By Howard Cohen
As the first Black pediatrician to be board certified in Florida, Dr. Dazelle Dean Simpson cured countless kids in more than 40 years of practicing in Liberty City and Overtown.
But she also made serious inroads in curing — or, at the very least, illuminating — societal ills like prejudice and preconceived notions of what a woman, and a Black woman in the segregated South, could accomplish in medicine and later in volunteer work and philanthropy.
When Miami native Simpson, who died at 95 on Sunday, earned her distinction from the state of Florida in 1953, she had already proven her mettle in so many respects.
In 1996, Dr. Dazelle Simpson stands outside the home she grew up in on Charles Avenue in Coconut Grove. C.W. Griffin
Educational achievements
The granddaughter of Coconut Grove real estate pioneer E.W.F. Stirrup, Dazelle Dean graduated as the valedictorian of her high school class at George Washington Carver in Coconut Grove. She graduated magna cum laude from Fisk College in Nashville in 1945. And then graduated at the top of her class from Meharry Medical College in Nashville in 1950.
Her husband of 70 years, George, was also a pioneer in medicine in Miami. He was the first board-certified Black surgeon in Florida and the first African American to perform surgery at Jackson Memorial Hospital, the Miami Herald reported. Together, their shared practices and post-retirement civic endeavors endeared them to a community.
George Simpson once joked that he noticed Dazelle during his first year at medical school at Meharry because she was getting better grades than he was.
“As a New Yorker I was surprised to hear that someone from the South was making higher grades than me,’” George Simpson told the Herald when Meharry’s Miami alumni chapter honored the couple for their nearly 65-year history in practicing medicine and subsequent community work in Overtown and Liberty City. “It was a rude awakening when I discovered it was someone from Miami consistently scoring high on the tests.”
During their final year of medical school, the couple wed at Christ Episcopal Church in Coconut Grove the day after Christmas in 1949.
George and Dazelle Simpson’s wedding photo at Christ Episcopal Church in Coconut Grove on Dec. 26, 1949.
As president of the Meharry Medical College alumni association, Dazelle would later raise $1 million for a new student dental facility. The historically Black school, established in 1876, gave Simpson another distinction. She was honored not once, but twice, as its Alumnus of the Year in 1975, then 1995.
But first, Simpson — who was also a president of the Greater Miami Pediatric Society and the Florida Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Association and a vice chairman on Miami Children’s Hospital’s board — had to make her mark.
A pioneering pediatrician
The Miami Herald first headlined her achievement this way: “First Negro Woman Doctor Pediatrician; Husband’s M.D. too.”
Then, she had to convince a skeptical maid at the hospital that she was on the right floor when she went to check on a patient at Jackson Memorial Hospital in 1953.
“One of the Black maids stopped me and said: ‘You can’t come down this ward,’ “Simpson told the Herald in 1986. “I guess the word spread like wildfire that there was a Black doctor in the hospital. When I got ready to leave, there was a standing crowd.”
In 2018, 65 years later and decades after establishing her private practice at 823 NW Third Ave. at the urging of her mother, educator Kate Stirrup Dean, and her grandfather E.W.F. Stirrup, she returned as a local legend to Jackson for the hospital’s 100th birthday celebration.
Both Simpsons were recognized in an exhibit at Overtown’s Historic Lyric Theatre on Northwest Second Avenue.
“It was not unusual to make a house call to Richmond Heights, Opa-locka and Overtown, and then get to my office by 9:30 in the morning,” Simpson told the Herald in 1986. “There were some doctors who would take black patients, but a lot of them did not.”
In 1994, the Buena Vista Early Child Development Center was renamed the Dr. Dazelle D. Simpson Early Childhood Center on Northeast 42nd Street.
Lifelong friend and former Miami City Commissioner Thelma Gibson recalls walking to school with a young Dazelle Dean and her sister Charlotte. She was “quiet” and “ambitious” even then. And she became a doctor “who loved working with people — especially babies and children,” Gibson said.
“I followed her career throughout — from when her first office opened on Northwest Third Avenue and Eighth Street in Overtown to the building of the Medical Tri-Arts Building on Northwest 54th Street,” Gibson said. “I was a public health nurse when her first office opened and I referred patients to her. The grand opening of her new office was on my wedding day — April 2, 1967 — and we still managed to attend. How could we not go? She has always been there for our community.”
A love of family
Carol Davis Henley, her first cousin, said Simpson’s love of family was inspired by their grandfather, E.W.F. Stirrup.
“Grandpa always believed in taking care of the community and family. Dazelle embraced his feelings wholeheartedly,” Henley said., recalling shared outings to the Seaquarium and the old Parrot Jungle and other South Florida attractions.
“Her dedication to medicine, even with late night house calls that, as children, we often rode with her to, did not prevent her from spending time with her children and little cousins.”
At the June 2017 Stirrup family reunion: Standing from left are Barbara Stirrup, wife of E.W. Franklin Stirrup III; Carol Davis Byrd; and Iral Davis Porter. Seated is Dr. Dazelle Dean Simpson with Tacari Adé Stirrup Wiggins, the then-6-month-old great-great-grandson of E.W. Franklin Stirrup Sr.
A family medicine practitioner, Dr. Thomas Garvin of the Brevard Health Alliance, calls Simpson his “guardian angel.” She was his pediatrician, making house calls to treat him for childhood asthma. When he graduated from Carver High, she mentored him with a science scholarship to Fisk University.
Garvin followed in her footsteps, attending and later supporting the same schools, at her urging. Simpson became his children’s pediatrician.
Simpson once said: “Before I came here, a lot of people didn’t even know the word pediatrician, or why it was important to go to one. Part of my success is that, to me, a patient is a patient, Black, white, yellow, whatever.”
She believed in preventative care, too, advancing the notion that visits to the pediatrician were not only at times of sickness.
“I think, in my own small way,” Simpson told the Herald, “I’ve done something to change that.”
Survivors and services
In addition to her husband, Simpson’s survivors include their sons George Jr., Gregory and Gary; their grandchildren Joelle Simpson Taylor and George Simpson III; and five great-grandchildren and numerous nieces, nephews and godchildren.
A litany service will be held at 7 p.m. Feb. 21, and the funeral will be at 11 a.m. Feb. 22, both at Christ Episcopal Church, 3481 Hibiscus St., Coconut Grove.
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