Making history: Black women in oncology

Edith Mitchell came a long way from growing up on a Tennessee farm, to becoming a brigadier general and serving on the President’s Cancer Panel.

“It was making a plan, having a plan, and all of us had similar type plans that we needed to leave the farm—yes I grew up on a farm—and get out of town,” Mitchell, member of the President’s Cancer Panel, clinical professor of medicine and medical oncology, director of the Center to Eliminate Cancer Disparities, and associate director of diversity affairs at Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson University. “Yes, you have success, but look back and pull somebody behind you, pull them up.”

Mitchell spoke with Robert Winn, director of VCU Massey Cancer Center and John Stewart, founding director of LSU Health/LCMC Health Cancer Center.

Sometime in 1995, Edith Mitchell, a U.S. Air Force oncologist who at the time served as commander of the 131st Medical Squadron at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, first heard the name Jane Cooke Wright.

Karen Antman, then president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, wanted to know whether Mitchell, who is Black, has heard that a Black woman oncologist was among ASCO’s seven founding members. 

Mitchell had no idea.

Antman reached out to Wright, inviting her to the 1995 ASCO annual meeting. Mitchell, too, reached out to Wright. This started a friendship with Wright and her family members. 

Wright died on Feb. 19, 2013, at age 93.

A transcript of a eulogy by Mitchell, now a professor and associate director for diversity services at Thomas Jefferson University Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, delivered on behalf of the National Medical Association at a memorial service for Wright follows. 

Edith Mitchell: Good afternoon.

It is a great privilege and honor to have the opportunity to represent the National Medical Association in this tribute to Dr. Jane Cooke Wright. I first met Dr. Wright during an ASCO meeting and maintained subsequent contact.

She is affectionately known in the cancer research community as the Mother of Chemotherapy. She is not only known as the Mother of Chemotherapy, but Dr. Wright is listed in the Women Pioneers of Medical Research and among the top Medical Researchers.

As a researcher, physician, administrator, teacher, mentor, educator, her many discoveries have brought continued health into the lives of millions of people. Across the board, doctors and research scientists dedicated themselves to find cures and treatment for some of the most severe and significant diseases that have challenged mankind for many ages.

Lori J. Pierce, MD, FASTRO, FASCO began her term as the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s 57th president on June 1, 2020, making her ASCO’s first African American woman to hold this prestigious title. The desire to pursue a career in medicine took root when Dr. Pierce was a young child visiting family in segregated Ahoskie, North Carolina. She witnessed firsthand the impact the town’s lone African American family physician had on the community.

When it came time to choose a medical specialty, while attending Duke University School of Medicine, Dr. Pierce was drawn to radiation oncology; it combined her dual interests in physics and biology and would give her the opportunity to spend time in the clinic treating patients with cancer. The experience led her to complete her residency and chief residency in radiation oncology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where she subsequently made the decision to specialize in the treatment of breast cancer.

After completing her chief residency at the University of Pennsylvania in 1989, Dr. Pierce was appointed as a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, and, 2 years later, she joined the faculty of the University of Michigan. Today, Dr. Pierce is a professor of radiation oncology and vice provost for academic and faculty affairs at the University of Michigan and director of the Michigan Radiation Oncology Quality Consortium.

Eva Bateman had more than one reason to celebrate in 1939 when she graduated from the School of Nursing at Buffalo’s E. J. Meyer Memorial Hospital. She was the first person of African descent to achieve that distinction, and she ranked first academically in a class of 100. But when she and her date entered the dining room of the Park Lane Hotel for the graduation dinner-dance, they didn’t get far. A line of waiters moved toward them and quickly ushered them out, advising them that the hotel did not serve African Americans.

In 2009, at age 90, Eva Bateman Noles shrugged at the memory. “If you’ve been hurt all your life, you get used to another hurt,” she said. There were many hurts: Even after she had been accepted to nursing school, it was unthinkable that she could room with a white classmate, so “they had to find a room for me — a separate room, almost in a separate building,” she said.  And there were roadblocks even after graduation, when prospective employers expressed skepticism that she was really a nurse or emphasized that, even if she were hired, she would not receive the same pay as the white nurses and would have to eat alone, in the kitchen.

Those roadblocks were no match for her tenacity. After stints at E. J. Meyer Memorial Hospital, Sisters of Charity Hospital and Columbus Hospital, in 1945, she followed one of her nursing supervisors to Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, then called the New York State Institute for the Study of Malignant Disease. “I went just to be with her, knowing I would have somebody behind me,” Mrs. Noles recalled. “I was welcomed [at Roswell Park].” There she thrived, proving her mettle with every new appointment — Head Nurse in Central Supply, 1953; Assistant Director of Nursing – Inservice, 1966; Chief of Nursing Services and Training, 1971.

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, MD, honored the late Henrietta Lacks with a WHO Director-General’s award, recognizing her world-changing legacy. Ms. Lacks, a Black American woman, died of cervical cancer 70 years ago, on October 4, 1951.

While she sought treatment, researchers took biopsies from Mrs. Lacks’ body without her knowledge or consent. Her cells became the first “immortal” cell line and have allowed for incalculable scientific breakthroughs such as the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, the polio vaccine, drugs for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and cancers, and, most recently, critical COVID-19 research.

However, the global scientific community once hid Henrietta Lacks’ race and her real story, a historic wrong that WHO’s recognition seeks to heal. “In honoring Henrietta Lacks, WHO acknowledges the importance of reckoning with past scientific injustices and advancing racial equity in health and science,” said Dr. Ghebreyesus. “It’s also an opportunity to recognize women—particularly women of color—who have made incredible but often unseen contributions to medical science.”

Camille Ragin had nearly completed her doctorate when she received a final telephone call from her Aunt Herma before she passed away from breast cancer. “I remember the telephone call to this day. After telling me how proud she was of me, she said, ‘I want you to fight this thing, cancer. I want you to do that research and find the cure so that other people, especially those in the Caribbean, will not have to suffer the way I did.’”

Not long after her aunt’s passing, Ragin ended up pursuing that path and is now a professor in the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at Fox Chase Cancer Center.

Ragin grew up in Portmore, Jamaica, just outside the capital city of Kingston. It was there that her Aunt Janet, a cytotechnologist, introduced her to the microscope. “It was intriguing to see cells in that context,” said Ragin. She went on to excel in biology at her all-girls high school before moving to New York City to earn an undergraduate degree.

Ragin then moved to Virginia and trained to become a medical technologist. Several years later, she went to the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health, where she earned her doctorate in infectious diseases and microbiology and Masters in Public Health (MPH) in epidemiology.

Through a career development program at the University of Pittsburgh, Ragin was able to be enrolled in her MPH program while completing a postdoc in the Human Genetics Department at the university. Her second postdoc turned out to be the most influential, because it led her into her present work. “I knew then that the racial disparities that impacted Black individuals would be my focus and passion. That was how the African Caribbean Cancer Consortium was born,” Ragin said.

“Blacks have the highest incidence and death rates and the shortest survival for most cancers in comparison to all other racial and ethnic groups,” said Ragin. “I have firsthand knowledge that although Africa is the common ancestral origin of Black subgroups, migrants to the United States, whether forced or voluntary, have differing health characteristics; cultural health beliefs, attitudes, practices; and genetic admixture.”

Ida J. Spruill, Ph.D., was a researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina who touched the lives of many through her important research in the Sea Island community. This community is a unique group of African Americans who are known for preserving more of their cultural heritage than any other group of African Americans in the U.S. The group is important to cancer research because it is uniquely positioned to allow genetic studies of complex diseases such as hormone-related cancer.

Spruill was successful in working with the Sea Island community to gain their trust and participation in cancer disparities research. She was known for her devotion to the community and for keeping them informed of research findings.

Spruill passed away in 2016, but her legacy continues. In this video, her colleagues remember her notable contributions and how her work is being continued today at MUSC Hollings Cancer Center.