Margaret Lawrence, 105, Dies; Pioneering Black Female Psychoanalyst
She overcame many hurdles, including rejection by Cornell’s medical school, which told her a black man before her “didn’t work out.” (He had died.)
As a senior at Cornell in the 1930s, Margaret Lawrence had a nearly perfect academic record and expected to attend the university’s medical school. But Ms. Lawrence (she was Margaret Morgan at the time), the only black student in her class, was denied admission.
“Twenty-five years ago there was a Negro man admitted,” the dean of the medical school told her, “and it didn’t work out.” That man had come down with tuberculosis and died, thus failing to graduate. It was excuse enough to reject her.
She absorbed the shock, then applied to Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. She was accepted, on the condition that she would not protest if white patients refused to be seen by her. (None did.) She agreed, and became the only black student in her class of 104, graduating in 1940.
She would still face discrimination, often being mistaken for a cleaning lady. But she went on to be a renowned pediatrician and child psychiatrist and the first African-American woman to become a psychoanalyst in the United States, according to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, where her career began.
When she died on Dec. 4 at an assisted living facility in Boston, she was 105. Her daughter Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot confirmed the death.
A student of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s, Dr. Lawrence was a pioneering therapist who treated young families in Harlem and in Rockland County, just northwest of New York City. There, in 1949, she and her husband helped establish a progressive, racially integrated cooperative community called Skyview Acres, where she lived for almost 70 years before moving to Boston to be near her daughter.
“She was an innovative, iconoclastic, unusual child psychiatrist,” said Ms. Lawrence-Lightfoot, a Harvard sociologist, who detailed her mother’s life in a book, “Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer” (1988).
“She understood that not just the interior life of a person but their context in the life of the family as well as forces in the community — particularly forces that are discriminatory — can leave people oppressed and marginalized,” Ms. Lawrence-Lightfoot said.
Dr. Lawrence became known for her empathy toward children. She saw her task as helping them develop what she called their “ego-strength,” their sense of self-worth.
“Strength abounds in Harlem,” Dr. Lawrence once said. “Three hundred years of oppression, and it survives.”
Margaret Cornelia Morgan was born in Harlem on Aug. 19, 1914. Her parents, the Rev. Sandy Alonzo Morgan, an Episcopal priest, and Mary Elizabeth (Smith) Morgan, a schoolteacher, were a middle-class couple living in Virginia at the time but had gone to Harlem for the birth because they had relatives there and believed that they would get better care there than in the Jim Crow South.
They moved back to Virginia after the birth, then eventually settled in Vicksburg, Miss., where Mr. Morgan had been assigned to a church. Margaret was raised there.
Margaret knew from an early age that she wanted to be a doctor. Her parents’ first child, a boy, had died in infancy two years before Margaret was born; she resolved to become a doctor to save babies.
She graduated from Vicksburg’s all-black high school at 14 but knew her education was inadequate. She went to live with her grandmother and aunts in Harlem, where she attended the selective Wadleigh High School for Girls. Two years later, she graduated with prizes in Greek and Latin. With a scholarship in hand, she headed to Cornell in 1932 as a pre-med student.
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