Note: We have also added Dr. Eliza A. Grier's brother, Dr. Richard E. Grier's life story (what we could find so far) to this post. End Note.

Dr. Eliza A. Grier was born in 1864 in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. She was the daughter of George Washington Grier (born May 1835 in North Carolina), and Emily J Grier (born in 1840 in North Carolina.)
She was the sister of Richard Edgar Grier MD.
Eliza died Apr 1902, and was buried in Charlotte, Mecklenburg, North Carolina.

Although she was born after the Emancipation Proclamation, she was effectively still a slave in that part of North Carolina not occupied by the Union Army. She was emancipated in practice at the end of the war while still an infant along with her parents, Emily and George Washington Grier, they were freed by the 13th Amendment to the US. Constitution in 1865.

Little is known of Grier’s early life beyond her growing up in Atlanta where she and her family moved in 1869.
In 1883-1884, nearly 20 years after her emancipation, she was accepted to Fisk University to study teaching.
It took her seven-eight years to work her way through Fisk, alternating years between course work and jobs picking cotton, or other farm and domestic work. She was dedicated to fulfilling classwork and her extracurricular activities, including serving in 1890 as president of the Young Ladies Lyceum.

After graduating from Fisk in 1891, Grier moved to Augusta, Georgia, where she taught at the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute, founded by Lucy Craft Laney. Soon after arriving at Haines, she wrote to the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in December of 1891 to inquire about the cost of medical school there, and whether there would be any work she could do that would not interfere with her studies.

"I have no money and no source from which to get it," she said, "only as I work for every dollar."

Grier had spent seven years working and studying to become a teacher at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, but she believed she could be of most benefit to her people by getting a medical education.
She asked the dean of the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania whether "any possible way...might be provided for an emancipated slave to receive any help into so lofty a profession?"

Grier was accepted into the Woman's Medical College in Pennsylvania (later part of Drexel University College of Medicine) but was offered no financial help with tuition.
She began her studies in 1893. Once again, Eliza used her strategy that she did at Fisk, working for a year picking cotton and other jobs to pay for the next year's medical school, taking her seven/eight years to graduate. She was determined to support her educational pursuits and persevered through financial hardships.

When she graduated in 1897, Grier was one of a small but growing number of African American women physicians in the United States.
Later that year, she moved to Atlanta, Georgia and applied for a license to practice medicine in Fulton County, she did receive her license making her the first African-American woman to receive a medical license in the state of Georgia. Grier set up a private practice in Atlanta, specializing in obstetrics and gynecology.

Grier and other Black physicians of this era, including Atlanta physician and pharmacist Henry Rutherford Butler, were confronted with a system of segregation and Jim Crow laws. In response, they built hospitals, formed professional societies, and created educational institutions to support themselves as well as their communities.

She was quoted as saying

"When I saw colored women doing all the work in cases of accouchement [childbirth], and all the fee going to some white doctor who merely looked on, I asked myself why should I not get the fee myself. For this purpose, I have qualified. I went to Philadelphia, studied medicine hard, procured my degree, and have come back to Atlanta, where I have lived all my life, to practice my profession. Some of the best white doctors in the city have welcomed me and say that they will give me an even chance in the profession. That is all I ask."

During this time, she also supplemented her income with teaching jobs. By 1899, however, Grier moved her practice to Greenville, South Carolina where she continued to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology.

In 1901 Grier was among the 200 attendees of the Tuskegee Negro Conference, which included such nationally recognized leaders as W. E. B. Du Bois. Soon after, in 1901 she contracted influenza and could not see patients for six weeks. Facing the loss of her practice, Dr. Grier wrote a plea for financial assistance to Susan B. Anthony.

The famous suffragist could not help her but sympathetically forwarded her request to the Woman’s Medical College. It is not known if the College provided help.

"To the President of the Women’s Medical College, Philadelphia PA. I send you the enclosed letter because Miss Grier claims to have graduated from your college, and because I think you can help her better than anyone else. She has undertaken a herculean task in that little old town of Greenville. If she is a woman of thrift and management she ought to have help to get started, but her getting the grippe is certainly bad. My sympathies are very strong for all these women, but my purse is not equal to helping them financially. Cannot you suggest to the girl some way out of her trouble?"

Later in 1901 Grier moved to Albany, Georgia partly because her brother, Dr. R. E. Grier, also practiced medicine there. Tragically, after struggling for eight years to become a physician, Dr. Eliza Ann Grier died in 1902 at the age of 38 after only five years of medical practice.
She was buried at Grove AME Zion Church Cemetery #1, in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Dr. Eliza Ann Grier, despite overwhelming difficulties, remained determined and engaged in opportunities to improve health and hygiene standards for African Americans in the rural South.

She lived in Atlanta and in Greenville, South Carolina, during the four years after graduating from medical school and struggled to build a private practice. She also supplemented her income with teaching and maintained connections to the Hospital and Training School for Nurses in Charleston, South Carolina

Eliza's brother,
Dr. Richard Edgar Grier was born 4 March 1865 in Mecklenburg County, NC to George Washington and Emily Grier. He attended Shaw University's Leonard Medical School in Raleigh, and Howard University Medical College, sessions 25, 26; 1892-1894, earning his MD degree in 1894.

He moved to Albany, Ga, and practiced medicine at 111 1/2 Broad Street in Albany, Georgia.
He married Evelina Thompson (born about 1867 in GA.) on14 Sep 1898 in Dougherty, Georgia.
Richard died 13 Jun 1909, age 44, in Albany, Dougherty County, Georgia.

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Source: A Historical, Biographical and Statistical Souvenir
By Howard University. Medical Department
https://books.google.com/books?id=M_gaAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA172...

Source: https://www.timesenterprise.com/.../article_ec73611e-d47b...

Source: Page 39, http://albanyunearthed.com/.../Albany-MMT-ARCH-data...

Source: Dorothy Sterling, We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the
Nineteenth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), http://www.nlm.nih.gov/chan.../physicians/biography_132.html