One Woman’s Quest to Reclaim the Ugly History of Black Maternal Health

A decade or so ago, to help pay the bills, the artist-activist Michelle Browder started giving human-rights tours of Montgomery, Alabama, the city where her family has deep roots. Riding around in a red-and-white trolley^[2], she would delve into the uncomfortable historical truths that many people she encountered either didn’t know about or preferred to pretend didn’t exist. She would tell them about antebellum Montgomery, one of the busiest slave markets in the South, and about Confederacy-era Montgomery, where delegates from slave-owning states convened to declare their unity against the Union. She talked about Jim Crow Montgomery, where separate-and-unequalness was enshrined in every aspect of civic society, and civil rights–era Montgomery, whose heroes fought to undo the injustices of the past even when it seemed hopeless.

One of the city’s lesser-known landmarks was a 12-foot bronze statue^[3] on the state capital grounds depicting a benign-looking man in a 19th-century frock coat, leaning on a cane. He was James Marion Sims^[4], a doctor in 1840s Montgomery who became world famous as “the father of modern gynecology” for his efforts to cure obstetric fistula^[5], a common and gruesome type of maternal injury that resulted from prolonged, obstructed childbirth. A plaque^[6] on the base of the monument extolled Sims as “a benefactor of women” who was celebrated by the kings of Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and Italy and Emperor Napoleon III of France. 

But Browder knew what that version of history left out, and more than all the other lies she routinely dispelled, this one made her physically sick: “My blood pressure would rise, I would have heart palpitations.” 

Sims achieved his surgical breakthroughs by experimenting on Black girls and women from plantations around Montgomery, including three teenagers named Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. As female slaves, one of their primary jobs was breeding—“replenishing the stock of chattel,” Browder puts it. Sims believed he could repair their childbirth injuries—holes in their vaginas, bladders, and rectums that had left them incontinent—so they could resume their labors. “He would use wire and silk suture,” Browder shudders. But no anesthesia, even though opium was readily available. And, because his patients were enslaved, no meaningful consent. “This,” Browder says, “was torture.” 

It’s an origin story the American medical establishment has spent almost 180 years trying to reconcile, whitewash, or ignore. Sims’s innovations may have revolutionized the reproductive care of women around the world, helping to save and improve countless lives, but his denial of his enslaved patients’ suffering and autonomy helped shape a broader medical culture that has contributed to vast inequities in Black maternal and infant health.  

Browder understands better than most people how Black history has been constructed and contested; how easy it is to lose the narrative; how quickly women in particular are forgotten. Sims’s victims “were girls, they were children, they were daughters that were violated in the most vicious ways,” she says. And she made a vow: Someday she would create a monument to their memory in the city that had tried to erase them.

One bright Saturday afternoon early this year, Browder and I are wandering through the shambling property near downtown Montgomery that her parents handed off to her a few years ago with the blessing: If you have a vision, do something with it. What she decided to do was transform an assortment of mismatched buildings and secondhand vehicles into a one-of-a-kind museum, education center, and wellness project focused on Black women and the reproductive injustices they have endured in this country for generations. Her mission, she tells me, is to educate people about Sims in the same city^[7] where he exploited the machinery of slavery and patriarchy without ever being held to account. But as we tour the remarkable project, I realize that Browder’s real subject—and the one that holds the most urgent lessons for today—is resistance.

At 54, Browder dresses like the coolest teacher in high school: The day we meet, she wears a black t-shirt, jungle-print pants, an African mud-cloth shawl, and olive-green Crocs. Her trademark, oversized glasses are an extroverted shade of red. As we talk, President Donald Trump’s second term has barely begun, but already the attacks against Black people, brown people, trans people, women and children, immigrants, the sick, the poor, science, education, public health, art, history, indeed against memory itself, are enraging. I ask Browder how she’s holding up. “I’m exhausted,” she admits. “It’s exhausting.” And distressingly familiar: “I live in the cradle of the Confederacy. The ideology of this administration was birthed in the state that I live in.”

But the Trump onslaught has also reinvigorated Browder’s sense of purpose. “It’s an artist’s duty to reflect the times in which we live,” she says, paraphrasing Nina Simone. “I think artists can shape or reshape paradigms on how we think about where we are in this country.”

“If you don’t want to give us a textbook, we’ll create art,” she adds. “And we’ll tell the story.” She can do this, she says later, because “we’re not threatened by the entities that are trying to use government money and white supremacy and whatever else that comes with that to tell us what we can and cannot say. We’re not concerned because we have our own space. This is our property. Get your own, teach your own.” 

We start the tour in a historic^[8] Victorian mansionette that Browder’s parents, now in their 80s, purchased decades ago, in a once-prosperous Black neighborhood red-lined into disrepair. For years, the house was the base for a nonprofit established by her father, the Rev. Curtis Browder,^[9] a pioneering chaplain in the Alabama prison system. Now Michelle has renovated the sun-washed space into a colorful retreat for pregnant and new mothers who need to travel to Montgomery for medical treatment or are suffering from depression.

Much of rural Alabama is a maternity care desert, and many patients must drive hours to see a doctor. The state’s abysmal maternal health outcomes are “rooted in the fact that the haves don’t think the have-nots should have equal access to care,” Browder says. “And now with all of these rollbacks [in federal funding], it’s going to be even worse.” Every room is filled with paintings and artifacts that celebrate African tradition and invite Black mothers to see their own stories as part of a long historical struggle.

From the kitchen, we enter the sprawling yard Browder has dubbed the More Up Campus^[10], her rescue mutt Nick keeping tabs. Browder is in full tour-guide mode, pointing out a miniature garden plot like the ones slaves tended in secret, to supplement the slop they were fed on plantations, mostly “scraps from pigs and pig feet, pig ears.” That leads to a discussion of cornrow braids as a tool of rebellion. “People would smuggle rice and watermelon seeds by braiding them into hair,” she marvels. Slaves intent on escaping to freedom “would hide the directions as to where they needed to go in their hair.”

I am riveted by a sculpture of a stripped-down 1949 Chevrolet Deluxe sedan, its exterior incised like rusted lace. The wheel rims are bright red, and a giant pair of cat-eye glasses sits on the roof. This is a tribute to Browder’s Aunt Aurelia Browder^[11], a seamstress, midwife, and mother of six, who is one of the largely forgotten heroes of the civil rights era. 

In 1949, Aurelia was on a city bus, on her way to deliver a client’s baby, when she was ordered to give up her seat for a white passenger—one of at least five times this happened, Browder says. Aurelia responded by scraping together enough money to purchase her first car, a ’49 Chevy like the one in Michelle’s courtyard; eventually, she owned a small fleet that she leased out as taxis. When another local seamstress, Rosa Parks, was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat in December 1955, touching off the Montgomery bus boycott, Aurelia’s cars became part of the protestors’ alternate transit system—an arrangement that “helped make it possible for the boycott to succeed,” Browder says. Aurelia also served as the lead plaintiff in the 1956 federal lawsuit, Browder v. Gayle^[12], that finally ended the 381-day bus boycott and overturned segregation in public transportation across the US. I notice Aurelia’s photo hanging on a placard nearby. With their imposing glasses and politely skeptical smiles, she and Michelle could be sisters.

Finally, we come to a trio of statues that rise above the courtyard like African goddesses—Browder’s majestic and defiant Mothers of Gynecology monument. Anarcha, at 15 feet, has wild braids and a gaping hole where her womb should be. Betsey is a few months pregnant. Lucy sports bantu knots, horn earrings, and a necklace studded with pottery shards and shells. All three statues are covered with discarded objects— bicycle parts, cutlery, scissors, screwdrivers, medical instruments—and names of brilliant Black women, cut from scraps of metal, that they wear on their skin like jewelry and scars. “Their backs are straightened,” Browder shows me, stroking the Andrika symbols for strength and friendship that she welded onto the girls’ spines. “A lot of times, you see enslaved women in photos with their backs bent. I didn’t want that. I wanted them to be upright, strong.” 

The day after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, she added a new element: chains. “We no longer have the right to do what is best for our bodies,” Browder says. The end of Roe “is slavery by another name.”

Browder has been grappling with the same themes—racism, misogyny, memory, resistance—since childhood. Her father grew up in 1940s and ’50s Alabama, then fled to the North, where he became a pastor and married Buena, an educator from Chicago. Michelle, the middle of five children, was born in Denver, “where my entire neighborhood was full of Black, brown, Asian, just a beautiful array of people,” she recalls. 

Then, in the late 1970s, her father was appointed by one-time segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace to be the first Black chaplain in the state’s prison system, and the family moved south. In the little town of Verbena^[13], “n____ was still a word that my teachers would use on me and my siblings,” she says. By age 13, she had been in so many fights that her father feared for her future. “Chap” Browder’s work with prisoners had shown him that art could be a powerful way for people to cope with trauma and rage, so he gave his rebellious daughter some tubes of paint, cautioning: I don’t want you to end up in prison. Michelle understood her art was a form of activism. “I was advocating for myself,” Browder says. “I [was] fighting with my hands but using the tools of art to do that.”

She first encountered the Sims’ story in the early 1990s, in the office of one of her professors when she was a 19-year-old graphic design student at the Art Institute of Atlanta. Lying on his desk was a postcard depicting a 1952 painting by the illustrator Robert Thom (“the Norman Rockwell of medicine”), part of the 45-part “History of Medicine^[14]” series celebrating (mostly) white (mostly) male healers going back to ancient times. The iconography of Thom’s “J. Marion Sims: Gynecologic Surgeon” is as creepy as it is clueless: A stern-looking white doctor and two young acolytes face off against a trio of Black women, one kneeling on a table, the others cowering behind a curtain.  

Despite Browder’s upbringing, no one ever taught her the history of enslaved Black girls and women. She asked her professor what he knew about the painting. The answer? Not much. Nor did he seem interested in learning. Instead, she says, he waved her off: You go figure it out. “He was just evil and racist,” she tells me.

Dismissing his dismissiveness, she threw herself into learning as much as she could about Sims and returned to her professor with an idea for her graduation portfolio—a series of pieces honoring the enslaved girls she was already thinking of as “the Mothers.” His response was emphatic: “He basically said to me, It’s too Black, and you need to diversify,” Browder says. This time, she couldn’t shrug it off. With less than a year left to graduate, she dropped out of school.

For the next decade or so, Browder supported herself as an artist and entrepreneur, including selling t-shirts decorated with her sketches of the Mothers and starting a nanny agency. In 2002, Browder’s parents finally lured her back to Alabama to help run their nonprofit, the Faith Crusade Montgomery Rescue Mission, which provided housing, food, and support for the poor. “Moving [back to the state] was my lowest moment,” she told the Montgomery Advertiser^[15] in 2022. “I was really depressed.”’

As an incentive, Browder says, her parents agreed to help her launch her own organization focused on empowering young people^[16]. Without support from government grants or big philanthropy, the Browders funded their efforts through social enterprises, including a thrift shop and a barbeque restaurant. Like the early Black Panthers—who originated in Alabama’s impoverished Black Belt^[17] during the voter registration drives of the mid-1960s—Browder’s parents believed in “starting businesses and being creative and creating infrastructure and revenue streams outside of the government,” Michelle says. “My father would say, ‘Always find multiple streams of income…If you get the grant, remember that you’re also subject to not getting it.’”

Browder’s best-known^[18] business got its start after she took a busload of students to the US Supreme Court in 2012 to watch Montgomery anti–death penalty crusader Bryan Stevenson argue the landmark case of Miller v. Alabama^[19] (in which the court ruled 5-4 that mandatory sentences of life without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders are unconstitutional). On the ride home, buzzing with the thrill of seeing a brilliant Black lawyer holding his own in the highest court in the land, the kids begged Browder for more—more information about their histories, more job skills, more possibilities for their own futures. “You cannot just teach us all of this and then leave us,” Browder recalls one kid telling her. And so More Than Tours^[20] was born.

For many visitors to Montgomery, Browder’s tours were the first time they had ever heard of J. Marion Sims. But elsewhere in the country, reproductive justice advocates had spent years pushing the medical establishment to repudiate Sims and his ugly legacy. The loudest protests were happening in New York City, where a bronze statue of Sims^[21], a bit smaller than one near the Montgomery capitol building, stood in front of the New York Academy of Medicine on Central Park for almost a century. 

Sims’ modern-day defenders argued that he was a man of his times and should be judged for his accomplishments—the good he did for all women, not his racism, sexism, and abuse of some women. Historian and ethicist Harriet Washington, author of the seminal 2006 book, Medical Apartheid^[22], was among those who pushed back, pointing out that Sims had plenty of critics during his own era, including Quakers, abolitionists, and even fellow doctors. “The problem with saying this was accepted back then,” she says, “is that you are ignoring all the people who did not think it was all right, who don’t have a voice in historical literature.” After more than a decade of pressure, New York officials finally agreed in 2018 to remove his statue and relocate it Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Sims was buried after his death in 1883.

But back in Montgomery in 2017, the Alabama Legislature passed a bill^[23] that prohibited the relocation, removal, alteration, renaming, “or other disturbance” of “architecturally significant” monuments that have been on public property for 40 or more years. That timeframe protected most memorials to the Confederacy as well as the statue of Sims on the capitol grounds, erected in the 1930s^[24]. 

Yet Montgomery was also the place where Bryan Stevenson and his Equal Justice Initiative^[25] had wrested control of the historical narrative around slavery, incarceration, and the racialized terror of the Jim Crow era by erecting new monuments and museums—including, in 2018, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice^[26], just blocks from Browder’s More Up campus—to coexist with and challenge the memorials to the mythic Lost Cause. To Browder, the Daughters of the Confederacy, which erected many of the statutes and monuments that had nurtured that myth, became an unlikely source of inspiration. “They’re my heroes,” she said on the “Monuments to Motherhood” podcast^[27] in 2024. “You know why? Because here we are, 100 years later, we’re still talking about Robert E Lee. They did their job.”

In late 2019, Browder was in San Francisco, visiting a couple whom she’d met on one of her tours, when she came across a massive sculpture^[28] of a robot-like Buddhist goddess, “Tara Mechani,” towering over a trendy neighborhood park. Made of recycled machine parts, hinges, door handles, and other detritus, it was stunning, Browder says, evoking exactly the strength and exuberance she had imagined for her Mothers of Gynecology. She shared some photos and sketches with her San Francisco friends. “And I was like, I’m going to do this one day.” 

Not long after, the pandemic hit. For all Browder’s worries— “when you can’t work, you can’t eat”—she also understood her opportunity: “Covid said, ‘Now it’s time to honor these girls.’” In the spring of 2021, Browder returned to San Francisco and took a five-week crash course in welding from the creator^[29] of the Tara sculpture. Then, she and her brother Steven loaded up a U-Haul with Anarcha’s head, parts of her legs, and 40 boxes of scrap metal and objects and drove back to Montgomery.

When Browder unveiled her Mothers of Gynecology monument in September 2021, the acclaim was immediate. Lynn Roberts, a reproductive justice scholar and associate dean at CUNY’s Graduate School of Public Health who was active in the effort to remove Sims from Central Park, sees Browder’s monument as “a reclamation of all the pieces and the contradictory parts [of the Sims story], both the triumph and the suffering.” At a time when so many people feel “really powerless,” she adds, “Michelle’s work is a reminder that it’s still possible to be powerful, and she’s done it through art.”

To Paul Farber of the Monument Lab—a public art, history, and design studio based in Philadelphia that seeks to advance justice by reimagining monuments—Browder “combines an entrepreneurial spirit with an artist’s vision and a community organizer’s resolve.” As dazzled as he was by Browder’s reimagining of the Mothers, he was just as impressed by her resourcefulness in funding their creation: Among other things, she sold t-shirts and offered historical tours via Zoom. In 2022, Monument Lab selected Browder^[30] for its “Re:Generation” initiative, with a $100,000 grant to develop the rest of her campus.

By then, Browder had already embarked on the next phase of her ever-more-audacious project. Organizing a conference for reproductive health scholars and advocates from around the country, she identified the perfect venue—the property, a few blocks from her compound, where Sims had conducted his surgeries in a crude backyard hospital. The red brick building that occupied the plot was empty. When Browder contacted the owner, he told her the place was haunted—and that it was for sale. Browder purchased it for a mere $35,000, with plans to turn^[31] it into an education center for clinicians and activists working to make pregnancy and childbirth safer for Black mothers and babies.

But as she started raising money—she was aiming for $5.5 million^[32]—she realized that it could take years. “I said, we can’t wait, people are dying in these rural counties now.” One day, driving to North Alabama with her brother, they passed a bunch of RVs. “I said, why don’t we just drive around the [Black Belt] and help people?” Browder acquired a pair of campers, which she retrofitted into “wellness pods”—a mobile clinic and food truck. “We just kind of go around providing care for people who may not otherwise be able to access it,” says doula Chauntel Norris, co-director of the Alabama Prison Birth Project^[33] and one of Browder’s posse of volunteers. “It’s just, ‘take what you need.’”

Browder has never forgotten that moment in her professor’s office when she first saw the postcard with the glorified image of Sims. She discovered that the original painting was the property of the University of Michigan Health System, which acquired the “History of Medicine” series in 2007.  Since then, the Sims canvas had been mostly stashed away^[34] in a basement—largely because Black students and staff found it so offensive. Last spring, Browder convinced the institution to loan it to her for display in the Sims property.

At a March event^[35] on the campus in Ann Arbor, honoring Browder’s efforts, one of the speakers fan-girled her by wearing big red glasses on stage. “We haven’t really known how to have a conversation about this painting,” Dr. Lisa Harris, who teaches obstetrics/gynecology^[36] and women’s/gender studies^[37] at the university, told the audience. “As an institution, we never found a way to display or talk about [it] in a way that could hold and manage its complexity, that could recognize that there may have been harm in displaying it and a different kind of harm of erasure in not displaying it.” 

When it was Browder’s turn to speak, she no doubt surprised many listeners by praising aspects of the painting. “I’m in awe of Robert Thom’s piece, the artistry, the art within the art,” she said. The challenge, she said, was how to take an image that creates such discomfort, and “face it, reckon with it, and use it to make change.” She said that the responsibility rested with people like those in her audience. “We need you not to be fragile. . . . We want, we need, you to see it. Need you to see it. Because once you [do], it’s going to grab your heart.”

But in the meantime, she said, “We’re going to take matters into our own hands. Not only are we having a conversation about what’s happening in healthcare, but we’re doing something about it… not waiting on Superman to come and save us.”

In many ways, the Sims saga is exactly the kind of inconvenient historical truth the Trump administration has sought to suppress since January—targeting the National Museum of African American History and Culture in an executive order^[38], moving to scrub Harriet Tubman^[39] and the Tuskegee Airmen^[40] from government websites (quickly rescinded), slashing funding^[41] for research on racial disparities in health, and on and on. Even when institutions and individuals haven’t acquiesced, many have tried to keep a low profile lest they attract Trump’s ire.

All of which makes Browder’s work—and the example she’s setting for others—more important than ever, her admirers tell me. “I think the people in power now would like to rewrite history or erase it, and so that monument is Michelle’s F-U,” Chauntel Norris says. “You know, it is in your face. It is big. You can see it all down the street. And it says, we will not be silenced.”