By Cindy ShmerlerPublished July 16, 2021Updated July 17, 2021
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
As the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, she persevered to make care accessible to women and Black communities, regardless of their ability to pay.
For more than 125 years, people trampled — unknowingly — across the grass where Rebecca Lee Crumpler rests in peace alongside her husband, Arthur, at Fairview Cemetery in Boston.
Her burial plot was devoid of a gravestone even though she held a unique distinction: She was the first Black woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.
It would take more than a century, from her death in 1895 until last year, for Crumpler to be given proper recognition by a group of Black historians and physicians. Were it not for them, she might still be languishing in anonymity.
They had learned of Crumpler through the Rebecca Lee Society, a support group for Black women physicians in the 1980s, now believed to be defunct, that would occasionally roam the tree-lined grounds of the cemetery, near the edge of Mill Pond, in the Hyde Park neighborhood, looking for any evidence of her plot. People knew she had died in that neighborhood, and had consulted city records, but all they found was a brown patch of dirt where a gravestone should have been placed after interment.
Since her death, Crumpler’s legacy has been muddled by incorrect information. Some mistakenly thought that she was the second Black woman to be awarded a medical school degree, after Rebecca Cole, but Cole graduated from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania three years after Crumpler earned her degree from the New England Female Medical College (now part of the Boston University School of Medicine) in 1864.
Several books and articles have featured photographs of a woman purported to be Crumpler, even though no pictures of her are known to exist. In “Gutsy Women,” a 2019 book by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton that celebrates historically significant women, there is a photo alongside an entry on Crumpler — but it is actually a photo of Mary Eliza Mahoney, the country’s first Black licensed nurse.