Dr. Florinda Cambridge was born in 1922 on Hay Street in Nassau. Her mother was Clarinda Speed Cambridge, born in 1905, in Florida. Her father was James A. Cambridge, born 1896, in Alice Town, Cat Island. Clarinda and James settled as a married couple in Hay Street, Grants Town, Nassau.
Florinda’s mother, Clarinda Speed Cambridge came from a well-to-do negro family in West Palm Beach Florida. Clarinda Speed was highly educated for negro woman born in 1905. In fact, all of her sisters in Florida were. Apparently their father Henry R. Speed, had put a high value on education. His daughter Clarinda did so for her daughter Florinda.
When and where Clarinda Speed met James A. Cambridge of Cat Island is not known. What is known, is that after some time, the marriage was not a happy one. They would eventually divorce.
By 1934, with very few opportunities on Hay Street, available for little negro girls like Florinda and her sister Winifred, their mother Clarinda made the decision to take her daughters back home to America.
It was their mother’s hope that her girls could be educated to a high standard, and, perhaps, definitely, college.
Despite racial segregation, discrimination and the plight of women to obtain advanced degrees in medicine, in a then male dominated profession, Florinda not only overcame obstacles of the time, she flourished.
In 1950s America, negroes and whites were still segregated in all schools, in the South, including medical school. There was only one school offering advanced medical education to negroes in Florida. Dr. Florinda Cambridge went to Florida A. and M. College for Negroes and was then awarded a scholarship to study clinical psychiatry at University of California in Los Angeles.
In 1955, some twenty-one years after her mother took her and sister Winifred to America for an education, Florinda came back to Nassau to visit relatives.
Florinda, Winifred and their mother Clarinda, who was then Dean of a negro girls school, Roosevelt High School in West Palm Beach, Florida, all returned in 1955.
Florinda returned as the very first Bahamian woman to be become a physician and surgeon, specialising in obstetrics and gynaecology.
Dr. Florinda Cambridge was The Bahamas’s very first female doctor.
Dr. Florinda Cambridge-Domon, the first female Bahamian medical doctor died in 1997 at the age of 74.
ANCESTRY of Dr. Florinda Cambridge – Domon
Clarinda Speed Cambridge was the mother of Dr. Florinda Cambridge-Domon. Her father was James A. Cambridge of Grants Town, Nassau.
In 1948, Clarinda Speed Cambridge divorced James A. Cambridge of Grants Town, Nassau Bahamas, in the United States.
Clarinda Speed was the daughter of Henry R. Speed (grandfather of Dr. Florinda Cambridge born in the Bahamas) and Lillie P. Samuel (1883-1925) of Florida.
Henry R. Speed was a top negro realtor in West Palm Beach. He died in 1937, three years after his granddaughter Florinda moved from Nassau to Florida with her mother Clarinda.
The Post, Sunday 26th October 1980
Mother of Dr. Florinda Cambridge dies 1986
