Then there was my uncle Stance. Only six years older than I, Stance was my dad’s baby brother. In his teen years, Stance had given his folks a rough time, and, to try to help him straighten out, my grandmother had sent him to Mississippi to live with us for a while. Stance was athletic, having been a boxer, but he had settled down to become a professional waiter on trains running from Chicago to Omaha. I admired Stance as a man of the world, and in Chicago, he took me under his wing. One day he decided to show me the city. We started at about Forty-seventh and South Parkway, going east to Cottage Grove where one of his friends lived. He took me into every bar on Forty-seventh, and we crisscrossed from side to side, working our way down the street. Stance showed me off at every stop as his nephew who was studying to be a doctor. Now, I was too young for anything but Shirley Temples, but Stance drank beer. When we got to his friend’s place on Cottage Grove, Stance drank a beer or two and suddenly noticed the time. “You know, I’m going to miss my train to Omaha,” he said, and we ran to wave the streetcar down, but the motorman wouldn’t stop. Stance ran along and tried to “Bogart,” running up to the door. The driver slammed the door on Stance’s fingers. It hurt Stance for me to have seen this car close its door on him. So, he reformed. Stance did not take another drink of beer or liquor that whole summer.
Stance, who had never finished high school, could converse on everything from jazz and bebop to philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Karl Marx. I was an avid reader, a member of the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Classical Club, but Stance really introduced me to Karl Marx, Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, and Marcus Aurelius before ever I studied them in college. In Chicago I read Carter G. Woodson’s pioneering works on black history and discussed them with Stance. Stance told me the first I ever heard about LSD and marijuana and their effects. From Stance I also learned about Charlie “Bird” Parker. Stance took me to the magnificent Regal Theater to hear and see such greats as Duke Ellington, Cootie Williams, Rochester Anderson, Clarence Muse, Louis Armstrong, Moms Mabley, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan. Then we would sometimes look in at the Savoy Ballroom and catch Billy Eckstine or Count Basie. Stance had worked all over the country, so he told me about many things I would never have thought about. Stance was a beautiful person, a genuine good and protective human being. For a while he was my hero, and he was always more like an older brother than an uncle.
Each summer Chicago was an education in itself, but I did not forget my great goal of medicine. My walking and wandering about the city often took me down by Michael Reese Hospital at Thirty-first and Lakefront. And there I would sometimes just stand and dream and hope and pray that, Lord, one day I would be in this hospital or one like it. To me no building had ever looked so pretty as the Michael Reese Hospital. Occasionally seeing that hospital helped keep my dream alive through long days of tedious summer labor.
Then each fall, I headed down to Tennessee State in Nashville and back into Jim Crow country to study chemistry, biology, and math. Now, racial discrimination in downtown Nashville in the late forties was just as bad as in Jackson, but I stayed on campus most of the time. In those days, the Tennessee State campus was almost totally self-sufficient, with its own farm, laundry, and cafeteria. You really had little reason to leave the campus, and if you did, you had to walk to town. There were plenty of social outlets to go along with an excellent academic program in chemistry, biology, and math. Most important, during my freshman year at Tennessee State I met and fell in love with the best thing in my life, Miss Natalie Lorraine Hamlar of Roanoke, Virginia, to whom I was married for forty-eight years. I remember that we went to some segregated movie theaters in Nashville, but I was so much in love that it didn’t make any difference as long as I could just be somewhere sitting next to her.
When Natalie and I started courting, and it got serious, I wanted to give her some token that would symbolize our being engaged to become engaged. The usual was a fraternity pin, but I didn’t belong to a fraternity. My Eagle Scout pin was the most precious thing I owned, and Natalie knew that I gave her my Eagle Scout pin. Natalie knew that I was serious about her. However, Natalie’s dream was social work, a major not then available at Tennessee State. My heart broke when she transferred to Howard in Washington, D.C., during our sophomore year so that she could get a social work major. Still, we kept in touch and I managed to get up to D.C. in the fall of 1947 to see her. By this time, I had joined the prestigious Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, and I had a new fraternity pin. Most Alpha men in those days would not give a girl their fraternity pin. I made a switch, though. I took my Eagle Scout pin back and gave Natalie the Alpha pin.
With Natalie gone to Howard, I threw myself into a full and active extracurricular student life at Tennessee State. To make ends meet financially, I worked in the cafeteria, took up meal tickets, and picked up trash. For a time, I washed and ironed other students’ shirts for money, but I eventually connected with a laundry in town that gave me forty cents on the dollar for picking up and delivering for their laundry service on campus. These jobs, along with a Tennessee Valley Authority research assistantship in the chemistry department, supplemented my summer savings to sustain me. I made the swimming team and was elected vice president of the freshman class. After two weeks, the president got sick, and I took over as president for the remainder of the year. Then, I was elected president of my sophomore, junior, and senior classes. In Alpha Phi Alpha, I was chapter secretary. I was inducted into Beta Kappa Chi, a scientific fraternity, and became its president and the vice president of Alpha Kappa Mu, an academic honor society sometimes known as the Phi Beta Kappa of black colleges. I was editor in chief for our college yearbook, the Tenuessean, in 1948 and 1949. On Sundays I stayed busy, too. We had chapel and Sunday school on campus, and I served as class president and assistant superintendent of the Sunday school. All of these offices gave me valuable leadership experiences, more confidence in public speaking, and additional motivation to really study the parliamentary procedure that Professor T. B. Ellis had induced me to learn about in high school.
Of all of these activities, Alpha Phi Alpha meant the most to me. Its fraternal ideals struck a deep chord within me. Alphas pledged to “Ask not what the fraternity can do for you, but what you can do for the fraternity” long before John Kennedy turned his version of the phrase. And the Alpha fraternal ideal stressed that lasting benefits accrue to oneself and one’s family in direct proportion to the service one performed for community and fraternity. I had been infused with the service ideals of the Boy Scouts of America, so this just resonated with me. I jumped from the Scouts into Alpha Phi Alpha. Outside of the church and the home these two organizations were, and still are, my molding guides.
The academic program at Tennessee State in chemistry and biology was challenging. We had a good faculty. Dr. Carl Hill and Professor Townes had written textbooks in chemistry. Townes had also worked on the Manhattan Project, as had Professor Dillard, my physical chemistry teacher. In biology we saw a lot of visiting lecturers from Meharry Medical College. Chemistry and biology students at Tennessee State also took joint seminars with students at Fisk and Vanderbilt. Fisk had one of the greatest black chemists of this century in Professor St. Elmo Brady. Tennessee State students were lucky to be able to take classes with St. Elmo Brady. Even white students from Vanderbilt and other Nashville colleges came up to Fisk to take St. Elmo Brady’s classes. And in the late 1940s, I attended integrated seminars at Vanderbilt as part of my Tennessee State science curriculum. Segregation in higher education in the upper south was eroding.
I took eighteen hours of pure science my first semester at Tennessee State and made the swimming team. I did well with the load. The second semester I made all A’s. They said I was the first male student in twenty-five years to have done so. During my sophomore year things got rougher with quantitative analysis. The swimming coach, Professor Hughes, promised that if I would go out for the team, I would letter my second year. I said, “Coach, if I work to make the swimmin
g team again, I’m going to flunk quan.” I made up my mind that since I was going to school to become a doctor, not a Johnny Weismuller, I would quit the swim team. I have had a little regret from time to time for not having earned an athletic letter from Tennessee State, but I made the right choice. I had an excellent science program in front of me, and I couldn’t waste that opportunity.
Of course, study in the humanities was required of everyone. I particularly remember sophomore literature classes which reintroduced me to Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” and the poem “Forbearance” made a deep impression on me. I carry a copy of “Forbearance” in my wallet. Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” had already captured my imagination and had become my credo. On two occasions twenty and more years after leaving Tennessee State, I have gone out of my way to visit Thoreau’s grave in Massachussetts, which is for me a shrine. Whitman’s love of democracy and his tribute to Lincoln in “O Captain! My Captain!” remains meaningful to me. I especially remember a lit class at Tennessee State in which the professor tried to push us to define this thing called democracy, which Whitman so celebrated. After some students ventured the standard textbook definitions, I shocked the lady with an answer that boiled up from my own painful awareness of the great gulf between this nation’s ideals and its practices. “Democracy,” I exclaimed, “is a farce!” Alarmed, the professor grasped her lips with both hands. “It is a farce,” I said, “when its benefits are entrusted to some and denied to others.” These sentiments were shocking to some faculty members in an all-black college in the South in 1946, but they are a good example of my evolving social and political thinking as a student.
I finished Tennessee State with “high distinction” in 1949. I earned a double major in chemistry and biology with a strong minor in math. Natalie and I had become engaged at the beginning of my junior year, so I hoped that I would be able to go to medical school at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she was starting her master’s in social work. My MCAT scores and grades made me confident that I would be admitted to medical or dental school somewhere. I applied at Howard, Meharry, Harvard, Washington University, and St. Louis University, but Howard was my first choice. The waiting lists were long, and it took a year for me to gain admission to medical school after college graduation. In the late summer of 1949, I decided to move from Chicago on down to Washington to be nearer to Natalie and to enroll in some graduate chemistry and anatomy courses at Howard to keep my scientific aptitude sharp. Natalie was staying with her sister and brother-in-law and working, but I had no money, so marriage was out of the question for the time being. I had to find a place to live and a job in D.C.
Once again my extended family came to my rescue. Little Mama, my grandmother in Chicago, had brothers living in the Washington, D.C., area. Decatur Trotter, my great-uncle, gave me a place to sleep and fed me until I could find a job and housing on my own. Decatur Trotter worked at the U.S. Naval Yard near Washington and received many citations for innovations and improvements on tools that the navy used. Decatur was a deacon in his church, active as a Boy Scout leader, and all around a grand man. Decatur and his wife, Bernice, introduced me to Bernice’s father, Reverend Caesar Alexander, a retired Methodist minister and widower with a big house and a little room to rent. Reverend Caesar Alexander, or Papoo as we called him, became one of my heroes and a molding influence in my life.
For seven dollars a week, I rented the little room from Papoo. It was just big enough to walk into and back out of. You couldn’t turn around. I was grateful for the room, and I soon realized how fortunate I was to be in the presence of Caesar Alexander and to sit at his feet and learn from his life. I mean I was fortunate. Reverend Caesar Alexander had read and seen and heard and associated with the great black leaders of his generation. To sit at his feet and hear him describe Booker Washington and the speech Washington made at the D.C. Farmer’s Market or to hear Papoo’s vivid descriptions of Marcus Garvey and what he said at Lafayette Square in front of the White House was fascinating. The life and message of Marcus Garvey about pride in who you are and about the absolute necessity for black entrepreneurship and black economic empowerment came alive for me. The lives of great men have always inspired me—Paul Robeson, Marcus Garvey, and W. E. B. Du Bois. I was so fortunate to be in the presence of living history because of Caesar R. Alexander. You never know the impact of your example on another person. Reverend Alexander and so many others have given me so much. The old Nelson Eddy recording of “Pilgrim Song” says it all: “And bless the staff that hither bore me, / The alms that helped me on my way, / … Lovers, strangers or foes, would that I / Might clasp them in fervent rapture to my heart.” In the still and quiet of my little room at Papoo’s house I had time to read and think and reflect and even write some poetry. In Washington, D.C., I became a physician and a better man.
In 1949, the city of Washington, D.C., was filled with contradictions. As our nation’s capital it was rich in the symbols of freedom and our highest ideals. However, Washington was also a southern city shackled with segregation and white supremacy. I could just wander around and gain inspiration amongst the monuments and museums. I’d go out looking for a job and wind up in the Library of Congress. I’d go out again the next day and end up at the Smithsonian, or the Armed Forces Medical Museum, or the National Archives, or the botanical garden, or the natural science museum, or the Capitol, or Frederick Douglass’s home. It was big time business to me. I would go into the Capitol rotunda with its great monuments and just look around. Every child should visit the nation’s capital and its historic sites. That’s one Washington, inspiring you with the ideals and greatness of the country at its best.
Then, there was the Washington that was as full of segregation and racial discrimination as any other city in the South. In 1949, segregated theaters, hospitals, hotels, and schools were the rule in Washington, D.C., just as much as in Jackson, Mississippi. There were department stores in Washington that would not serve blacks. When I arrived in D.C., Mary Church Terrell, founder of the National Association of Colored Women and charter member of the NAACP, and a group of ladies were picketing Woodard and Lothrop because they wouldn’t serve blacks. This was long before the Montgomery bus boycott or the North Carolina lunch counter demonstrations. Before I left D.C. in 1954, Mary Church Terrell had succeeded in a lawsuit to end discrimination in Washington hotels, restaurants, buses, and other public facilities. What a role model! A graduate of Oberlin College, daughter of an ex-slave from Memphis who had become a millionaire, Mary Church Terrell was a well-educated, wealthy, beautiful, elegant, stately lady pounding the pavement for human rights and dignity.
I began making it a point to try different businesses in Washington to see which ones would serve me. Natalie told me about this fabulous store off G Street called Julius Garfinkel. She said, “They won’t serve black folks.” I said, “We’re going to find out” It was around Christmastime, and Natalie’s birthday was coming up. I wanted to give her a nice gift, so off to Julius Garfinkel’s I went in a defiant mood, thinking, “They’re going to serve me.” I broke in there with my southern self and looked around the store, waiting for somebody to tell me to get out I found a stylish dark-blue umbrella with simulated reptile skin on the handle, just perfect for Natalie. So, I took it to the white sales clerk and said, “I want to buy this.” She looked at me, looked at the umbrella, and hesitated; then, as if to say, “It’s Christmas,” she sold it to me, and wrapped it up. I gave this surprise to my love, saying, “Julius Garfinkel will serve you.”
My main concern was finding a way to support myself until I could be admitted to medical school. In 1949, I got a temporary summer job with the Census Bureau. When that played out, I found work sweeping the floors and putting together toys for twenty-six dollars per week at a national chain store noted for its bicycles, auto parts, tires, and appliances. Near Christmastime as business increased, I worked assiduously. However, the white store manager, who was about my
age, insisted that I call him “sir.” I had refused to use this form of address as a teenager in Jackson, and as a college graduate in Washington, D.C., I was not about to use it on someone my own age. Segregationist etiquette took its course once again. On a cold Christmas Eve in Washington, D.C., this bigoted young white store manager fired me for refusing to call him “sir.” Segregation and degradation went together in D.C. just as they had in Jackson.
I soon landed another job washing dishes for twenty-six dollars a week at the Roger Smith Hotel, which used to stand at 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue, just down from the White House. I walked past the White House every day going to work. The president was staying in Blair House while they renovated the White House. I happened along just minutes after the Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to assassinate President Truman at Blair House, and I saw the security activities in the aftermath as I walked on, spellbound, to my job at the Roger Smith. After about three months, I switched to the very elegant old Shoreham Hotel, where I continued to wash dishes for twenty-six dollars per week.
I got more human rights education at the Shoreham, which at that time still catered to a “white only” clientele. There were certain parts of the hotel that were off limits to black employees, even in emergencies. Hurrying one day, I snagged my finger on a stainless steel runner on the dish slide and opened a deep gash in my finger. The hotel had a resident doctor, but I was made to go a very roundabout way to the doctor’s office to keep me out of the “white only” areas of the establishment. However, I got a different kind of human rights education at the Shoreham and the Roger Smith. In this post-World War II era, there were several displaced persons from Hitler’s concentration camps working at these hotels alongside me. One in particular impressed me. He had been a philosophy professor at the University of Heidelberg before the Nazis took over. He used to pick through the garbage for food. He knew that I wanted to be a doctor and that I was waiting to get into med school. He used to say, “Mason, you know, sometimes you have to step down before you can step up.” I learned firsthand some of the things that had gone on in the concentration camps and what had happened to Germany. Stark fear still haunted the minds and memories of these Holocaust survivors whose gaunt bodies bore witness to the awful fruits of unchecked bigotry everywhere.
Beaches, Blood, and Ballots Page 5