16 Facts About Byllye Avery

Byllye Yvonne Avery was born on October 20,1937 and is an American health care activist.

Byllye Avery is best known as the founder of the National Black Women's Health Project, the first national organization to specialize in Black women's reproductive health issues.

Byllye Avery was born in Waynesville, Georgia and grew up on a farm in DeLand, Florida.

Byllye Avery is the daughter of L Alyce M Ingram, a schoolteacher.

Byllye Avery was killed when Avery was 14 years old.

The oldest of three children, Byllye Avery assumed a lot of responsibility from a young age.

Byllye Avery attended college at Talladega College and earned her BA in psychology in 1959.

Byllye Avery met her husband, Wesley Avery, while at Talladega College and they married in 1960.

In 1967, Byllye Avery received a fellowship to obtain her master's in special education at the University of Florida Gainesville.

Byllye Avery was only thirty-three years old and it was discovered after his death that he had very high blood pressure.

Byllye Avery met her wife, Ngina Lythcott, in 1989, and the two were married in 2005.

In 1978, Byllye Avery helped to found Birthplace, an alternative birthing center in Gainesville.

In 1981, while serving on the board of directors for National Women's Health Network, Byllye Avery started a two-year long project called the Black Women's Health Project.

Byllye Avery was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship this same year in the area of health policy.

Byllye Avery has called the health discrepancies between African-American and white women a "conspiracy of silence".

Byllye Avery has been a visiting fellow at the Harvard University School of Public Health; she has served on the Charter Advisory Committee for the Office of Research on Women's Health of the National Institutes of Health; she has been a health issues advisor for the Kellogg Foundation's International Leadership Program; and she has served as a consultant on women's healthcare in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa.