Strongly motivated to provide better healthcare to the African-American community, these jobs enabled Dickens to combat the racial and residential segregation integrated into medicine at the time.

[4] Her father, Charles Warren Dickens, a former slave and water boy during the Civil War, was raised by a Union colonel from the age of 9.

[4] Her mother, Daisy Jane Dickens (née Green), originally from Canada, was a domestic servant to the Reynolds family of paper manufacturers.

[4] After completing her primary education, Dickens earned a full-tuition scholarship to attend Crane Junior College in Chicago where she studied pre-medical classes.

[3] Dickens interned at Chicago's Provident Hospital for two years, treating tuberculosis among the poor, and then became a resident in Obstetrics.

[6] She was drawn to Virginia M. Alexander, who founded the Aspiranto Health Home, which was based in a three-story North Philadelphia house.

In 1948, she became director of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Philadelphia's racially segregated Mercy Douglass hospital, where she remained until 1967.

After leaving the hospital in 1967, Dickens opened a clinic at Penn that was devoted and specialized to helping and supporting teen parents.

Throughout her career, Dickens published several articles and contributed chapters to several books on teen pregnancy and prevention and adolescent health issues.

Dickens instigated a program, funded by the National Institute of Health, to carry out pap tests to detect cervical cancer.