S3: E1. Love and Labor

The story of African American midwifery is part of a larger history of Black women’s struggles to protect their own lives, as well as the lives of other Black women and their children. This episode explores the long history of African American midwives, doulas, and birth attendants who have labored to ensure the safety and dignity of Black mothers and their children in and beyond the maternity ward. These Black women have worked to provide emotional support and medical advocacy for other pregnant and laboring women. Their reproductive advocacy makes clear that the delivery room has become an important site to ensure that Black Lives Matter.

Hosts and Creators: Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman

Senior Producer: Saniya Lee Ghanoui

Producer and Story Editor: Rebecca Davis

Assistant Producers: Chris Babits, Isabel Machado and Mallory Szymanski

Thank you to Kimberly Blockett, Alyxe Fields, Michele Lamarr-Suggs, Marquita Taylor and Debra Pascalli Benarro for sharing their stories with us.

Episode Music:

1. The Nightingale Jubileers "Sorrow's Valley"

2. "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" (instrumental)

3. O.V. Wright "Motherless Child"

4. Blind Willie Johnson "Dark Was the Night"

5. Little Walter "Sad Hours"

6. Elizabeth Cotten "I'm Going Away"

7. Odetta “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”

8. Bessie Griffen "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" 

9. Assorted Audio "All My Babies"

10. Bumblebee Slim "Dead and Gone Mother"

11. "Black Ballots" by Blue Dot Sessions.

12. Mississippi John Hurt "You Got to Walk That Lonesome Valley"

13. Billie Holiday "God Bless the Child"

Archival Audio:

Willie Ann Lucas's interview is courtesy of the Behind the Veil Oral History Project Collection at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University.  

Bessie Jones's interview is courtesy of the Alan Lomax Sound Recordings at the Association for Cultural Equity. 

Eunice Rivers Laurie's interview is courtesy of the Black Women Oral History Project Interviews at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. 

Midwives singing in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1937 is courtesy of the Lomax Family Collections at the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress.

Viola Brown Jones's interview is courtesy of the Southern Oral History Program Collection at the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Selected Bibliography:

• Gertrude Fraser, African American Midwifery in the South: Dialogues of Birth, Race, and Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)

• Lisa Levenstein, A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010)

• Sharon A. Robinson, “A Historical Development of Midwifery in the Black Community: 1600-1940,” Journal of Nurse Midwifery 29, no. 4 (July-August 1984): 247-250

• Susan L. Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women’s Health Activism in America, 1890-1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1995)

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Further Readings