The Remarkable Life of Beebe Steven Lynk

How a local pioneer challenged Victorian notions and paved her own way in the fields of medicine and education.

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At the turn of the twentieth century, contrasts between pre-modern and modern ways of life were palpable if you were a woman, especially if you were a Black woman, and especially if you were a Black woman in West Tennessee. In bridging those contrasts, few figures are more intriguing than Beebe Steven Lynk. As one of the nation’s first Black women scientists and university instructors, she paved the way for many more who came in her wake, even as she distinguished herself as an author through writings on African-American culture and do-it-yourself beauty practices.

Though historical accounts of her personal details are fragmentary, we do know she occupied the cusp of transition to a more modern mindset. As the years leading up to 1900 established the currents of life that we still recognize well into the digital age, Lynk’s accomplishments proudly announced a new era. Just when radioactivity and electrons were being discovered, and as motion-picture cameras, diesel engines, and gramophone discs were being invented, gender roles were being redefined. And yet America still had one foot in the world of horse-drawn wagons and dirt roads.

Lynk came of age just in time to challenge prevalent notions of women’s roles in science and medicine, and to raise herself up as a respected educator, only to see her prestige and power diminish in the face of a wave of medical modernization greater than even she could have imagined. Nonetheless, she left behind a legacy of Black self-empowerment that survived in spirit, if not in the physical buildings of the college she helped found.

By 1896, she had published her first book, Advice to Colored Women, which advocated improving the status of African-American women through education and respectability.

Lynk was born in Mason, Tennessee (northeast of Arlington), in 1872 — a year of contradictions if ever there was one. We don’t know if her parents, Henderson and Judiam Steven, were enslaved before the war, though prior to 1865 the Tennessee constitution required emancipated Blacks to leave the state. It was also in 1872, when former Union General Ulysses S. Grant was reelected, that the General Amnesty Act pardoned most former Confederate soldiers. But perhaps Henderson and Judiam were more focused on their new baby girl than U.S. politics. That baby girl seems to have enjoyed a nurturing childhood; she apparently enrolled at Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, at a young age, earning her bachelor’s degree when she was only 20.

Lane College was itself a sign of the changing times. Founded in 1882 by the Colored Methodist Episcopal (C.M.E.) Church in America, it was named after Methodist Bishop Isaac Lane and aimed to educate newly emancipated people to be “teachers and preachers.” One can safely assume that Lynk pursued the former track, as her subsequent career attests. That Lane was founded at all in the heart of the Jim Crow South is remarkable enough; but it carries on to this day, with more than 1,400 students strolling its 55-acre campus, part of which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

At some point during her college years, young Beebe Steven met Dr. Miles Vandahurst Lynk of Brownsville. He must have been impressive, if a bit on the formal side, having set up his medical practice in Jackson shortly after earning his M.D. from Nashville’s Meharry Medical College in 1891. Meharry was the first medical school for African Americans in the South, and carries on today as the nation’s largest private historically Black institution dedicated to medicine and science. Even in its earliest years, the college clearly instilled a sense of purpose in its graduates. Within a year after graduating, the ambitious young Lynk had founded the nation’s first African-American-published journal of medicine, the Medical and Surgical Observer.

They were undoubtedly thinking big. In a few short years they would make their greatest ambition a reality, beginning the work that would consume their lives well into the 1920s.

We can only guess at the romance that ensued after the two met. The autobiography he penned later in life, Sixty Years of Medicine, or the Life and Times of Dr. Miles V. Lynk, features four short paragraphs titled “Marital Relations,” where he writes, “On April 12, 1893, I was united in the bonds of matrimony to Miss Beebe Steven, graduate of Lane College, Jackson, Tennessee, to whom I owe a great deal for whatever degree of success I have attained. She was always at my side encouraging me in whatever undertaking I might engage, and many times darkness would have completely over-shadowed my pathway but for the brilliancy of the light cast by her encouragement.”

This and three spare sentences on her education and death are the only mention of Beebe in his manuscript.

And yet Beebe Steven Lynk was not one to settle for an “MRS” degree. As a member of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs, serving as treasurer of the Tennessee chapter, she embraced a nascent form of women’s rights. By 1896, she had published her first book, Advice to Colored Women, which advocated improving the status of African-American women through education and respectability.

A few years later, she would be drawn to medical education, a field in which she became distinguished in her own right. One can only surmise what hopes and dreams the young couple inspired in each other as the turn of the century approached. Miles shared Beebe’s literary bent, and after his medical journal folded in 1894, he published a literary monthly from 1898 to 1900, and went on to write two books, including the popular The Black Troopers, or Daring Deeds of the Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War. They were undoubtedly thinking big. In a few short years they would make their greatest ambition a reality, beginning the work that would consume their lives well into the 1920s.

In 1900, still in Jackson, Miles obtained a charter for the University of West Tennessee College of Medicine and Surgery (UWT). A 1903 article in The Freeman noted that it included “Colleges of Medicine, Law, Dentistry, Pharmacy, and School of Nurse Training — A Prosperous, Unique and Most Interesting Institution.” It was actually one of 14 Black medical schools that sprouted up in the South after the Civil War. And for any African American aspiring to a career in healthcare, they were typically the only option: most Black physicians in the late nineteenth century attended such schools.

The year 1903 also marked the graduation of one of UWT’s most notable students: Beebe Steven Lynk herself. After two years of study, she was granted a degree in pharmaceutical chemistry, and soon thereafter began teaching medical Latin, botany, and materia medica at UWT. To this day, she is celebrated in such volumes as Wini Warren’s Black Women Scientists in the United States and Jeanette Brown’s African American Women Chemists.

The daughter of parents who were likely enslaved navigated beyond obstacles of the Jim Crow South and of gender inequities to become both a published author and one of only two female instructors at a medical college. Lynk’s journey is individually phenomenal, and more broadly indicative of the large-scale upheavals occurring through the Progressive Era.

Even so, we shouldn’t assume that Beebe was the firebrand our modern imaginations might be inclined to conjure. As a figure with stakes in both the archaic and the modern, she represents contradictory forces in the empowerment of Black women. One biographical sketch of the Lynks, dating back to UWT’s heyday, celebrates her for being “one of the truest helpmeets” that a husband could ask for, urging “young girls of the race to emulate her good example — a woman of a lovable disposition, of an immaculate character and giant intellect — a benefactress to her husband and race.”

There are indications that Beebe herself would approve of this appraisal. Her most readily available writings are in her 1919 book, A Complete Course in Hair Straightening and Beauty Culture, which begins with the chapter title “Be Beautiful”: “It is the duty of every woman to be beautiful. When a woman loses interest in her beauty she is losing interest in the only thing that keeps her alive and up to date. A careless woman loses her beauty, her love, her friends and her ambitions. ... It pays to be attractive!”

The contradiction inherent in any calls for women’s empowerment based on their duty “to be beautiful” should not diminish what Beebe Lynk did accomplish. The daughter of parents who were likely enslaved navigated beyond obstacles of the Jim Crow South and of gender inequities to become both a published author and one of only two female instructors at a medical college. Lynk’s journey is individually phenomenal, and more broadly indicative of the large-scale upheavals occurring through the Progressive Era.

It’s also worth noting what UWT achieved as an institution. More than 155 physicians, as well as a number of pharmacists, nurses, and dentists, were trained during its years of operation. And beyond the medical training, the university championed a vision of Black excellence on par with any white institution, developing students’ knowledge of law, botany, and “a thorough superstructure built on a broad and liberal literary foundation.”

Among the 14 Black medical colleges of its time, UWT seems to have set some of the strictest graduation criteria, offering in-depth clinical and laboratory experience, with courses spanning a full four years (as opposed to others that might be completed in a year).

And it was successful. According to one university tract:

The rapid growth of the school made it necessary that we move to a more metropolitan center, where facilities would be adequate for a great educational plant. Accordingly, in the spring of 1907, the trustees decided to locate the school in Memphis, Tenn., a city of over 200,000 inhabitants and business and manufacturing interests that will easily make it the commercial mistress of the Mississippi valley. ... Memphis furnishes a wealth of clinical material second to no city of the South.

The university’s 1907 catalog touted the relocation to Memphis with a list of the city’s many attractions and features:

• Memphis has an up-to-date electric street car service — over 100 miles.

• Memphis has the fastest trotting track in the world,

• Has the largest artesian water system in the world,

• Has one hundred and forty churches,

• Five theaters and two park theaters.

• Is the home port of eighty-four steamboats,

• Two hundred and thirty-five miles of sewers.

• There are over thirty-five educated Afro-American physicians, dentists and pharmacists actively engaged in the lucrative pursuit of their professions.

• Afro-Americans of Memphis own over two million dollars worth of property.

Indeed, UWT represented a rapidly growing professional class of African Americans in the city. And Beebe Steven Lynk, in her teachings and writings, was proof positive that Black women could elevate themselves to such prosperity as well.

In a twist of tragic historical irony, however, forces were at work in the national medical community that would spell the downfall of UWT. Indeed, most African-American medical schools would close in the years to come. And much of that was due to the work of one Abraham Flexner, the man hired in 1908 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to survey American medical education.

Though he was neither a physician, a scientist, nor a medical educator, Flexner had run a successful private school in his native Kentucky. And he was very thorough. Casting a critical eye on the medical teaching practices of the day, he summed up his findings in 1910 with the Flexner Report, which marked a quantum leap in the professionalization of medicine in the United States. As Patricia M. LaPointe explains in her 1984 historical account, From Saddlebags to Science: A Century of Health Care in Memphis, 1830-1930:

The University of West Tennessee was one of the schools visited by Abraham Flexner, and he noted the school’s lack of adequate buildings, meager laboratory equipment, and poor clinical facilities. Because of the revolution in medical education that came about after publication of the Flexner Report in 1910, the University of West Tennessee was one of the schools that had to close because of its lack of funding and inability to meet rising standards. In spite of the lack of scientific equipment, a dedicated faculty did manage to continue the school in operation until the close of the 1923-24 session. ... It is interesting to note that the University of West Tennessee had a four-year medical program from the outset and many Black physicians and dentists who practiced in Memphis in the early decades of the 20th Century were graduates of this institution.

Black colleges were not the only recipients of Flexner’s scathing critiques; he actually celebrated the medical education at two historically Black schools, Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, D.C., and Meharry Medical College, Miles Lynk’s alma mater. Flexner sat on the board of Howard for a time.

But among other factors surrounding the creation of Flexner’s report, questions of race loom large.

He dealt a death blow to UWT, which shut down not quite a quarter century after Dr. Miles Lynk founded the school. Largely because her fate was tied with that of the school, that is where the historical record fades out for Beebe Steven Lynk. As her husband writes, “On November 11, 1948, after 55 years and seven months of marital bliss, the Lord saw fit to call her from labor to reward.” She is buried in Memphis’ New Park Cemetery with her husband, who died in 1956.

Though the vanishing of the Lynks’ life work is tragic, it is heartening to consider the mark they made in their most active years. One can imagine the many former students of UWT fanning out into the city, or the state, or the nation, to ply their trade in the healing arts, and what impact they may have made over the course of generations. In the Lynks’ lives, and in Beebe’s in particular, we see in miniature the power and the potential realized by those who challenged assumptions about who they were supposed to be. And all the while, Beebe stood astride two worlds, the archaic and the modern, the traditional and the scientific, the oppressed and the free.

With thanks to the Special Collections Department at the University of Memphis Libraries, and to the Jackson-Madison County Library Tennessee Room.