New Haven Filmmaker Documents Struggles Of ‘Black Women In Medicine’

The home-office in New Haven where Crystal Emery lives and works is full of inspirational messages. Her front door bears the sign “‘I Can’t’ Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” Above her desk reads a printout, “Conscious Positive Choices.” Another printout reads “When God calls, He also provides.”

Emery’s life has been driven by these philosophies. As a child in New Haven, bused into a school in Cheshire, she experienced violent racism. Since she began as a student at UConn, Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease has slowly deteriorated her body, and since 2000, she has been a quadriplegic dependent on a respirator.

Still, she hasn’t let her tribulations deter her from her goals and she wants to inspire others to pursue their dreams, too.

Emery has written, directed and produced “Black Women in Medicine,” an hourlong documentary featuring more than a dozen black women who pursued medical careers, challenging the norms and expectations of colleagues and patients in a white- and male-dominated profession.

The movie features about a dozen women doctors, two of whom still practice in Connecticut. It was shot in part at Yale School of Medicine — where some of the women profiled went to school — and at Gateway Community College in New Haven and Emery’s alma mater, Hillhouse High in New Haven. It is having its world premiere Aug. 26 to Sept. 1 in New York City. It will be shown on public television stations later in the year, with dates to be determined. Emery also wrote a companion book to the movie, profiling more than 100 African-American women who make their living in medicine.

“The film isn’t really about medicine. It’s about encouraging young people to think big and act on it,” Emery said. “It could be about education or the law. It’s really about visibility. You can’t be what you can’t see.”

Emery is borrowing that last quote from Joycelyn Elders, the first black female surgeon general of the United States, who never met a doctor until she was 16 years old. Elders appears in Emery’s film, along with other black female medical trailblazers, including Claudia Thomas, the first black female orthopedic surgeon, Velma Scantlebury-White, the first black female transplant surgeon, and Barbara Ross-Lee, the first black female dean of an American medical school.

Many young and veteran doctors fill out the roster of interviewees, including Middletown family practitioner Rashelle Yarborough and Hamden rheumatologist Deborah Dyett-Desir.

The women tell stories of their decisions to pursue medical careers, their struggles to be accepted and their hopes for the future. Sometimes their stories are amusing, as when cardiothoracic surgeon Jennifer Ellis quips, “The further you are from Marcus Welby, the more the patient is not expecting you. So, by definition, when a black woman walks in and says, ‘I’m going to do your heart surgery,’ it throws them.”

Other stories are sad, frightening or maddening. Thomas tells of racist acquaintances at John Hopkins University and a sexist colleague early in her career. “Some people even believe and buy into that ‘post-racial’ statement,” she says in the film. “There’s nothing post-racial in this country. Race matters. It’s the first thing they see when people look at you.”

Lifetime Experiences

Emery came to this film project with her own lifetime of experiences. Growing up in the Brookside section of New Haven, she loved her neighbors. “It was wonderful, a sheltered environment, very interracial,” she said. “Our neighbors were the Horowitzes, the Polanskis, the Smiths, the Joneses.”

She liked putting on plays. She fondly remembers a play she put on about Batman and Robin vs. the Green Hornet and Kato. When she was in fifth grade, one of her plays took on a social conscience as a result of a frightening incident. New Haven began busing pupils to other, predominantly white towns. Emery wound up going to school in Cheshire from first to fifth grade.

“We experienced very open hostility as children, whether from the other children or from the teachers,” said Emery, who is now age 55. “One of the [white] kids brought a knife to school and said, ‘my father said n—–s don’t have red blood’ and he cut my right arm.”

In response to the attack, Emery did what came naturally — she wrote and directed a play about abolitionist Harriet Tubman. “It was received well,” she said. She returned to school in New Haven. She acted whenever she could throughout elementary school and at Hillhouse, and enrolled at UConn majoring in acting. But a career in that field wasn’t meant to be.

“While I was at UConn, this disease took a turn for the worse. It’s a form of muscular dystrophy. I kept falling down,” she said. “There were no disabled actors in that era.” She began wearing leg braces through the years until those were insufficient, then started using a wheelchair.

Today, her home, where she lives with her husband, children and a brother, is her office. Her husband and a few employees help her with her life and work. During a recent visit, Emery’s husband fed her a meal and her employees bustled around doing their jobs, while she took a call on a headset about her movie’s promotional materials.

In college, increasingly incapacitated by the disorder, she stopped acting and began directing plays, continuing after college. One of her highlights was “Runaways” at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. In her theatrical career, she was mentored by director Lloyd Richards.

She got work in movies, too, including as a production assistant on the 1991 noir “A Rage in Harlem,” directed by Bill Duke, who became a mentor, too, along with that film’s star, Gregory Hines. She has produced more than 20 plays and made the documentary “The Deadliest Disease in America,” about racism in health-care practices. She has her own nonprofit production company, URU The Right To Be, Inc.

Emery’s next film also has a racial theme. “Open Season” will take on the subject of young black men being shot by police or armed white citizens.

For now, though, all her concentration is going into getting “Black Women in Medicine” seen — to inspire young people and educate older ones.

“As much as I made this for young people, I found the old guard needs it the most, because stereotypes and mindsets are still in place,” she said. “For young people, they need to know that they can be anything they want to be. We don’t feed them that information.”

A bus trip will take place on Saturday, Aug. 27, from Windsor to New York City to see a screening of “Black Women in Medicine.” Admission is $35 and includes transportation and a ticket to the movie. Theresa Staten, a lifelong friend of Emery’s, is organizing the trip. The bus leaves the commuter lot on Cottage Grove Road at 9:30 a.m., arrives in Times Square early enough to allow participants to dine and shop, then proceeds to the 4 p.m. screening and returns to Windsor by about 9 p.m. Space on the bus is limited and must be reserved. To join the bus trip, email sweett17@icloud.com.

Details on the film: changingthefaceofmedicine.org and urutherighttobe.org.