The Definitive Guide to Black Midwifery

Last reviewed: 2026-09-30. This is a living guide. It will be updated when new CTL research editions touch health, labor, or women's history, or when cited scholarship is superseded. Corrections are logged publicly per CTL's corrections policy.

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What this guide is

For generations, Black babies in the rural South were delivered not in hospitals but at home, by Black midwives — the "granny midwives" — who held spiritual authority, medicinal knowledge, and community trust. They were systematically displaced by the professionalized hospital system across the twentieth century. This guide covers the tradition, its most documented practitioner, how it was dismantled, what was lost, and the modern revival reclaiming it.

The granny midwives

"Granny midwife" was the term — used by the women themselves and their communities — for the African American lay midwives who delivered the majority of both Black and white babies in the rural South well into the twentieth century. They were more than birth attendants: postpartum caregivers, herbalists, family counselors, health educators, and spiritual authorities. Knowledge passed through apprenticeship lineages — an older midwife training a younger one — rather than through schools. That apprenticeship was the profession's university: years of accompanying births, learning to read a laboring body, memorizing remedies, absorbing the spiritual protocols that made birth safe in every sense. No diplomas were issued; the credential was the community's trust, renewed at every delivery. When the state later imposed training programs, it was grafting a bureaucracy onto a pedagogy it did not understand — and then using the graft as grounds to declare the root obsolete. The films and health-department records preserve the state's version of this encounter: the midwife as a problem to be trained into compliance. The community's version survives in memory — the midwife as the person you called first, the one who stayed after the birth, the one whose bag held both medicine and prayer.

Their practice had a material culture: the midwife's bag and its kit, the remedies and instruments carried from home to home. Their work had an economy: fees in cash, goods, or reciprocal labor, making many midwives among the most economically independent Black women in their communities. And their work had a politics: in the segregated South, a Black midwife attending a white birth crossed the color line in the most intimate of settings.

Miss Mary: the most documented midwife

The tradition's most fully documented practitioner is Mary Francis Hill Coley (1900–1966) of Albany, Georgia — "Miss Mary." Trained in midwifery by the Alabama midwife Onnie Lee Logan — a training lineage reported across secondary profiles (Georgia Women of Achievement, HealthConnect One, Wikipedia's Coley entry, the Kentake Page) but never documented in a primary source, and chronologically uneasy: Logan (born c. 1910, practicing in Mobile, Alabama, delivering babies from about 1931) was a decade younger than Coley, who began practice in southwest Georgia after her 1930 move to Albany — so the claim should be read as reported, not proven — Coley delivered more than 3,000 babies over a 30-year career, serving Black and white families across the segregated South, and acted as an intermediary between patients, nurses, physicians, and county health officials.

In 1952–53, documentary filmmaker George C. Stoney followed Coley for four months for the Georgia Department of Public Health, producing All My Babies: A Midwife's Own Story (1953) — an instructional film for training midwives that became a landmark of documentary cinema. It follows Coley through two births, demonstrates her exacting standards of sterility and prenatal care, and preserves an intimate record of Black community life under Jim Crow. The film won a special Robert J. Flaherty Award in 1953 and was selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2002 as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." When Coley died in 1966, her funeral program noted the film as her legacy.

Coley is the exception that proves the archival rule: one midwife, documented because a state health department pointed a camera at her. The practitioner population — the training lineages, the bag-and-kit contents, the state-by-state licensure struggles — has no consolidated record. Wikipedia has no standalone article on granny midwives; coverage sits as a subsection of "Midwives in the United States."

How the tradition was dismantled

The displacement was systematic, not accidental:

• Professionalization campaigns beginning in the early twentieth century framed lay midwives as unhygienic and backward — a campaign with deep roots in racism and in organized medicine's drive to move birth into hospitals.
• State training-and-licensure programs, starting with Progressive-era maternal-health legislation, first regulated granny midwives (requiring training, sterile technique, and registration) and then used regulation as a path to elimination: as hospital birth became the enforced norm, lay midwifery was squeezed out state by state.
• The hospital shift. By the late twentieth century, home birth with a lay midwife — the norm for generations of Southern Black families — had been nearly eliminated, replaced by hospital delivery systems in which Black women faced the documented disparities of institutional medicine.

The irony is sharp: films like All My Babies were made to train midwives to state standards, and became monuments to a tradition the state was simultaneously dismantling.

What was lost — and what the revival reclaims

What disappeared was not just a profession but a model of care: continuous, community-based, culturally attuned, and economically accessible. Its loss is part of the context for today's Black maternal-health crisis — federal data consistently shows Black women facing markedly higher maternal mortality and morbidity rates than white women in the United States.

The revival is underway. Black birth workers — midwives, doulas, lactation consultants — are reclaiming the tradition explicitly: the Black Midwifery Collective documents the history as advocacy; Shafia Monroe's histories trace "Black Midwives Through Time"; community exhibits like Mississippi History Now's "Mississippi Granny Midwives" preserve the local record; and a new generation of Black midwifery schools and training programs is rebuilding the apprenticeship lineages. The granny midwives' model — care as community relationship, not clinical transaction — is the revival's blueprint.

Timeline

• 1900 — Mary Francis Hill Coley is born in Baker County, Georgia.
• 1921 — The Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act launches federal maternal-health programs — the beginning of state entanglement with lay midwifery.
• 1930 — Coley moves to Albany, Georgia, and begins midwifery practice after training in the apprenticeship tradition.
• 1952–53 — George C. Stoney films Coley for the Georgia Department of Public Health; All My Babies: A Midwife's Own Story is released in 1953.
• 1953 — The film wins a special Robert J. Flaherty Award for documentary.
• 1966 — Coley dies in Albany; her funeral program names the film as her legacy.
• Late 20th century — Lay midwifery is effectively eliminated state by state as hospital birth becomes the enforced norm.
• 2002 — All My Babies is selected for the National Film Registry.
• 2010s–2020s — The Black birth-worker revival: the Black Midwifery Collective, new training programs, and birth-justice advocacy reclaim the granny-midwife model.

Key figures

• Mary Francis Hill Coley (1900–1966) — "Miss Mary"; 3,000+ deliveries; subject of All My Babies; the tradition's most documented practitioner.
• Onnie Lee Logan — noted Alabama midwife and author of the oral-history autobiography Motherwit; reported as Coley's trainer (widely repeated in secondary profiles, unconfirmed by any primary source — see the note in "Miss Mary" above).
• George C. Stoney (1916–2012) — documentary filmmaker; All My Babies made Coley, in a retrospective's phrase, "one of the towering figures of the documentary tradition."
• Shafia Monroe — tradition-bearer and historian; author of "Black Midwives Through Time"; founder of the International Center for Traditional Childbearing (ICTC), the nonprofit she established in Portland, Oregon, in 1991 to increase midwives and doulas of color and reduce infant and maternal mortality (per her site, shafiamonroe.com; Women's eNews, 2015).
• The unnamed thousands — the apprenticeship lineages, the bag-carriers, the county-known midwives whose names survive only in family memory: the archive's actual subject.

The midwife's bag: the material record

The granny midwife's practice had a material culture that is almost entirely uncollected. The bag itself — leather, worn, personalized — and its kit: sterile cord ties and dressings (the very items All My Babies stresses), scissors, herbal remedies, clean linens, the record book where births were logged for the county registrar. These objects are the profession's archive, and they survive, if anywhere, in family closets and attics. A systematic collecting effort — photographing bags and kits, recording their contents, interviewing the families who kept them — would build in months what a century of scholarship has not: a material history of Black birth work. State health-department files hold the bureaucratic shadow (licensure rolls, training certificates, inspection reports); the bags hold the practice.

Where the records live

• Mississippi History Now, "Mississippi Granny Midwives" exhibit (grannymidwives.org) — community-built exhibit, among the richest single sources.
• The Black Midwifery Collective, history of midwifery page (blackmidwiferycollective.org) — advocacy-grounded history.
• Shafia Monroe, "Black Midwives Through Time" (2021, PDF) — a printable history from a leading tradition-bearer.
• All My Babies: A Midwife's Own Story (1953) — National Film Registry; available through the National Library of Medicine's catalog and public screenings.
• State health-department records — midwife licensure rolls, training-program files, and inspection reports: the bureaucratic trace of the tradition and its regulation.
• Onnie Lee Logan, Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story — the oral-history autobiography of the noted Alabama midwife, as told to Katherine Clark: first published New York: E.P. Dutton, 1989 (177 pp.; reviewed in the Journal of Nurse-Midwifery), paperback reprint Penguin/Plume, 1991, later reissued by Histria Books.
• Oral histories with midwives' families and the now-elderly children they delivered — the most urgent uncollected archive.

What remains under-documented

The dossier finding stands: rich community material exists, but the practitioner population has no consolidated record — no census of training lineages, no survey of bag-and-kit contents, no state-by-state history of the licensure struggles (dossier topic 61). The generation that can still name the granny midwives of their counties is passing. This is a now-or-never oral-history frontier.

How to cite this guide

Frequently asked questions

Who were the granny midwives?

African American lay midwives who delivered the majority of Black — and many white — babies in the rural South into the late twentieth century. They were community health authorities: birth attendants, herbalists, counselors, and educators, trained through apprenticeship lineages.

Who was Mary Francis Hill Coley?

"Miss Mary" Coley (1900–1966) of Albany, Georgia, delivered more than 3,000 babies over 30 years. She is the subject of the landmark 1953 documentary All My Babies: A Midwife's Own Story, selected for the National Film Registry in 2002.

What is All My Babies?

A 1953 documentary by George C. Stoney, commissioned by the Georgia Department of Public Health as a midwife-training film. It follows Coley through two births and became both a training staple and a landmark of American documentary — and an inadvertent monument to a tradition being dismantled.

Why did granny midwifery disappear?

A twentieth-century campaign by organized medicine and state health systems: professionalization drives framed lay midwives as unsafe, licensure regimes regulated them toward elimination, and hospital birth became the enforced norm — replacing community-based care with institutional systems marked by racial disparities.

Is there a revival?

Yes. Black birth workers — midwives, doulas, lactation consultants — are explicitly reclaiming the granny-midwife model: community-based, culturally attuned care. Organizations like the Black Midwifery Collective document the history as part of birth-justice advocacy, and new Black midwifery training programs are rebuilding apprenticeship lineages.

Where can I learn more?

Start with the Mississippi History Now "Mississippi Granny Midwives" exhibit (grannymidwives.org), the Black Midwifery Collective's history page, Shafia Monroe's "Black Midwives Through Time," and the film All My Babies itself.

For educators and birth workers

This guide is built to be used. All My Babies screens in under an hour and anchors a unit on medical racism, public-health history, or documentary ethics — pair it with the Mississippi History Now exhibit for the community record. For birth workers, the granny-midwife model is a practice text: continuous care, community trust, the home as a safe setting. Discussion prompts: What did regulation promise the midwives, and what did it deliver? Whose knowledge counted as expertise in 1953, and whose counts now? What would a reparative midwifery policy look like — one that funds Black-led birth work instead of merely studying its absence? See CTL's open educational resources for structured assignments.

Further reading

• Mississippi History Now, "Mississippi Granny Midwives" exhibit (grannymidwives.org) — the richest single community source.
• Black Midwifery Collective, history of midwifery page — advocacy-grounded history.
• Shafia Monroe, "Black Midwives Through Time" (2021, PDF) — printable history from a tradition-bearer.
• National Library of Medicine catalog entry for All My Babies — the film's archival anchor.
• Wangui Muigai, "'Something Wasn't Clean': Black Midwifery, Birth, and Postwar Medical Education in All My Babies" (Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2019) — the scholarly reading of the film.
• Smithsonian NMAAHC, "Historical Significance of Doulas and Midwives" — the museum's framing of the tradition and its revival.

Related CultureTechLens resources

• How to Cite Us — cite this guide and every CTL research output in Chicago, APA, or MLA format.
• Methodology — how CTL builds verifiable cultural data.
• CultureTechLens Research Repository — open research packages, source register, and corrections log.
• Companion guides in this series: The Definitive Guide to the Great Migration's Chicago (the migration the midwives' patients joined) and The Definitive Guide to Black Barbershops and Beauty Culture.

Source: CultureTechLens