A Woman of “Firsts:” Dr. Mildred Faye Jefferson (Oct 6, 2024)
by Scott Sosebee
History tends to remember those who accomplished something “first”—names like Charles Lindbergh, Richard Byrd, and even Christopher Columbus come to mind. For African Americans, such landmark events tended to happen much later since American society retarded their acceptance and progress through much of the twentieth century. Still, we recognize the names of many of those African American pioneers, such as Edward Brooke, who became the first elected African American senator; Shirley Chisolm, the first black woman to serve in the United States House of Representatives; or even Henry O. Flipper, who was the first man of African descent to graduate from West Point. One name that most may not recognize is that of Mildred Fay Jefferson, a native of East Texas who accomplished many of those firsts. She was the first African American woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, and the first woman of any race to attain membership in the Boston Surgical Society. In addition to her medical career, she gained a reputation as one of the most forceful opponents of abortion in the United States.
Born in Pittsburg, Texas, to Millard—a Methodist minister—and Guthrie Jefferson, Mildred Fay Jefferson spent most of her formative years in Carthage and Roxbury. Her father certainly influenced her faith as she remained a devout Methodist her entire life and, on numerous occasions, cited the tenets of her religion as a basis for her opposition to abortion. Her other “guide” in life was the town doctor in Jefferson, a man who allowed Mildred to follow him around on house calls and provided her earliest introduction to the practice of medicine.
Jefferson attended segregated schools, in which she excelled so much that she graduated when she was only fourteen years old. She left Roxbury and went to college in Tyler, at Texas College—African Americans were, of course, only allowed to matriculate at black colleges—where she also was a star student. She was but sixteen when she graduated from Texas College, and her dream was to enroll in medical school. However, there were obstacles to such a goal. One was that Texas had no medical school that would accept African American students, and most of the others in the nation would not allow someone so young to enroll. So, Jefferson took another route to her aspiration. She enrolled at Tufts University, where she received a Master of Arts degree in Biology.
MA degree in hand, a slew of awards on her vita, and some of the most glowing recommendations any student could ever receive led her to chase history. Harvard Medical School was the top university in the nation to train to be a surgeon, which was what Mildred was determined to be. However, Harvard accepted very few women and had never admitted a black woman to its medical school. Mildred applied anyway, and while she had to endure some early opposition, her stellar academic career carried the day, and she became the first African American woman to graduate from the prestigious university. She went on to do a surgical internship at Boston City Hospital—the first woman to do so—and then became the first female doctor at the Boston University School of Medicine. But she was not done with “firsts;” she next became the first woman to be made a member of the Boston Surgical Society.
Jefferson’s medical career was certainly noteworthy, but that was not the only thing in her life that made news. She was a lifelong Republican, a political affiliation common for African Americans of her era. After all, the Republicans were the party that ended slavery, the party of Lincoln, and thus, the primary political direction for blacks after the Civil War. While African American loyalty to the Republican Party began to shift with the New Deal and the Great Depression, well into the 1970s a large percentage of African Americans continued their fealty to the Republicans. Her activism in the Republican Party led Jefferson to the other social visibility she had—that of a pro-life activist.
Jefferson told an interviewer in the 1980s that her opposition to abortion was part of her Hippocratic Oath which, in her mind, bound her to the preservation of life. However, her views remained personal and private until the American Medical Association proposed a resolution that called for the organization to support the liberalization of abortion-related laws in 1969. She said that that “triggered” her public opposition, and she became a sponsor of a petition against the resolution and became one of the founders of Massachusetts Citizens for Life. She went on to help found the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), in which she would serve as Chairman of the Board in 1974 and President from 1975 to 1978. While she was President of NRLC, in 1976, she wrote then Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan a letter urging him to adopt a pro-life position. Reagan, as California’s governor, had gained notoriety as a public pro-choice defender, but he cited Jefferson’s letter as the “biggest reason I changed my mind on the issue.” It would go on to be a signature part of his successful 1980 campaign for president.
Jefferson entered politics after her retirement from medicine. She unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for the U. S. Senate in 1982, 1990, and 1994. After her last campaign, she moved away from public life and died in Cambridge, MA in 2010 at the age of 83, leaving behind a long legacy of “firsts.”
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.