The List

Okay, I just simply had to put THE LIST up here because of a certain conversation on this past evening about relationships b/t a woman & a man. This certain prince charming, my boo, etc. has to somehow fulfill these requirements:

FIRST and foremost, he must have a personal relationship with God and accept Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.

He must pursue a college education (via a UNIVERSITY and proceed to GRADUATE SCHOOL) and have HIGH goals and standards for his life.

He must have it all together, from head to toe, be fit spiritually, mentally, physically, emotionally, and socially.

Muy inteligente y guapo (very smart & handsome)

Compassion, Sense of humor, Security, Humbleness, Sincerity, Gratefulness, Optimism

Respect (i.e. Respect His Mother), Faithfulness, Loving, Caring, Kindness, Honesty...

Some musical talent via singing/playing an instrument and other gifts (perhaps baking/cooking, knows how to work well with kids....)

Recognize his spiritual gifts as well (to each his own ministry)

He must love me for who I am (as JESUS loved the church) and be supportive of my endeavors and give me the world hehe.

I could definitely put more but I won't go overboard. : )

Dr. Dorothy Ferebee

Dr. Dorothy Ferebee was a tireless advocate for racial equality and women's health care. In 1925 in a derelict section of Capitol Hill, she established Southeast Neighborhood House, to provide health care for impoverished African Americans. She also set up the Southeast Neighborhood Society, with playground and day care for children of working mothers. At Howard University Medical School, she was appointed director of Health Services. She was founding president of the Women's Institute, an organization that serves educational, community, government, and non-profit organizations, as well as individual patients.

Dorothy Celeste Boulding was born in 1889 or 1890 in Norfolk, Virginia. Her father's parents were former slaves. While she was young her family moved north to Boston, Massachusetts, where Dorothy and her brother Ruffin grew up in the middle-class neighborhood of Beacon Hill. Her family enriched her childhood, serving as excellent role models. With eight attorneys among them, discussions about law dominated the household. One of Dorothy Boulding's uncles, George Lewis Ruffin, was the first African-American graduate of Harvard Law School and later became Massachusetts's first black judge. "All I heard at the table was 'your honor, I object,' or 'answer the question yes or no.' Yet all my life I wanted to be a doctor."

Since she was a child, Dorothy Boulding wanted to help cure the injured. While her friends played with toys, she doctored ailing and injured animals, "I would nurse and help the birds that fell out of trees, the dog that lost a fight."

After graduating from English High School with highest honors, Dorothy Boulding attended Simmons College in Boston and decided to apply to medical school and she was accepted into Tufts University School of Medicine. Although she graduated among the top five in her class, she met a blockade of racism when she applied for internships at white hospitals. So Dr. Boulding moved to Washington, D.C., for an internship at Freedmen's Hospital, the precursor to Howard University and one of the few hospitals under African-American administration that provided health care to the black community.

After completing her internship in 1925, Dr. Boulding opened her own practice in a derelict area of Capitol Hill, without ambulance service. To augment health care in the neighborhood, she persuaded the trustees of the Friendship House, a charitable segregated medical center, to open an adjunct clinic for African-Americans. The new facility was named Southeast Neighborhood House. She also set up the Southeast Neighborhood Society, with playground and day care for children of working mothers. That same year she joined the faculty of Howard University Medical School, and became the founding president of the philanthropoic and educational Women's Institute.

In 1930, Dr. Boulding married Claude Thurston Ferebee, a dentist and instructor at Howard University College of Dentistry. A year after their marriage, the couple had twins, Claude Jr. and Dorothy. Tragically, their daughter contracted flu and died at age 18.

The Great Depression of the 1930s was devastating to the poorest members of society. In 1934 the philanthropic sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha (the first African-American sorority, founded 1908) sponsored the Mississippi Health Project to bring primary medical care to the rural black population across the state of Mississippi, who struggled to receive even the most basic health care. Dr. Ferebee served as medical director of the project which was active for two to six weeks every summer from 1935 to 1942. Dr. Ferebee, a long-term member of the sorority, was elected President of Alpha Kappa Alpha in 1939.

Through contacts with the United States Public Health Service, an endorsement by Senator Byron Patton (Pat) Harrison (D-Miss), and the State Department of Health at Jackson, Mississippi, the project sent mobile medical units into regions of poverty in the rural South.

Alpha Kappa Alpha members used the Mississippi Health Project to bring federal attention to the needs of African Americans in the rural South. In the face of hostile, intimidating, and suspicious white plantation owners, project participants launched smallpox and diphtheria immunization programs in ramshackle communities of black sharecroppers. They also tackled widespread malnutrition and venereal disease.

In 1949 Dr. Ferebee was appointed director of Howard University Medical School's health services, a post she held until 1968. An active member of the National Council of Negro Women, she succeeded her friend Mary McLeod Bethune as its second president from 1949 to 1953, and expanded the organization's efforts to eliminate discrimination against minorities in housing, health care, education, and the armed forces.

In the 1960s, when President John F. Kennedy appointed her to the Council for Food for Peace, she toured Africa for five months, lecturing on preventive medicine. She died on September 14, 1980, in Washington D.C.

-From the National Library of Medicine

Celebrating Black History Month

February already, wow! Time sure does fly. Anyways, I will be updating my blog with wonderful, strong, and beautiful black people who have inspired me and keep me pressing on. First up is Dr. Justina Ford. Thanks for making the way for black women in medicine..pediatrics and gynecology..right up my avenue.

Biography from National Library of Medicine...
Dr. Justina Laurena Ford challenged and overcame gender and racial barriers in her medical career to become the first African American woman physician licensed to practice in Colorado. In 1950, just two years before her death, she was still the only black woman physician in the state.

Born in 1871, Justina Warren (later Ford) grew up in Knoxville, Illinois. She is sometimes known as Justina Carter Ford, although the name Carter—actually her sister's married name—was not used by Justina Ford. After her graduation from Hering Medical College in 1899, she briefly practiced medicine in Alabama, but moved to Denver seeking a place where black Americans would have more opportunities to practice medicine in the expanding West.

Three years after earning her medical degree from Chicago's Hering Medical College, Dr. Justina Ford settled in Denver, Colorado in 1902. When she applied for her license to practice medicine, she was told by the clerk, "I feel dishonest taking a fee from you. You've got two strikes against you to begin with. First of all, you're a lady, and second, you're colored." Ford often referred to this double barrier to her career. In her later years, she said, "I fought like a tiger against those things"

Despite her early encounter with the Denver bureaucracy, she managed to establish a long and notable practice there, specializing in gynecology, obstetrics, and pediatrics. Like other black physicians, she was denied hospital privileges, which required her to make house calls for many years. Known lovingly as "The Lady Doctor" during her fifty years of practicing medicine, Dr. Ford estimated that she delivered thousands of babies for families from many different backgrounds.

Eventually, she was allowed to practice at the Denver General Hospital and was admitted to the Denver Medical Society. Four months before her death in 1952, she is quoted as saying, "...When all the fears, hate, and even some death is over, we will really be brothers as God intended us to be in this land. This I believe. For this I have worked all my life."