Trailblazing Doctor and Civil Rights Leader Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee Was Alpha Kappa Alpha’s 10th International President

Did you know that pioneering physician and civil rights leader Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.? Ferebee was initiated through the Epsilon Chapter while she was a student at Simmons College in Boston, and she would go on to lead the sorority as its tenth International President.

Dorothy Celeste Boulding Ferebee was born on October 10, 1898, in Norfolk, Virginia, into a distinguished family; her maternal grandfather, born enslaved, went on to become a businessman and a member of the Virginia legislature. Raised in Boston, she graduated from Simmons College in 1920 and then from Tufts University School of Medicine in 1924, finishing among the top five students in her class. Barred by racism from interning at white Boston hospitals, she moved to Washington, D.C., to complete her training at the Black-run Freedmen’s Hospital.

Ferebee built her career serving those who had been shut out of care. She opened a practice in a poor section of Capitol Hill, founded the Southeast Neighborhood House to bring health services to struggling Black families, and joined the faculty of Howard University, where she later directed the university’s health services for nearly two decades.

Her most enduring legacy began in 1935, when she became medical director of Alpha Kappa Alpha’s Mississippi Health Project. Each summer through 1942, Ferebee and her fellow sorority volunteers traveled into the Jim Crow South to bring free care to Black sharecroppers. When plantation owners blocked access to clinics, they loaded medical supplies into cars and went directly to the families, creating what is regarded as the nation’s first mobile health clinic. The project immunized roughly 15,000 people against smallpox and diphtheria, and the U.S. Surgeon General praised it as one of the greatest volunteer public health efforts he had ever seen.

Ferebee’s leadership extended far beyond medicine. She served as Alpha Kappa Alpha’s International President from 1939 to 1941, and in 1949 she succeeded Mary McLeod Bethune as president of the National Council of Negro Women, where she championed civil rights in health care, housing, employment, and voting. Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee died on September 14, 1980, at the age of 81, remembered as a physician and activist who embodied the scholarship and service at the heart of Alpha Kappa Alpha.

Share this article with your network and let them know about this piece of Alpha Kappa Alpha history.