Life Story: Byllye Avery (1937– )

Byllye Yvonne Reddick was born in Waynesville, Georgia, on October 20, 1937. When Byllye was nine months old, she and her mother moved to DeLand, Florida, where her mother started a teaching job. 

Byllye did not grow up with her biological father, but her mother married her stepfather, Quitman “Mike” Reddick, shortly after moving to Florida. Her mother and stepfather had a son together, also named Quitman, and adopted Mike’s baby nephew. Mike owned a gambling business and often cheated customers. When Byllye was 15 years old, he got into a violent fight with a customer, and both men died. 

Byllye was expected to help her widowed mother care for the house and her two brothers. Often when she got out of school, her mother asked her to prepare fried chicken. Byllye caught a chicken from their backyard, then killed, cleaned, and cooked it.

After graduating from her segregated high school in 1955, Byllye attended Talladega College, the oldest historically Black college in Alabama. She first decided to go to college there when she read an article about it in Ebony magazine in eighth grade.

Byllye loved life at Talladega. She majored in psychology and enjoyed learning. It is also where she first got involved in the civil rights movement. Authorine Lucey was the first Black student to integrate the University of Alabama in 1956. When her enrollment resulted in violent and massive student riots at the university, she sought safe harbor on the Talladega campus. Talladega students held rallies in support of Authorine. Byllye also had the opportunity to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak at her campus church. 

Byllye met Wesley Avery on her first day of college. They married on June 25, 1960, shortly after they graduated. They had two children, Wesley, born in 1961, and Sonia, born in 1966. 

Growing up in the 1950s, Byllye had not learned much about birth control. She tried to prevent getting pregnant so soon after she married, but did not know how to do that. Byllye did not even realize she was pregnant with Wesley Jr. until another woman told her.

The Averys first lived in Jacksonville, Florida. Then Byllye received a fellowship to get a master’s degree in special education at the University of Florida in Gainesville. She was the only person in the entire state to receive this fellowship. She moved to Gainesville to study, and Wesley stayed in Jacksonville to work and care for the children. Soon after, Wesley received a scholarship to attend the same university, and the entire family moved to Gainesville.

Shortly after arriving in Gainesville, Wesley suffered a major heart attack. He died when he was only 33 years old.

Wesley’s death was a radicalizing experience for Byllye. She realized that despite their successes in formal education, she and Wesley never learned how to take care of their health. Wesley suffered from hypertension, but neither he nor Byllye realized the dangers of this condition. They also did not know that certain diseases can run in families and that being aware of these family patterns can prevent serious health issues. 

Byllye took a job in the children’s mental health unit of a local hospital. In 1971, she gave her first public lecture about reproductive rights with two colleagues. Shortly after, a white woman reached out to Byllye and her two colleagues for help getting an abortion, which was illegal in Florida. They arranged for her to receive an abortion in New York. Then a Black woman called, but she could not afford to travel to another state, which the white women they had previously helped had been able to do. The Black woman attempted to self-induce an abortion and died from her injuries. This difficult experience led Byllye to get more involved in the feminist movement and focus on the inequalities Black women faced. 

Byllye and her colleague Judy decided to open an abortion clinic in Gainesville after the Supreme Court affirmed the legal right to an abortion in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. They knew this would be a challenge, as the county refused to allow Planned Parenthood, the national women’s health organization, to start a clinic in the area. They recruited a medical director and secured a medical facility. The women raised several thousand dollars and were able to open the Gainesville Women’s Health Center in 1974.

Running the abortion clinic opened Byllye’s eyes to the importance of giving women the opportunity to control their reproductive decisions. She also realized that many Black women got abortions—more than she expected. More than half of their patients were Black, while they made up only about 20 percent of Gainesville’s population. 

The feminist movement had successfully fought for abortion rights. However, Byllye saw that Black women, especially those who were lower income, still lacked knowledge about their own bodies. She believed that education was key. Byllye developed educational materials and classes so that every woman who entered the health center would leave with more knowledge about her own reproductive system. These goals were articulated in the broader women’s health movement as well.

The feminist movement also changed how American women gave birth. In the 1960s, it was common for women to be sedated during delivery. New mothers often woke up unaware they had given birth. Many women felt like they missed out on being aware of this important life experience. The Gainesville Women’s Health Center opened a separate birth center in 1978, called Birthplace, where Byllye went to work. Byllye and her colleagues gave women more agency over their birthing experience. They hired a midwife to guide women through childbirth and decorated the building to make it feel more like a home than a hospital. Byllye assisted in over a hundred births at the center.

After two years at the Birthplace, Byllye took a position at Santa Fe College in Gainesville. A major part of her job was to help young Black women stay in school. She learned about the challenges they faced, especially those who were young mothers. Byllye realized that she needed to raise awareness on a larger scale since Black women dealt with different challenges than white women.

In 1981, Byllye began to raise funds for her research on Black women’s health issues, the Black Women’s Health Project. In 1983, she organized a conference on Black women’s health at Spelman College in Atlanta. Almost 2,000 Black women attended, many traveling in tour buses from all over the South.

Byllye founded the National Black Women’s Health Project (NBWHP) in 1984, a nonprofit organization that provides self-help classes on health issues for Black women, as well as policy research with the aim to make the medical establishment more inclusive. 

The success of the NBWHP led to Byllye receiving a MacArthur Fellowship, known as a “genius grant,” in 1989. Byllye used the opportunities afforded by the grant to travel and write books. In 1990, she co-founded African-American Women for Reproductive Freedom, an organization with the goal of reducing the stigma of abortion within the Black community.

Throughout the 1990s, Byllye worked on health projects in other countries including Brazil and South Africa. In Johannesburg, she trained Black women in her Self-Help program. While the women there faced similar health issues as in the United States, she also saw the major impact of HIV/AIDS on the South African community. 

Back in the United States, Byllye founded the Avery Institute for Social Change in 2002. The organization educates Black Americans on health-care policy. 

Byllye married her longtime partner Ngina Lythcott in 2005, and they currently live in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

• abortion: A procedure to terminate a pregnancy.
• Ebony: A magazine about news and entertainment, primarily tar