Easmon family

Easmon family
John Farrell Easmon (seated) and his brother Albert Whiggs Easmon
Current regionFreetown, Sierra Leone
Place of originUnited States
Founded
  • Arrival in Sierra Leone
  • 11 March 1792 (1792-03-11), Freetown
  • 232 years ago
FounderWilliam Easmon
Members
Connected members
Distinctions

The Easmon family or the Easmon Medical Dynasty is a Sierra Leone Creole medical dynasty of African-American descent originally based in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The Easmon family has ancestral roots in the United States, and in particular Savannah, Georgia and other states in the American South. There are several descendants of the Sierra Leonean family in the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as in the Ghanaian cities of Accra and Kumasi. The family produced several medical doctors beginning with John Farrell Easmon, the medical doctor who coined the term Blackwater fever and wrote the first clinical diagnosis of the disease linking it to malaria and Albert Whiggs Easmon, who was a leading gynaecologist in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Several members of the family were active in business, academia, politics, the arts including music, cultural dance, playwriting and literature, history, anthropology, cultural studies, and anti-colonial activism against racism.

The Easmon family was among the wealthy, upper-class and aristocratic Creole families, known locally as the Aristos and descended from one of the original black American founding families which established the Colony of Sierra Leone in 1792.