Dr. Dorothy Lavinia Brown spent her childhood in an orphanage and grew up to become the first African American woman surgeon in the South, eventually being made chief of surgery at Nashville’s Riverside Hospital. She was also the first African American woman to be made a fellow of the American College of Surgeons.
Among Dr. Brown’s many honors are the naming of the Dorothy L. Brown Women’s Residence at Meharry College in 1970. She also received the humanitarian award from the Carnegie Foundation in 1993 and the prestigious Horatio Alger Award in 1994. As she often said, she was proud to be a role model, “not because I have done so much, but to say to young people that it can be done.”
https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography_46.html