Annie Elizabeth "Bessie" Delany

A mainstay in the Harlem community for much of the twentieth century, "Bessie" Delany (1891-1995; Columbia School of Dental and Oral Surgery 1923) came to broader public attention only after the age of 100, when she and her sister, Sarah "Sadie" Delany (1889-1999), a retired teacher, were approached by New York Times reporter Amy Hill Hearth. Following the publication of a newspaper story by Hearth, the threesome collaborated on Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years, a best-seller acclaimed as a portrait of a century of African American life and a self-portrait of pioneering black professional women. It was adapted for Broadway in 1995. The sisters, two of 10 children born to a former slave who became the first African American Episcopal bishop, witnessed the growth of New York's African American community from the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance through the Civil Rights era.

Bessie and Sadie Delany came to New York during the First World War from North Carolina, where they were educated at St. Augustine's College in Raleigh. Bessie became one of only 11 women, and the only African American woman, out of 170 students in the 1919 entering class of the Columbia School of Dental and Oral Surgery. She earned her DDS degree in 1923, and was soon the second black woman dentist licensed in the State of New York. During Harlem's heyday, Bessie looked after the teeth of such luminaries as nightclub owner Ed Small, civil rights leader Louis T. Wright, and author James Weldon Johnson. Widely known throughout the community as "Dr. Bessie," she treated the rich and poor equally, and performed thousands of free children's dental exams. In 1994, Columbia's School of Dental and Oral Surgery awarded her its Distinguished Alumna Award for "her pioneering work as a minority woman in dentistry."

Read about other notable Columbians on Columbia250.