotlighting extraordinary African American women. (Coretta Scott King was also among the featured women).
A Woman Ahead of Her Time
Stemming from her experience as an obstetrician, Ferebee embraced controversial issues. She advocated for abortion rights and knew and admired Margaret Sanger, the Founder of Planned Parenthood.
In Ferebee’s view, a lack of family planning was detrimental to society — causing poor health, poverty, crime, and racial prejudice. Unfortunately, Ferebee’s support for abortion was sometimes misunderstood as a form of eugenics. Her concern was the unnecessary suffering and premature deaths of Black women and children. Ferebee’s “overarching goal was to uplift the race, not eliminate it,” Kiesel clarifies.
Ferebee’s association with leftist individuals also aroused suspicion. She was summoned to an executive session of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Investigations. While undergoing an interrogation by Missouri Senator Stuart Symington, she remained composed and dignified. She was also placed under FBI surveillance.
Before the advent of Second-wave Feminism, Ferebee publicized her thoughts on women’s empowerment. During a Civil Rights Movement rally at the First Baptist Church in Selma on October 4, 1963, she remarked: “You know, there was a time when women were not expected to participate in any work of the community, in any work of society or anything that contributed to human betterment. But we know quite differently now that the young women are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the men. And we know that the whole range of potential abilities that belong to men, also belong to women.”
As Kiesel observes, Ferebee’s “feminist message presaged the emergence of the women’s movement by at least five years and demonstrated that even as she approached retirement, new ideas continually dominated her thinking … Dorothy was ahead of the game.”
Ferebee remained connected to Simmons, contributing a 1961 article to the Simmons Review (an award-winning student magazine, formerly called Persimmons, that covered student life and alumnae/i). Here she discussed Ghana’s recent independence, though noting the hypocrisy of the US decrying South African apartheid while segregation still lingered at home. Two years earlier, Simmons awarded Ferebee with the Alumnae/i Lifetime Achievement Award — she was the inaugural recipient of this august recognition.
Simmons University retains the imprint of Ferebee’s pivotal leadership. In 1986, the College dedicated a student dormitory lounge in her name, and six students from the Class of 1992 received minority scholarships to honor Ferebee’s legacy.
Shortly after her passing, an editorial from The Washington Post crystallized Ferebee’s courageous spirit: “In the Washington of those most active years, it took more than a little courage to break down the barriers of sex and color. Dorothy Ferebee — spurning discouragement and goading herself always to ‘keep moving and keep busy’ — knew how to do so, with a marvelous blend of compassion, cussedness, and class.”