By Guy Trammell Jr.
Pregnancy-related deaths in the United States average 16.7 per 100,000 live births. Among white women it is 12.7 deaths. However, among Native Americans it is 29.7 and for African Americans it is 40.8. Sixty percent of these deaths are preventable.
Prior to the 1800s, U.S. births took place at home, overwhelmingly assisted by midwives since white male physicians didn’t view maternity as medical. Midwives provided physical care along with the critical emotional, mental and spiritual care needed by mothers.
Prior to the 1600s, Native American midwives were the primary support for pregnant mothers. Native Americans viewed the role of midwife as a calling, a very spiritual and powerful position. Following the birth, she lived in the home for a period, tending to the infant and mother and assisting the mother with her responsibilities.
In 1619, the first African midwife arrived in the U.S. as a kidnapped, forced laborer. She served her community as a physical and spiritual healer. As more African-trained midwives populated the country, they became the primary maternal health provider for both European Americans and African Americans.
By the 1800s, white male physicians discovered the financial and prestige benefits of including maternity in their practice. They began labeling Black midwives as “grannies” to stigmatize them as unprofessional and outdated.
By 1918, Black midwives attended 90% of southern Black births and many white births, and the Alabama Legislature passed a law that all practicing midwives be certified, intentionally eliminating Black midwives.
To counter this move, Tuskegee Institute’s medical director, Dr. John A. Kenney, Sr., created the first ever U.S. midwives training program. The intensive four-week course provided midwives with physician level training, along with skills for passing the state Midwife Certification exam.
In 1939, the Tuskegee School of Nurse-Midwifery was established by the Julius Rosenwald Foundation. It would continue until 1946 and produce 31 nurse-midwives. Tuskegee graduate Beatrice Johnson, one of the first two instructors in the school, assisted many births around Tuskegee and other counties.
She gained national acclaim for an innovative malaria cure in the Harris Neck, Georgia, outbreak. The Negro press later memorialized her in death.
Nurse Girtha R. Wilkerson, a graduate of Tuskegee and Tuskegee’s midwife training, lived across from Greenwood Cemetery. She was both midwife and the Rosenwald schools’ nurse for east central Alabama. My mother and I traveled the county assisting the older Nurse Wilkerson with her duties. Her outreach inspired me to do community work.
My father’s first wife, Beatrice Johnson Trammell, died from a nursing-associated disease. This influenced my mother to not major in nursing. However, she researched and studied natural health cures that allowed me to be alive today.
By Amy Miller
It’s quaint, isn’t it, to take a month to honor women, human beings who make up about 49.7% of the world ‘s 7.8 billion people. But each March our nation declares Women’s History Month, and typically my column with Guy considers the women in our lives or in history. Much like Black History Month, the occasion gives us a chance to fill in past gaps.
Out of the millions of women past and present I might choose, today I call on history – more typically the arena of my co-columnist. As a young journalist I thought frequently about Margaret Bourke-White, photojournalist, documentarian and all-around adventurous spirit who died in 1971 at the age of 67.
A photographer, most famously at Life magazine at a time when women were not generally hard-news journalists, Bourke-White went to edges that others – male or female – dared not go. With her camera and tripod, she flew with bombers, stood on rooftops, met concentration camp survivors and stood precariously on building scaffolding.
Some of the photos she is best known for include Gandhi at the spinning wheel, Manhattan from the 61st floor of the Chrysler building, survivors at Buchenwald, and African Americans on line for food in front of a sign boasting of America’s standard of living. Her work, often highlighting humanitarian crises and injustice, took her around the world.
“Nothing attracts me like a closed door. I cannot let my camera rest until I have pried it open,” Bourke-White once said. I love that. And even more, her contention that “the beauty of industry lies in truth and simplicity” is an ideal that informs much of my communications, both written and oral.
Many women had entered journalism by the time I was a young reporter, so I faced little of the discrimination Bourke-White encountered. While she wanted to do “all things that women never do,” I simply walked a (somewhat newly) worn path.
And although my reporting days were far less bold, not to mention less influential, a famous photo of Bourke-White perched on scaffolding of the Chrysler building stood as a reminder to me of what a journalist often does to accomplish her mission.
I remember my adrenaline running at the first large house fire I covered; the frenzied emotions at my first fatal accident; the glamour of trying to lure facts about a small plane crash from federal aviation officials; and the incomparable sadness of interviewing parents of an 8-year-old boy from Cambridge who was kidnapped and murdered, then found in a river in South Berwick.
While I admire Bourke-White’s following stories to the Arctic, where she was stranded, and to Moscow where she witnessed a German bombing, her peripatetic lifestyle created relationship challenges. As she told it, “Work is a religion to me, the only religion I have. Work is something you can count on, a trusted, life-long friend, who never cheats on you.”
This was among the sacrifices that paved that path for women who came after her.
Color Us Connected 