OPHELIA SETTLE EGYPT (1903-1984)

OPHELIA SETTLE EGYPT (1903-1984)
OPHELIA SETTLE EGYPT (1903-1984)

Medical social worker, educator, sociologist, writer, and women's rights advocate.

 

By  ANDREW WARD

In the late 1920s, Ophelia Settle Egypt conducted some of the first and finest interviews with former slaves, setting the stage for the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) massive project ten years later. Born Ophelia Settle February 20, 1903, she was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a researcher for the black sociologist Charles Johnson at Fisk University in Nashville. Her work with Johnson led to her 1945 study, The Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Account of Negro Ex-slaves.

Over the course of her career Settle helped expose the infamous Tuskegee study of syphilis among black sharecroppers, and played a leading role in Charles Johnson’s “Shadow of the Plantation” study of the sharecropper system. As the Depression wore on, she left Fisk to assist with relief efforts in St. Louis. She accepted a scholarship from the National Association for the Prevention of Blindness to study medicine and sociology at Washington University, where, as a black woman, she was required to receive all her lessons from a tutor. She also became head of social services at a hospital in New Orleans, and five years later conducted research for James Weldon Johnson, about whom she wrote a children’s book. Egypt was a social worker in southeast Washington, D.C., and for eleven years was the director of the community’s first Planned Parenthood clinic, which was named for her in 1981.

Ophelia Egypt left a legacy for the future. In the early 1950s, Mrs. Egypt, a social worker in Southeast Washington, DC saw a problem in her community, and set out to solve it. In the neighborhood where she lived and worked, she often came in touch with impoverished mothers of large families. Many of them were hardly more than girls themselves, and they told her over and over that they felt that they had no options. They thought they’d never be able to obtain birth control information and services.

Mrs. Egypt thought otherwise. In 1956, Planned Parenthood hired her to bring family planning into her community. She did exactly that, with tireless commitment. Mrs. Egypt went door-to-door, visited in living rooms, spoke at informal neighborhood gatherings, handed out literature at public housing projects, and reached out to others in every possible way. Singlehandedly and singlemindedly, she persuaded community leaders, including clergy, that family planning was a means of empowerment that gave women and men more control over their economic condition.

In 1957, Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington opened the first private family planning clinic in Southeast Washington, DC, and for 11 years, Mrs. Egypt was its director. In 1981, three years before Mrs. Egypt passed away, the clinic was named for her.

Ophelia Settle Egypt died in Washington, D.C. May 25, 1984.  She was 81.

ter class="entry-footer">
Author:  Andrew Ward is the author of several award-winning historical works including River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War; Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres in the Indian Mutiny of 1857;and Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. A former contributing editor and essayist at the Atlantic Monthly, commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered, and columnist for the Washington Post, Ward has also written numerous articles for American Heritage and National Geographic, and documentary screenplays for WGBH and the Hallmark Channel.

Original post blogged on Women' Voices Media.


Form is loading...