Chinn, May Edward (15 April 1896–01 December 1980), physician and cancer researcher, was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the daughter of William Lafayette Chinn, a former slave who had escaped to the North from a Virginia plantation and had unsteady employment as a result of race discrimination, and Lulu Ann Evans, a domestic worker. Occasionally William Chinn worked at odd jobs and as a porter. Raised in New York City, May Chinn was educated in the city’s public schools and at the Bordentown Manual Training and Industrial School (N.J.), and she attended Morris High School in New York. A severe bout with osteomyelitis of the jaw plagued her as a child and required extensive medical treatment. Her family’s poverty forced her to drop out of high school in the eleventh grade for a factory job. A year later she scored high enough on the entrance examination for Teachers’ College at Columbia University to be admitted to the class of 1921 without a high school diploma....
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Chinn, May Edward (1896-1980), physician and cancer researcher
Robert C. Hayden
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Fraser, Sarah Loguen (1850-1933), a pioneering African American physician specializing in pediatrics
David Marc
Fraser, Sarah Loguen (29 January 1850–09 April 1933), a pioneering African American physician specializing in pediatrics, was born in Syracuse, New York, as Marinda Sarah Loguen, the daughter of Caroline Storum and the Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Both parents were lifelong activists in the movement to abolish slavery in the United States, and they established their family home as a “station” (safe house) in the underground railroad, harboring some 1,500 African Americans who passed through Syracuse en route to asylum in Canada during the decades preceding the Civil War. The U.S. Fugitive Slave Act, which criminalized any failure to report knowledge of the whereabouts of an escaped slave, became federal law the year of Sarah Loguen's birth. This posed new threats to the entire family and especially to Reverend Loguen, who had escaped from slavery in his youth....
