02/27/2026
Lillie Johnson (1922-2025) was born in Jamaica, and practiced in Ontario. She earned the honour of becoming the first Black midwife in Oxfordshire, England following her education in Jamaica and Scotland, before she immigrated to the U.S. and eventually Canada in 1960. Over the course of her career, Lillie served as the first Black Director of Public Health in Ontario, taught Child and Maternal Health at Humber College, consulted for the Ministry of Health, and became Director of Nursing Services at Leeds Granville and Lanark Health Unit in Eastern Ontario. During her lifetime, immigrant Black midwives were too regularly excluded from practicing in Canada, despite their apprenticeship experience and earned credentials — barriers that still impact many immigrants to Canada today.
Among her many professional accomplishments, she and other like-minded professionals founded the Sickle Cell Association of Ontario in 1981. Her tireless advocacy resulted in getting Sickle Cell Disease — a genetic condition that predominantly affects the Black community — added to newborn screening in her province in the early 2000s. In her over 100 years of life, Lillie received many accolades, including being invested into the Order of Ontario in 2011 and the Order of Canada in 2024. Amazingly, many of these milestones occurred following her retirement in the late 1980s; as her collaborator Dr. Mavis Burke noted in the foreword to Lillie's biography My Dream, "retirement only allowed Lillie to do more."
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We are thankful for records of Lillie's life collected and shared by Dr. Karline Wilson-Mitchell (Toronto Metropolitan University) via the Colour of Birth project () and the Sickle Cell Association of Ontario ().
Base image source: Sickle Cell Association of Ontario ()
Canada // Black History Month // Black midwives // Canadian Black midwives // midwifery // midwife // birthworker
