With reproductive justice on the ballot for New Yorkers this November, the first confirmed case of a post-Roe abortion-related death in the United States is shining a light on Black maternal mortality — and the pioneers who helped more Black women access reproductive care.
Dr. Josephine English, the first Black woman to open a private OB-GYN practice in the state of New York, is one of them. She delivered an estimated 6,000 babies, including notable Black figures like Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage. Her legacy was recently put on permanent display in “Doctors’ Row” in Crown Heights, where a street was co-named after her during a special ceremony.
Dr. English once lived there, on the same street as other Black trailblazers like former congressperson Shirley Chisholm. Black women professionals were not uncommon in their neighborhood, but still faced rampant racism in their field and more so in leadership roles. The obstacles Dr. English tackled in healthcare, real estate, and philanthropy as a Black woman born in the South in the 1920s are themselves the stuff of local legend.
Now, a documentary team that led the street co-naming is fundraising to capture Dr. English’s impact and the stark realities of being a community change-maker in “The English Way: The Story of the Birth Mother of Brooklyn.”
“The English Way” in community healthcare
The intersection of President Street and New York Avenue is now also known as “The English Way,” an homage to Dr. English’s selfless community healthcare, including affordable abortions.
“If you didn’t have [enough money], she would tell you, ‘that’s OK, give me what you have’ — she was loved for that,” John Sheppard, one of her sons, told Epicenter NYC.“My mother never turned anybody away.”
Dr. English graduated from Meharry Medical College, specializing in obstetrics and gynecology, in 1949. She bought the apartment across the street from her home in Bushwick and opened a private practice there in 1956. Dr English devoted one side of that property to her family practice, and on the other side performed abortions on Saturdays
The importance of being seen by another Black woman
As one of the few Black women OB-GYNs in New York at the time, Dr. English made women’s healthcare more accessible. Black girls and women are more likely to trust and seek care from someone who look like them, shares their background, and understands the systemic issues they face, local OB-GYNs say.
Dr. Sierra Washington, an OB-GYN at Stony Brook Medicine, saw this play out recently while supervising another Black female resident. The patient was also a Black woman. Dr. Washington says they had a “Black lady courtroom” moment.
“The patient immediately was like, ‘oh, wow, this is amazing,’ … and took an audible exhale when we walked in the room,” Dr. Washington said. “She smiled, and was like, ‘OK, now I can talk to you,’ and opened up. We had a very deep conversation about contraception and what her choices were.”
Dr. Washington also stressed the value of sharing the same gender and race while navigating vaccine hesitancy during the pandemic. After all, not only were Black men exploited by the Tuskegee experiment, but white doctors experimented on enslaved Black women to establish the modern OB-GYN field.
So when Dr. Washington started holding Zoom calls for Black women on vaccine hesitancy, their shared identity mattered.
“It was so powerful, the number of people we were able to impact just by having a sisterly conversation,” Dr. Washington said. “For them to hear from a Black female parent gynecologist that the vaccine is safe, that I myself was in a vaccine trial, that it’s safe for our community, I was able to change a lot of minds.”
New York community connections
For Dr. English, who devoted her days to practicing healthcare in her own Bushwick community and treating other Black Brooklynites, gaining trust was also about other shared experiences. Dr. Antoinette Danvers, director of the OB-GYN residency program at Montefiore Health System and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, sees this in her own practice.
Dr. Danvers went to high school in Harlem with other youths from low-income communities, where teen pregnancy wasn’t uncommon. Her experience made her someone who can comfortably talk to teens who are having sex and want to avoid pregnancy. It also informed her decision to specialize in OB-GYN.
“It wasn’t my plan, but I was inspired by the work I observed as a medical student, … my ability to pull on my own experiences, that of my friends, growing up in New York City, in the Bronx, and [going] to school in Harlem,” Dr. Danvers said. “I found in OB-GYN a way to give back to the people that try to solve … problems that I saw my friends and my family members go through.”
Dr. Danvers’ experience ultimately led her to direct the complex family planning division at Montefiore.
Supporting Black power
Local OB-GYNs also stress the importance of Black girls and women seeing OB-GYNS like them to inspire possible career paths. For Sheppard, this commitment to Black empowerment belied her work ethic.
“My mother was a workaholic,” Sheppard said. “Everything was for the Black cause.”
Ever since Sheppard can remember, Dr. English worked six days a week, either at her family practice and women’s clinic, or at a similar clinic she started in Fort Greene. In 1979, just after Adelphi Hospital closed, she established the Adelphi Medical Center in part of the old hospital.
On her rest days, she only watched TV shows with Black people in empowered roles, like the doctor protagonist in “The Cosby Show.” Sheppard says: “If it was a football game, [she’d ask] ‘is the quarterback Black, Johnny?’”
Dr. English was also close with Malcolm X. He and Betty Shabazz trusted her to deliver all six of their children. Dr. English had met Shabazz while delivering her first baby at Harlem Hospital, where Dr. English worked for seven years.
Later, at her Bushwick practice, she would meet them early in the morning and close the blinds out of fear for Malcolm X’s and the family’s safety, Sheppard says. Malcolm X would send Dr. English letters back from Mecca when he was going through “his conversion … to being more tolerant of other races,” he said.
Facing barriers in gentrifying Brooklyn
At the street co-naming ceremony, New York Attorney General Letitia James, who knew Dr. English while representing the neighborhood as a councilmember, called English a “transformational figure.”
“She focused on maternal healthcare before it became a movement, … particularly for Black women,” James said.
It wasn’t easy. When Dr. English started performing abortions, she received death threats. For protection, police cars lined up down the block and police escorted her home, Sheppard says.
There were the systemic barriers, too, of being a Black woman at the helm of a women’s health clinic and medical center in gentrifying Fort Greene. Dr. English would tell Sheppard about the racism she encountered from other doctors. Still, “she was a fighter,” Sheppard said. “She did not let white people intimidate her.”
Credit: Seed & Spark.
In 1995, Adelphi Medical Center, which was facing financial issues, was auctioned off. Up to the last moment, Dr. English continued to work there and keep up the building.
“I would, as a child, run downstairs, and people would stop me and they’d be like, ‘wow, this is Dr English’s son,’” Sheppard said. “They just held her in such reverence. “I was like, ‘wow, my mother’s really important.’”
Lessons from Dr. English’s legacy
Diversity in the OB-GYN field looks a lot different now than when Dr. English practiced medicine. But there may always be people that undermine Black women in leadership positions, experts say. Support needs to come from the top down, they say.
It also means valuing Black women doctors’ approach, including a tendency to practice community medicine the way Dr. English did or to center community outreach, Dr. Washington says. This outreach can be as varied as school health clinics, contraception clinics, mammogram buses — and partnerships with community health workers.
Supporting Black women OB-GYNs also means elevating their work to encourage better representation, policies, and a supportive pipeline for other Black girls and women, experts say. They can only imagine how Dr. English’s legacy could have reached even further with greater recognition.
“She’s certainly a local hero,” Dr. Washington said, adding that she only recently heard of Dr. English, as she trained outside of New York. “There are local heroes in every community that go unsung. We stand on the shoulders of Josephine English, and there’s an analogous person in many different cities in the nation, where people were trailblazers and made it possible.”
Follow @theenglishway_doc on Instagram to learn more about “The English Way: The Story of the Birth Mother of Brooklyn” documentary project.
Read more of our health stories here.
