Byllye Avery

Byllye in front of Sojourner Truth poster

Byllye Yvonne Reddick Avery was born in 1937 in Waynesville, Georgia. Her family moved almost immediately to DeLand, Florida, where she was raised. She graduated in 1959 from Talladega College, a prestigious, HBCU (Historic Black College or University) in Alabama. She married in 1960, and had two children, Wesley and Sonja. In 1970, her husband, Wesley Avery, died suddenly of a massive heart attack while they were both in graduate school at the University of Florida. Wesley Avery’s death radicalized her, and she became an activist for Black health issues as a result.

Byllye Avery served in the 1970s on the Board of Directors of the National Women’s Health Network, which connected to the Boston Women’s Health Collective that published the first Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971). As one of her earliest health-advocacy actions, she cofounded the Gainesville Women’s Health Center with Judy Levy and Margaret Parrish. In 1978, the three of them cofounded the BirthPlace, also in Gainesville. Her work in Gainesville raised her awareness of the need for better counseling and education around Black women’s health issues.

Byllye Avery moved from Gainesville, Florida, to Atlanta, Georgia, where in 1983 she founded the National Black Women’s Health Project, now known as the Black Women’s Health Imperative. Since that time, she has received many major honors, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for Social Contribution (known as “genius grants”) in 1989, the Essence Award for Community Service in 1989, the Dorothy I. Height Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995, the President’s Citation of the American Public Health Association in 1995, the Ruth Bader Ginsberg Impact Award from the Chicago Foundation for Women in 2008, and the Audre Lorde Spirit of Fire Award from the Fenway Health Center in Boston in 2010.

Byllye Avery did an extensive interview in 2005 for Smith College’s Voices of Feminism Oral History Project. The 95-page transcript of that interview is available online (see link below), and it covers her entire life, with much detail about her work with women’s health advocacy Rather than replicate that interview, we developed questions that build on it.

Byllye Avery authored An Altar of Words: Wisdom to Comfort and Inspire African-American Women (1998).

Byllye Avery lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with her partner of 26 years, Ngina Lythcott, whom she married in 2005.

See also:

Interview online at Sinister Wisdom

Barbara Esrig, “The Gainesville Women’s Health Center 1974-1997,” Sinister Wisdom 93 (Summer 2014): 42-43.

Robin Toler, “Byllye Avery: The Birth Place and the Black Women’s Health Project,” Sinister Wisdom 93 (Summer 2014): 53-57.

Loretta Ross, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, video recording, July 21, 2005, online transcript.