Delores Brisbon shares wisdom from book ‘A Privileged Life’ at Temple’s Blockson Collection

Delores Brisbon’s first job at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania was as the head nurse of a neurology unit. That was in 1959.

During her 28-year career there, she rose to become chief operating officer. She retired after supervising such projects as divesting Graduate Hospital from Penn’s ownership and leading the construction of the $46 million Silverstein Pavilion and the $116 million Founders Pavilion.

After retiring, she launched a new career in 1987: Brisbon & Associates, a health care consulting firm. Some of her clients were the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; Temple University, the Medical College of Pennsylvania; the Hospitals and Higher Educational Authority of Philadelphia; City of Philadelphia; University Hospital in Newark, N.J..; District Councils 33 and 47 municipal unions, and the William Penn Foundation.

Now, at 91, she is still actively engaged as a consultant, advising several of the nation’s historically Black graduate schools of theology for a new project that is expected to be announced this spring. In 2022, the leaders of these divinity schools came to Philadelphia to meet with Brisbon and discuss how the schools can help Black churches become more responsive to social justice concerns.

Last week, she spoke at Temple University’s Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection about her second book, A Privileged Life II: Wisdom from My Journey, published in 2019. It followed her 2010 book A Privileged Life: Remembering My Journey.

The books’ titles might lead some to think that they were about someone from an elite background.

“But you can have a privileged life, even if your life started in struggle,” she told the audience at Temple.

“I come from a faith tradition,” Brisbon later told The Inquirer. “I think kindness is necessary. I think helping people is what God requires us to do. My success in my work has been my authenticity.”

Diane D. Turner, curator of the Blockson Collection, said she invited Brisbon to speak for one of the collection’s occasional “author talks,” to mark Women’s History Month.

“She has wisdom,” Turner said. “She’s achieved a lot, and she has the willingness to share that information with you. She still has the willingness to help others, and she’s a concerned citizen.”

Brisbon told her near capacity audience at Blockson that she once stood 5-foot-11, and would wear three-inch heels when she walked the corridors of HUP.

That made her a commanding figure. Now, with age, she said, she has lost some of her height and is now about 5-foot-8.

However, it was more than her physical stature that took her to such heights in her career as a hospital administrator.

Mark Levitan, who was HUP’s chief executive officer for a time, told The Inquirer in 1982 that the doctors and other staff at the hospital saw something special in Brisbon:

“I would describe her as being bright, decisive, thoughtful, a doer. You don’t hit a lot of home runs in a job like this. There’s not one major accomplishment; it’s a series of accomplishments over a period of years that demonstrates a remarkable capacity to perform well. That’s an unusual skill, to deal in a complex environment, and to be well-supported and respected by the medical faculty. And I happen to know she is.”

In her talk and throughout her books, Brisbon writes about her faith in God and how it has fortified her. She said she is guided daily by reading the Bible.

When Brisbon, who now lives in Society Hill and has two children, was first hired at HUP, she was well aware of the Civil Rights demonstrations, protests and attacks taking place in the South.

She had been born in Jacksonville, Fla., and earned her nursing degree at Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University.

In 1954, her senior year there, someone burned down the chapel on campus. A year later, Rosa Parks would make history after her arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white person led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

After graduating with an undergraduate degree in science, Brisbon worked at John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital, a small teaching hospital then on Tuskegee’s campus that mainly served Black people and attracted patients from as far away as Montgomery, Ala., and Columbus, Ga.

One of those patients from Montgomery — about 38 miles from Tuskegee — was a young Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had begun to preach at Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in 1954.

“We treated Dr. King before he was famous,” Brisbon, 91, said in a recent interview. (The Andrew Memorial Hospital closed in 1987.)

Brisbon said she learned to navigate a subtle racism at that time at HUP, she told an Inquirer reporter in 1982.

“I worked there, but I wasn’t accepted socially,” she said. She talked about finding anonymous, racist notes slipped into her locker in the nurse’s locker room.

» READ MORE: At her hospital, respect in heavy doses

In her first memoir, Brisbon wrote that after she was promoted from head nurse to supervisor of medical nursing in 1962, she shared an office with another nurse supervisor. That colleague told her: “The place for colored people is to care for our children.” Brisbon said she didn’t respond. She simply walked away.

Years later, when she was chief operating officer at the hospital, that same nurse met with her regarding her own retirement. “As she sat in front of my desk, and made her request, [which I granted] I resisted the temptation to ask her where ‘my place ‘ was.”

Brisbon was profiled in that Jan. 12, 1982, article because her promotion to chief operating officer was ground-breaking and history-making.

After The Inquirer article, other profiles followed in Ebony, Essence, and Black Enterprise magazines. The Inquirer’s headline read: “At her hospital, respect in heavy doses.”

Brisbon said she has no intention of slowing down in 2024.

She is very involved in the divinity schools project. She volunteers to accompany someone with Alzheimer’s to doctor’s visits, and because she has a driver, she said, she will take others to the grocery store.

“If I can schedule it, I will do this, because I’ve been loved so much by a family that taught me the best thing you can do is to be good to others,” Brisbon said. Her mother, she said, was the first person to go to someone’s house to clean and cook for a neighbor dealing with an illness or death.

“That’s why I’m working at 91 years old,” she said. "I don’t need money. I enjoy helping people, and it is genuine.”