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Long before it became the slogan of the Obama campaign, Dr. Dorothy Ferebee (1898-1980) lived by the motto ¿Yes, We Can.¿ An African American elite descended from lawyers, journalists, politicians, and possibly a white governor of Virginia, Ferebee was an obstetrician and civil rights activist from Washington, D.C. She was articulate, attractive, and effective as well as relentlessly self-promoting and tragically flawed. At a time when African Americans faced Jim Crow segregation, menial job opportunities and lynch mobs, Dorothy Ferebee advised presidents on civil rights and assisted foreign governments on public health issues. In high heels and a silk dress, she stood up to gun toting plantation owners, determined to bring health care to sharecroppers during the Great Depression through her famous Mississippi Health Project. She was president of the powerful National Council of Negro Women in the nascent civil rights era and later ran the 200,000 member Alpha Kappa Alpha black service sorority. A household name in black America for 40 years, known to presidents from FDR through Jimmy Carter, Ferebee was the media darling of the thriving black press. Ironically, her fame faded and her relevance waned as African Americans achieved the political power for which she fought. In She Can Bring Us Home: Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, Civil Rights Pioneer, Diane Kiesel brings Ferebee¿s extraordinary story of struggle and sacrifice to a new generation.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Compassion, Cussedness, and Class
Prologue
1. Push, Pluck, Prominence, and Merit
2. Among the Favored Few
3. As If I Had Thrown a Bomb into the Room
4. The Count
5. Petunia Ticklebritches
6. Everything Was Precise
7. We Went, We Saw, We Were Stunned
8. Stupid, Vacant, and Void of Hope
9. As the Moonlight Turned Barn Roofs to Silver
10. Tell Claude Ferebee to Keep His Shirt On
11. Madeline, My Concerto
12. The Skipper
13. Some Stuff
14. Every Bone in the Body
15. A Matter for Grave Concern
16. One of the Coldest Winters We Ever Had
17. As Good as I Could
18. You Were Grand as Ever
19. A Bad Bitter Pill
20. A Citizen Concerned with International Affairs
21. Woman Power
22. I Should Not Be Here but I Had to Come
Epilogue: Going Home
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Diane Kiesel is an acting justice of the New York State Supreme Court. A former journalist, she is a winner of the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism and is the author of Domestic Violence: Law, Policy, and Practice. She lives in New York City.
Summary
Long before it became the slogan of the Obama campaign, Dr. Dorothy Ferebee (1898-1980) lived by the motto “Yes, We Can.” An African American elite descended from lawyers, journalists, politicians, and possibly a white governor of Virginia, Ferebee was an obstetrician and civil rights activist from Washington, D.C.
