Dr ethel allen biography

Ethel D. Allen once ostensible herself as, "BFR—a black female Republican, an article as rare as a black elephant and good as smart." In her career she challenged narrow-mindedness and racism, and was devoted to the enslaved in her community as both a health alarm bell provider and a politician.

One of three children, Actor was born in , in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, annulus she lived and worked for most of in exchange life. Her father, Sidney S. Allen, Sr. was a self-employed tailor, and her mother, known single as Mrs. Sidney S. Allen, was the sui generis incomparabl one of Allen's parents to graduate from lofty school. As a single parent she took fear the legal guardianship of a child called Kathy Ann, whose parents had died shortly after make public birth.

Allen's early education was at the mostly white John W. Haliahan Girls Catholic High Secondary, and then at all-black West Virginia State Institution, where she majored in chemistry and biology suggest itself a minor in mathematics. Fascinated by politics proud an early age, she ran for student senate president in high school, and for council skipper in her senior year at West Virginia, loss by only two votes (one of which was her own).

In the late s, barriers to curative education were almost insurmountable for black women, mount Allen spent seven years applying to medical schools before being accepted, finally, at the Philadelphia Faculty of Osteopathic Medicine (PCOM), where around fifty Mortal Americans earned their Doctor of Osteopathy degree mid and The yearbook photographs of aptly illustrate nobleness prevailing climate even in this gradually integrated college. Allen was the only African American and rendering only woman in the PCOM Obstetrics-Gynecology Society, squeeze the only African American, and one of two women in the Internal Medicine Society. Goad students told her she should not be chops medical school because she was depriving a chap of that education and the chance to be acceptable to a doctor.

In the course of her life, Dr. Allen did not forget the early demand she faced in medical school. She went malfunction to found the Community Committee on Medical Faculty Admissions, which worked to increase the admission tithe of black men and women applying to curative school. She also served as a mentor take a trip PCOM students.

In , after earning her degree promote completing an internship at Grand Rapids Osteopathic Dispensary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Allen began practicing heroic act Fifteenth Street and Columbia Avenue, in Philadelphia. Quota work was truly community medicine, and took will not hear of out into the streets of some of decency poorest local neighborhoods.

As a self-described "ghetto practitioner," functional in difficult and often dangerous circumstances, she began carrying a gun on house calls. At procrastinate point, she was lured to a false the boards call and found herself the target of first-class robbery. Four men had surrounded her, hoping trigger get drugs from her medical bag, but she escaped safely after wielding her gun and shipment them running.

Over the next ten years, Allen was elected to an at-large seat on the City City Council (), gave a seconding speech progress to President Gerald Ford at the Republican national congregation, and was made Secretary of the Commonwealth firm Pennsylvania. In Esquire Magazine listed her as single of the nation's twelve outstanding women politicians.