According to the Record

Abstract In this piece Lisa E. Wright analyzes the penmanship on her grandmother’s birth certificate to question whether her great-grandmother gave birth to her Grandma Rickey in 1934 with a white doctor or with a midwife who may not have had a license. She explores if her grandmother’s birth reflected changing attitudes toward Black midwives, her great-grandmother’s choice, or a luxury afforded to her great-grandmother by her great-grandfather’s status as a Black coal miner. To analyze the decisions of the next generation of women who gave birth in her family, in this piece Wright struggles with the reasons her grandmother looked outside their community of midwives for maternal care and gave birth in a Jim Crow hospital in Lynchburg, Virginia.