UC Santa Cruz

This research takes the Tuskegee School of Midwifery (1941-1946) in Tuskegee, Alabama, which graduated the first class of midwives from a college or university in the U.S., as its primary object of study. Considering the significance of the emergence and disappearance of this program for all Black women—as most of the school’s records were destroyed or lost by its founding partners—the analysis follows feminist projects of inquiry, listening to silences and absences, and is attuned to sites of reproductive care and cure. Framing the Tuskegee School of Midwifery as an understudied and rich historical site, entangled in local, national, and transnational circuits of knowledge, the project examines the resonances of obstetrics and gynecology (OB/GYN) as a medical field formation, considers the suppression of the Black and Indigenous lay midwife in relation to the Tuskegee Institute as a private, land-grant HBCU, and traces the criminalization of informal medical knowledges through circuits between Alabama and Haiti. Arguing that the school exposes broader implications of what M. Jacqui Alexander has called “the active suppression of Indigenous systems of metaphysics” in the U.S. South in relation to the formation of modern medicine, the conclusion calls for more expansive definitions of medicine and care, rooted in an abundant archive of subordinated cultural knowledge forms.