TSHA Award
Last month, the Texas State Historical Association awarded me a Randolph B. “Mike” Campbell Award for an article I wrote on pioneering Black physician Dr. Edith Irby Jones. This is an amazing honor! It’s the first award that I’ve won for my academic writing, and, more importantly, highlights the legacy of an amazing woman.
Image courtesy of the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History. Image available on the Internet and included in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107.
Here’s an excerpt from my article:
Edith Mae Irby Jones, African American internal medicine physician, the first African American student accepted to the University of Arkansas Medical School (UAMS), the first African American accepted to any all-White medical school in the South, and the first woman president of the National Medical Association…
In the fall of 1948 Edith Irby Jones became the first African American student admitted to the medical school of the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, Arkansas. This made her the first African American student admitted into an all-White medical school in the South. In a class of ninety-one students, she was the only African American person and one of only three women. To pay for her tuition, Black and White residents of Hot Springs took up a collection to help her pay for her medical school expenses. Contributions of nickels, dimes, and dollar bills eventually totaled $500.
I started writing about Dr. Irby Jones when I was in a public history class at the University of Houston, over a decade ago. Three of us were put on a team to research the history of African Americans in medicine in Houston, on behalf of the Houston Medical Forum. As part of the project, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Irby Jones a few times. My work on the project and her story, in particular, propelled me to dedicate my dissertation to Black women medical doctors.
My dissertation research took me to several archives (mostly at HBCU medical schools) and to interview more Black women in Houston. The finished volume is entitled Race, Gender, and African American Women Doctors in the Twentieth Century (2010).
Various life changes (moving to England, having a child, switching jobs a few times) put my research on hold. So, I was delighted when, out of the blue, an editor from the Handbook of Texas Online contacted me. She was looking at my dissertation on Proquest to fact-check another author’s entry. From that interaction, and after Dr. Irby Jones passed, I received an invitation to author a biographical entry in the Handbook. I was delighted to do so.
It was almost a decade from when I finished my dissertation to when I published my first article from it. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s too late!
I donated part of my award money to the Houston Medical Forum in Dr. Irby Jones’s honor.
