A. Elizabeth Delany

Annie Elizabeth "Bessie" Delany was an American dentist and civil rights pioneer. Delany was born in Lynch's Station, Virginia, the third eldest of ten children born to the Rev. Henry Beard Delany (who was born into slavery), the first black person elected Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, and Nanny Logan Delany, an educator.

Bessie was raised on the campus of St. Augustine's School (now University) in Raleigh, North Carolina, where her father was the vice principal and her mother, a teacher and administrator. Delany was a 1911 graduate of the school. In 1918, she followed her sister to New York City. She enrolled at Columbia University, from which she earned her dental degree in 1923. Of 170 students in her graduating class, she was the only black woman, and she was the second black woman licensed to practice dentistry in New York state. She shared a dental office in Harlem with her brother, Dr. H. B. Delany Jr.

In 1991, Delany and her sister Sadie were interviewed by journalist Amy Hill Hearth, who wrote a feature story about them for The New York Times titled Two 'Maiden Ladies' With Century-Old Stories to Tell. A New York book publisher read Hearth's newspaper story and asked her to write a full-length book on the sisters. Hearth and the sisters worked closely for two years to create the book, an oral history called Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years, which dealt with the trials and tribulations the sisters had faced during their life. The book spawned a Broadway play in 1995 and a television film in 1999. In 1994, the sisters and Hearth published The Delany Sisters' Book of Everyday Wisdom, a follow-up to Having Our Say.

Sources: Wikipedia and Wikipedia