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MATILDA ARABELLA EVANS (1872 - 1935)

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South Caroliniana Library

Black doctor gave hope, health to Columbians in Depression

By MICHEAL SPONHOUR
Staff Writer

To be a black doctor in Depression-era Columbia was to face a sea of misery with meager resources. That was a lot of Matilda Arabella Evans.

Evans wasn't the first female doctor in South Carolina; that distinction belongs to Lucy Hughes Brown. But she was the first black woman born in the state to earn a medical degree, graduating in 1897 from Women's Medical College in Philadelphia.

At the turn of the century, she was one of only three black doctors in Columbia. But Evans' legacy is more than that.

With the help of local churches, Evans vaccinated hundreds of children and adults. She founded the first black hospital in Columbia. She started a free medical clinic in 1932, at 1235 Harden St., that provided the only health care for hundreds of black Columbians. She start-
See Evans, 4E

Evans from 1E
ed a school to train nurses. Her home, "Cottage Lane", was a haven for under-privileged youth. She did all this, Evans said because there were so many people who "do not live. They simply exist for a short time, most miserably, because they cannot do better."

In 1931, Evans convinced the state health board to give her vaccines to operate a free children's clinic. About 100 children were expected. But on the appointed day, more than 700 people stampeded the Zion Baptist Church on Washington Street. Police had to be called to control traffic. Eventually, 4,000 were vaccinated. 

A native of Aiken, Evans had picked cotton to work her way through the Schofield Boarding School, a Quaker high school for blacks in Aiken. She waited tables to

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South Caroliniana Library

get through Oberlin College in Ohio. In medical school, she was the only black in her class.

Evans was convinced that much misery in Columbia was caused by whites who refused to pay their black employees a decent wage. She argued that it was in the self-interest of the well-to-do to improve living conditions for those who dwelled anonymously in the slums.

"A disease germ has no more regard for a white man than it has for a black man," Evans wrote in the Negro Health Journal of South Carolina, which she founded. "It will kill a rich man just as dead as it will a poor man."

She used that newspaper to call for medical - and social - progress. Families were urged to keep flies, a major cause of disease, out of their homes.

"Keep the fly out, have nothing for him to eat, kill him when he comes in," she wrote.

Money was desperately short. Black and white business leaders kept the clinic running.

"Will not somebody help us immediately before it is too late?" she asked in one issue in 1932. Evans died three years later at the age of 63.
3/13/94