Black History Moment: Dr. Dorothy Lavinia Brown — Surgeon and First black woman representative to the state legislature in Tennessee

The state of Tennessee is suffused with a history of racism.  It is the state where Ku Klux Klan was founded by six Confederate  veterans and high ranking officials of the Democratic Party in December 1865, and where the black Union soldiers attempting to surrender at Fort Pillow, Tenn., were massacred in 1864. It is also considered by some as the white supremacist epicenter of the nation where an annual European Heritage Festival is held each October and the state where Martin Luther King Jr., was murdered.

Through all of this, it is also a — place where African Americans have persevered and achieved above all expectations. This is the case with Dr. Dorothy Lavinia Brown. Dr. Brown was born in Philadelphia in 1919 where she spent much of her childhood in an orphanage until her thirteenth birthday. She ran away five times, worked as a maid eventually, and based on her desire to get an education, she ran away again at age 15 to enroll in Troy High School.

In 1937, she graduated from Troy High School second in her class, which won her a four-year scholarship from the Troy Conference Methodist Women to Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. Graduating second in her class, she received her B. A. in 1941, and worked as an inspector in the Rochester, N.Y. Army Ordinance Department to save money for medical school during WW II. In 1944 she enrolled at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tenn. where she graduated in the top third of her class.

Dr. Brown was also the first African American woman to practice general surgery in the South. She was the attending surgeon at George W. Hubbard Hospital and professor of surgery at the Meharry Medical College. Eventually she became chief of surgery at Nashville’s Riverside Hospital.

But there was more to her career. In 1966 she became the first African American woman to be elected to the Tennessee state legislature for a two-year term. She tried in 1968 to run for a seat in the Tennessee Senate, but lost. One of the primary reasons she lost the election was her support to liberalize the abortion laws in Tennessee. In the legislature she introduced a bill to legalize abortions in cases of incest or rape.

In addition to being the first African American female surgeon in the South, she also became the first single woman in Tennessee to adopt a child at the age of forty. She was also the first African American woman to be made a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. Dr. Brown received the humanitarian award from the Carnegie Foundation in 1993 and the prestigious Horatio Alger Award in 1994. Dr. Brown died in 2004. –torrance stephens