Dean's Lecture Series
Black Before ‘Brown’: Education, Health, and Social Welfare Professionals in the South, 1930–1954
By Pat Harrison
As photographs of her subject flashed on a screen behind her, Darlene Clark Hine RI ’04 described the life and career of Maude Callen, an African American nurse-midwife in Pineville, South Carolina, who delivered more than eight hundred babies over the course of her long career. The photographs of Callen--watering her garden, teaching a class of black midwives, attending a birthing mother--were taken by renowned photojournalist W. Eugene Smith (1918–1978) for what became a twelve-page spread in the December 3, 1951, issue of Life magazine. The white man who had risen to prominence for his harrowing pictures of World War II said that following Callen around for six months was “the most rewarding experience photography has allowed me . . . . She is perhaps the most completely fulfilled person I have known.”
Callen was born in 1898 to a family of thirteen daughters, only three of whom survived. After she completed nursing training in 1922, she began serving the black community as both a midwife and teacher of midwives. “Teaching midwives what they needed to know to save the lives of mothers and children was for Maude not just a matter of survival,” Hine said. “It was a process of empowerment of the most marginal and negatively stereotyped members in the health-care delivery system.”
Hine spoke on Callen at her March 23 Dean’s Lecture, titled “Black Before ‘Brown’: Education, Health, and Social Welfare Professionals in the South, 1930–1954.” She conducted this research during her fellowship year at Radcliffe, for her forthcoming book from the University of Illinois Press, Black Professionals and Race Consciousness: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 1890–1955.
In her introduction of Hine, Dean Drew Gilpin Faust said, “Her intellectual leadership has made an indelible mark. She has been responsible for writing and editing books that have defined the field of black history, and black women’s history in particular.” Hine will become the Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University in the fall of 2004. She was previously the John A. Hannah Professor of American History at Michigan State University.