[2][3] Her work included clinical care, teaching, and research, particularly into the presence and development of ego strength in inner-city families.
[5] They lived in Richmond, Virginia but traveled to New York City for Lawrence's birth, as their first child had died in the local segregated hospital.
[5] Lawrence said, "In childhood and through adolescence I said I wanted to become a doctor because of the death of my only sibling, a brother, at eleven months, and two years before I was born.
Because she wanted to become a doctor, Lawrence moved to Harlem, New York City as a teenager in the 1920s to attend Wadleigh High School for Girls and live with family.
[4] With a Rosenwald Foundation fellowship, Lawrence then earned a master's degree in Science at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.
[4] During World War II, Lawrence taught pediatrics and public health at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee and decided to become a psychiatrist.
[4] When Swarthmore College awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2003, the citation said that through articles and books, Lawrence's work "markedly strengthened the social and ethical awareness of the field and inspired in it deeper appreciation for the resilience of spirit at the heart of every child.
[4][9] The HFI presents the Margaret Morgan Lawrence Award to honor outstanding service to the children and families of Harlem.
[10] She is the author of two books, The Mental Health Team in Schools (1971)[11] and Young Inner City Families: Development of Ego Strength Under Stress (1975).
[12] The Susan Smith McKinney Steward Medical Society honored her with its Outstanding Women Practitioners in Medicine Award.
[20] Reviewed by H. Jack Geiger in The New York Times, the book chronicles "seven decades of struggle, change and achievement," including the accompanying emotional scars and conflicts.
I have rarely read anything as painful as Margaret Lawrence's account, told to her daughter, of her return to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital nearly 50 years later.