At least I was working and taking graduate courses in chemistry at Howard, but medical school was still my dream. Both Meharry Medical College back in Nashville and Howard’s dental school in D.C. let me know fairly early that I would be admitted to their fall 1950 classes. Howard’s medical school was what I really wanted, but it was slow in acting on applications. With time running out for me to commit to Meharry or the dental school, I reved up my courage and went to Dr. K. Albert Hardin, chairman of the Howard medical school’s admissions committee, and told him my dilemma. God was with me. They called a special meeting of the admissions committee, and I was literally the first applicant admitted to the entering class at Howard University College of Medicine for 1950.
Natalie and I married on July 29, 1950. My finances eased some that summer, as I got a job with the Census Bureau. I had again applied for summer work there but was at first rejected. Then, I ran across a friend from Tennessee State who had completed his sophomore year and landed a Census Bureau job. It appeared to me unreasonable that I, an honor graduate of Tennessee State, should be rejected in favor of a college sophomore. I decided to go to see Senator John Stennis of Mississippi. The senator graciously gave me an audience, and I told him my needs and my frustration with the Census Bureau. “I am a Mississippian,” I said. “I want a job.” The senator said, “Go back tomorrow.” I did just that, and found immediate employment as a GS-3. I soon found that my friend who had not finished college was a GS-4. I went back to Senator Stennis and told him. “How did you vote last time?” he asked. Now, 1948 was the year the Dixiecrats bolted the Democratic Party and Mississippi had gone Dixiecrat, but I truthfully replied, “I didn’t vote. I was too young.” “Go back tomorrow,” he said. The next day, I was promoted to GS-5. Years later as a physician, I was in Washington lobbying for Head Start. I recounted this story to Senator Stennis, and he claimed to remember it. He said, “Well, I was right. I believed in you, and you amounted to something.” I learned something about the importance of patronage and personal friendships. How many talented people get passed over who have no connections, or who lack the courage to go to power with their qualifications and needs?
In the fall came medical school. For once, Mississippi’s Jim Crow system favored me. Because there was no opportunity for its black citizens to attend graduate school or medical school inside the state, Mississippi offered to pay black medical students a five-thousand-dollar stipend in monthly installments over four years on the condition that recipients return to Mississippi to practice for at least five years after med school. Natalie had a similar but smaller stipend from the state of Virginia to support her master’s of social work studies at Howard. Our finances were spread thin, but somehow we managed. On Christmas breaks, I worked for the U.S. Postal Service delivering in the snow or sorting the Christmas mail surge.
Medical school was rigorous, and Natalie’s graduate work was demanding. So, we had to study all the time. We had no car. We had to walk to school. Still, in all those years we never missed a class, and we were never late for a class, not even a 7:30 A.M. roll call. The Howard faculty was superb. Natalie’s great professor was Ina Bell Lindsey, one of the nation’s pioneers in the field of social work. One of the greatest teachers I ever encountered was my anatomy professor, Dr. W. Montague Cobb, a graduate of Amherst with an M.D. from Howard and a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve. Dr. Cobb was a real scholar. He published research in anatomy, and he must have quoted the Bible as much as any theologian. He was editor in chief of the Journal of the National Medical Association for many years. As a professor and as a man, Dr. W. Montague Cobb had a powerful influence on me. The overall program was well organized, thorough, and focused on excellence. The entering first-year medical students were assigned to five-person support groups arranged alphabetically. My group consisted of Marius from New York, Mason from Mississippi, Mulvaney (a woman) from New York, Magee from Washington, D.C., and Newton from New Jersey. It was tough.
Howard’s program gave med students in their last two years many excellent clinical experiences or externships to back up that power in the classroom. Freedmen’s was a black hospital that took Howard externs, interns, and residents. However, segregationist traditions imposed certain limitations. For example, some traditionally white hospitals would allow Negro medical students to go on rounds and hear cases presented, but would not allow them to “put on hands” to examine white patients. Public hospitals in the Washington, D.C., area began desegregating while I was at Howard. We did pediatrics at Gallinger, now D.C. General, which had previously been “white only.” When my class went to Gallinger to do our pediatric training, the hospital had accepted its first black resident, Dr. LaSalle LeFall, only one year earlier. LeFall broke the color barrier for black doctors, and our class broke the color barrier at Gallinger for black medical students. Between my junior and senior years I was lucky enough to be one of five Howard medical students hired as externs at the Maryland state mental hospital called Crownsville. We were the first black students to work there. There were two German-trained Jewish staff physicians at Crownsville who were displaced persons from Nazi Germany. We learned a lot of medicine from them, especially from Dr. Mendal, who passed on a lot about Jewish sufferings under the Hitler regime. Dr. Mendal taught me how to do spinal taps. I stayed on campus at Crownsville one night a week to answer emergencies. Here we quickly learned to suture, because the patients fought or got cut frequently. We also learned to evaluate a patient’s reality orientation and to administer appropriate sedatives when necessary.
During my last semester at Howard in January of 1954, my son, Gilbert, Jr., was born at the historic Freedmen’s Hospital established in 1867. At about the same time, I got a job as an extern at St. Elizabeth’s, a psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. I was the first black anything there—extern, intern, or physician. I got off the bus every day right in front of Frederick Douglass’s house and walked to work surrounded by history. My job was to give annual physical examinations to patients, many of whom had not had physicals in years. In doing this, I discovered that even the minds of the mentally ill can be permeated with racism. As I examined one elderly white man, he looked up at me and asked, “Are you a doctor?” I said, “Yeah, I’m a doctor.” He said, “Well, I’ll be damned. A nigger is a doctor.” I asked him how long he had been in the hospital, and he told me that he had been there since 1898. I said, “Well, nowadays we have Negroes driving buses, teaching school, and flying airplanes.” He did not want to believe me. I’m going to have to check that with Dr. Willis,” he snorted. Dr. Willis was white. This patient’s racial stereotypes were still intact despite his psychosis. Even in the confused mindscape of mental illness, he wasn’t going to believe a black man.
In the spring of 1954, I graduated from Howard Medical School with honors, and I received the top award in neurology for a paper dealing with nomenclature in psychiatry. I was ready for an internship, but there were still only a handful of hospitals in the United States that would take black interns. I applied at Michael Reese, the hospital of my dreams in Chicago, but I wound up at Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis. This turned out to be good for me, because my internship at Homer G. Phillips gave me a much broader base of practical experience than I might have gotten elsewhere. As an intern, I worked hard, seventy-two hours on, twelve hours off. It was rough. They paid me $155 per month. Natalie and Gilbert, Jr., stayed in Mississippi for the first part of my internship. I lived at the interns’ dormitory, which was connected to the hospital through a tunnel. I saw almost everything there was to see in medicine: infectious diseases, pediatrics, adult male and female medicine, male and female surgery, ob-gyn. I delivered babies and learned to do cesarean sections and tubal ligations. We wired jaws, set legs, and treated gunshot wounds and all types of traumas from automobile and industrial accidents. I got little sleep, but these were great experiences for someone like me who wanted to be a family practitioner back home in Mississippi.
Eventually, I got
an apartment in a home near King’s Highway on Labadie Street, and Natalie and the baby joined me for my final few months of internship. I had little time to really see or get to know St. Louis, but in 1954 the city was desegregating its streetcars and buses, and black and white hospitals had begun to exchange personnel. By Christmas of 1954, we had some white medical students at Phillips from St. Louis University and Washington University, but there was not yet reciprocity for black students and interns at the white hospitals except for occasional lectures or seminars. Still, as I finished my internship in 1955, old patterns of segregated race relations were changing, if slowly, in both St. Louis and Washington, D.C.
With a rich and tough internship under my belt at Homer Phillips, I felt well prepared to set up a medical practice. I had seen Chicago, Washington, Nashville, and St. Louis—four big cities in the world outside Mississippi. In 1954, my dad made the trip to Washington for my graduation from medical school. When I took Daddy to the train station for his return trip home, an older black man heard that Daddy was headed back to Mississippi. “Man, if they let you out of Mississippi once,” he questioned, “why in the world would you go back?” Daddy’s reply was simple. “It’s my home,” he said, “and I want to go back.” A year later in 1955 as I completed my internship, my idealism also drew me back home to Mississippi. In the atmosphere that was Howard University in the 1950s, I had gotten a solid medical education, but I also got an education in humanity. Washington had surrounded me with the history and idealism of freedom. Howard just drove it home. Mordecai Johnson, the first black president of Howard University, was still there. He brought champions of freedom from around the world to lecture and speak at graduations. Mordecai Johnson always gave spellbinding introductions that made you know the importance of the philosophy behind any speaker he presented. The historian John Hope Franklin and the writer E. Franklin Frazier were teaching at Howard in those days, and while I could not sit in their classes, I heard them give talks. I heard James Nabritt III, the dean of the Howard University Law School and one of the lead attorneys for the 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka desegregation case. So, I had sat at the feet of giants inside and outside the classroom. Freedom and public service were just in the air at Howard. My beloved anatomy professor, W. Montague Cobb, was more than just a physician and scholar. As national president of the NAACP for many years, Dr. Cobb lived his commitment to freedom and community service for all to see. He used to tell us, “Go south, young man.” Black physicians’ services and black physicians’ influence for social uplift were most needed in the South. Dr. Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard, echoed this in his talks with students. The South was my home, and I wanted, above all, to serve. The Howard ideal was that physicians were not just healers but teachers who should become a part of their community. Howard inspired us with the notion that medicine had to do with healing the soul, the heart, and the spirit as well as the body. Thus, by the time I finished my training, medicine and the struggle for human freedom and dignity seemed synonymous. I concluded that dedication to one required dedication to the other. The Boy Scout oath has always meant a lot to me. I had a clear sense of duty both to my patients and to the world in which we all must live. As a boy in Mississippi, I had also learned about an oath that Athenian youths took to “transmit this city far more beautiful than it was transmitted to me.” Howard reinforced these ideals. I believed deeply in the words of these two oaths when I decided to come home to Mississippi to practice medicine, to teach, and to become a part of the community.
THREE
Going Home to Serve
[B]ut whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister: And whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all. —Mark 10:43–44
IN THE SUMMER OF 1955, I CAME HOME TO MISSISSIPPI to practice medicine. I wanted to come back. Mississippi’s infant mortality rates were high. At the time of my decision to return, I expressly pointed out three guiding goals for my medical practice: I wanted to see healthy babies, healthy mothers, and good housing for my mothers and babies. This meant good prenatal care, safe deliveries, and good neonatal care. I needed to be able to get staff privileges in a hospital to deliver babies. For black doctors at this time, hospital staff privileges were rare, whether you were in the South or the North. In Mississippi the black-owned Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou and the African-American Hospital in Yazoo City granted black doctors staff privileges. In 1955, no white-run hospital in the state’s capital city, Jackson, had ever granted a black physician staff privileges of any kind. Nonetheless, I believed, perhaps naively, that my training at Howard Medical School and Homer Phillips Hospital made me especially well suited to treat the conditions I would encounter in Mississippi’s impoverished communities. An all-white local Mississippi hospital board might not see it that way. Still, I knew that I was needed, and, after all, I had signed a five-year obligation to practice in Mississippi when I had taken the state’s five-thousand-dollar grant for medical school. I hoped and prayed to find a place in Mississippi where I would be allowed to serve to my fullest potential.
I believe that providence, acting through a cafeteria worker at Homer Phillips in St. Louis, opened the doors that allowed me to set up a practice in Biloxi, Mississippi, a coastal town with about ten thousand black citizens out of a total population of some forty-three thousand. In 1955, Biloxi was losing its only active black physician, a woman named Dr. Velma Wesley. Off up in St. Louis finishing my internship, I had no reason to know this, but I had made friends with a cafeteria worker who happened to be from Pass Christian, another Mississippi coast town near Biloxi. On duty at about 2:00 A.M. one morning, I went to the cafeteria to snack. My friend was working this shift, and we talked. When she found out that I was from Mississippi, this cafeteria worker told me about a Dr. Felix Dunn, a Meharry graduate from Mississippi who had come through Homer Phillips a couple of years earlier and gone back to practice in Gulfport, Mississippi. I had never met or heard of Dr. Dunn, but I took his name and wrote to him to inquire about prospects for my setting up a practice on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Unknown to me, Dr. Dunn forwarded my letter over to Dr. Velma Wesley, who was about to leave her general practice in nearby Biloxi. So, out of the blue, one day as I was making rounds in St. Louis, I got a long distance phone call. On the line, Dr. Wesley introduced herself and said, “I’ll be leaving here in May, and I’d like to sell you my equipment and if necessary my practice.” We talked further, and I discovered that I knew Dr. Wesley’s husband, who had been a medical student at Howard one year behind me. She had been in Biloxi for eighteen months and was planning to rejoin her husband in Detroit, where he planned to intern and where she wanted to do a residency.
With alacrity, I caught a train to Mississippi. Dr. Wesley showed me around Biloxi, and introduced me to the office landlord and to some of my future patients. I took out a note to buy her equipment, but I declined to buy her practice. I said, “I’ll earn a practice, if I merit one.” Before heading back to St. Louis, I called Dr. Dunn to thank him for passing my letter along.
I finished my internship and returned to Biloxi in July of 1955 to open my practice at 439½ East Division Street. Located in a predominantly black neighborhood, my first office was a wood frame building with a sandstone-colored, simulated-brick tar paper finish. I had one examining room, a consultation room, a lab, a rest room, and a waiting room. The building was small but efficient, and, as a State Sovereignty Commission agent later reported, it was air-conditioned. I rented this little building for sixty-five dollars per month from Mr. James Pollard, Sr., a local black businessman. I hired Mrs. Gilmore, an LPN, to work as my receptionist and nurse, and Natalie helped with insurance forms. Little did I know that within eight years this little building would withstand two attempted firebombings.
I found that Mississippi was as segregated when I came back in 1955 as it had been when I left in 1945. There were only forty-seven black physicians in the state when I left in 1945, and there wer
e exactly forty-seven when I got back. When I had made a trip down to take my Mississippi State Medical Licensing Exams at the “white-only” King Edward Hotel in Jackson in 1954, I sat for the exam in the room with the white interns and examinees. However, when break time came I literally had no place to go. I could not go with the white doctors to the coffee shop or to get a soda. Those places were off limits to blacks. I decided to try to relax on a sofa in the second-floor lobby. A white attendant quickly told me that blacks were not allowed in the lobby, and that I would have to remain in the testing room alone during breaks. Whatever may have been going on with the U.S. Supreme Court, or in Washington or St. Louis, Jim Crow had no chinks in his armor in Mississippi in 1954.
I soon found that Biloxi was just like any other Mississippi town in this regard. Its schools were segregated and unequal. To accommodate servicemen stationed at Keesler Air Force Base, there were separate white and colored USOs. Everywhere there were separate but unequal white and colored waiting rooms, rest rooms, and drinking fountains. Poll taxes and fear of capriciously administered literacy tests kept most blacks from voting. All public accommodations in Biloxi and Harrison County legally discriminated against Negroes. In courtrooms, whites sat on the left side of the aisle and blacks sat on the right. White political candidates would not address integrated audiences. On the transit system, my wife was sent to the back of the bus. The beachfront hotels, restaurants, and tourist entertainments were “white only.” And a beautiful twenty-six-mile-long white sand beach was strictly forbidden territory for blacks, except for a few dozen yards in front of the Gulfport Veterans Hospital.
Beaches, Blood, and Ballots Page 6