When Harlem Nearly Killed King

by Hugh Pearson

  Aubré Maynard spent most of his youth in his home country, Barbados (though he was born in British Guyana). It wasn’t until the age of fourteen, when his father sent for him, that he moved to New York City. Upon arriving, he received his high school education in a setting where he grew used to being the only Negro among Caucasians in rigorous academic settings. At overwhelmingly Caucasian Townsend Harris High, one of the most challenging public high schools in the country (alma mater of luminaries such as Oliver Wendell Holmes), admission was gained only through exam. When Maynard first started attending, on the way home each day it became necessary for him to dodge Irish-American boys in the neighborhood intent on beating him up. Then he attended City College, where he majored in Physics in the era when the college was so academically well respected, it was known as “the poor Jewish man’s Harvard.” After that Maynard was the only Negro admitted to the class of 1926 at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. But he felt compelled to withdraw acceptance of the admission offer when told he would have to transfer to Howard University School of Medicine for his clinical years because Columbia’s teaching hospital (Columbia-Presbyterian) wouldn’t accept a Negro medical student on its wards. Maynard considered that an insult. He hadn’t even applied to Howard or Meharry. After withdrawing his acceptance to Columbia he attended New York University School of Medicine instead. Upon graduating he became one of the four Negro interns to break the color barrier on the house staff of Harlem Hospital. And to top it off, he scored higher than any other applicant that year for an internship, since these were also the days when medical graduates from everywhere coveted an internship at Harlem Hospital.

  And now, thirty-two years later, he was Chief of Surgery. But on the day of September 20th, no one could find him. As Harriman, Spingarn, other VIPs, and hospital staff members who would have never been present on a Saturday gathered in the public corridor of the surgical suite, King was prepped for the emergency procedure. Surgical resident Leo Maitland and the nurses on the ward completed the “cut down,” connecting intravenous lines to him, taking his blood pressure, washing his chest, properly isolating the area for operation. King was wide awake, lucid, and calm. Maitland immediately contacted two chest specialists on staff. One was Emil Naclerio, an Italian American. The other was a talented young Negro who had just completed his training in Thoracic Surgery by the name of John W. V. Cordice.

  Naclerio was in his home in the Bayside section of Queens, dressed in a tuxedo, about to go to a friend’s wedding at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Now he would have to skip the wedding. Cordice, with his daughter in tow, was collecting his mail at the office he was trying to open for private practice in the town of Orange, New Jersey. As soon as he heard that King had been brought in with a stab wound to his chest, Cordice raced to his car, headed for the New Jersey Turnpike, entered New York City via the George Washington Bridge, and made his way to the hospital. Upon arriving, he began examining the X rays a radiology resident had taken. While he was doing so, Naclerio walked in. Then came Austrian-born anesthesiologist, Helen Mayer. All three had always been ready to respond to such emergencies without the involvement of Maynard. Such cases came in so often, they were routine. Cordice, Naclerio, Mayer, and the radiologist on duty continued examining the X rays. They revealed that the tip of the blade of the letter opener that Curry had plunged into King’s chest was lodged right in the spot where the innominate artery cleaves off from the aorta, the primary blood vessel leading out of the heart.

  Given King’s vital signs, it was clear that he wasn’t in any immediate danger. But suppose the blade moved? All it might take to get the tip to pierce the aorta was a mere cough. And, given the pressure of the blood coming out of the aorta, even a small pierce would quickly become a rip and King would hemorrhage to death before anything could be done to stop the bleeding.

  The four doctors huddled together and thought about the situation further. Had this not been Martin Luther King, Jr., they would have gone in and operated immediately. But staff members who watched as the emergency room began filling up with spectators had been right. Suppose something unforeseen took place? The operating room suite was now filling up with more and more VIPs, including now eminent surgeons called in from rival medical centers by Harriman’s aides: Mount Sinai, Columbia-Presbyterian, New York Hospital, and so on—the same men who tended to look down upon the staff at Harlem Hospital, where the Department of Surgery was the sole department run by a Negro. Upon further discussion of the situation round-robin, the three surgeons and anesthesiologist agreed that since King was not in immediate danger—since he wasn’t agitated and his vital signs were stable, at least for now—it would be best to wait until Maynard could be located. It would be best to wait, even though they had their own problems with Maynard that extended beyond his reputation and his tendency to berate underlings, traits that had earned for him the nickname around the hospital of Little Napoleon. Yet little did they know that once Maynard arrived on the scene, he would see in the situation an opportunity to make hay for Harlem Hospital and for himself, to elevate the reputation of the hospital with embellishments regarding what happened in the operating room, embellishments that would survive for years to come.

  ELEVEN

  roots

  WHILE HE WAS completing his undergraduate medical training in the early 1940s at the very medical school Maynard attended, the same John W. V. Cordice who was about to play a crucial role in performing surgery on King had been told by an NYU medical faculty member about an alumnus of his race who had been a wonderful student at NYU and was now doing great things up at Harlem Hospital. Over and over he kept hearing about the work this graduate and other Negro physicians and surgeons on the staff up there were doing. Perhaps such stories reminded Cordice of his father, which was why upon graduating from NYU, rather than accept an internship at Bellevue, John was determined to train at Harlem Hospital. Maybe such stories explained why Cordice became determined to train with a surgical staff that included Aubré de Lambert Maynard.

  John Cordice was a product of the renowned Negro bourgeoisie of Durham, North Carolina, where his father had also been a doctor. Durham’s Negro bourgeoisie had founded the venerable North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the largest Negro-owned insurance company in America, as well as other thriving businesses. They had coerced the Duke tobacco family to donate the seed money to erect Lincoln Hospital for the Negro community. Cordice’s father, a 1911 graduate of Howard University School of Medicine, was on staff. And to John he cut a dashing, noble figure. As noted earlier, in the days when his father began practicing medicine, formal specialized training in the various specialties hadn’t been launched yet. A year of internship in a hospital was considered enough, then a physician hung out his shingle and gravitated toward whatever area of medicine interested her or him. Cordice’s father volunteered for the U.S. Public Health Service. The country had just entered the First World War. He thought he would be sent to Europe. Instead, the elder Cordice was sent to the town of Aurora, North Carolina, along the state’s Atlantic coast. Very shortly the great worldwide flu epidemic of 1918 struck and the senior Cordice was the only doctor in the area who knew an effective treatment for the disease. He treated people of all colors.

  John was born in 1919. Stories of the influenza treatments administered by his father instilled within him a tremendous pride and self-confidence in his roots. When he was six, his father moved the family to Durham. As John grew up among the prosperous Negro bourgeoisie of Durham, his father made sure he saw as little of the ugliness of the predominantly Caucasian Durham as possible. He instilled within John the notion that he could do anything. Upon graduating from high school after the eleventh grade, John told his father that he wanted to attend college at Duke. Of course in those days this was impossible due to his race. His mother wanted him to attend Hampton Institute. By contrast, his father had no intention of exposing him any longer to the deprivations of the Jim Crow South. He recommended t
hat John head for New York City and apply to Columbia University. “Don’t worry about the cost,” the senior Cordice told his son. “You just get up there and stay with your aunt and I’ll pay for it.”

  The year was 1935. Sixteen-year-old John headed for the city with a principal interest in flying airplanes. It was the age of Charles Lindbergh, who was still a hugely popular American folk hero after making the first transatlantic flight in history in 1927 in his airplane The Spirit of St. Louis. Subsequently he married Anne Morrow Lindbergh, with whom he began embarking on pioneering flights to Latin America and Asia in their own Lockheed Sirius seaplane. The Lindberghs became “the first couple of the skies.” Then they became even more exposed to the public due to the 1932 kidnapping and murder of their baby son, Charles junior. Every youth was still fascinated by Charles Lindbergh. As John headed for the New York City area, he was determined that one of the things he would do was meet Lindbergh.

  To John, this couldn’t possibly be an unrealizable dream. After all, one of his aunts lived in Englewood, New Jersey, just a hop, skip, and jump from New York City, but also just a hop, skip, and jump from the borough of Hopewell, New Jersey, where the Lindbergh family lived. His aunt was part of the relatively prosperous band of Negroes who worked in the homes of wealthy Caucasians in the area. They considered themselves cultivated. Like John’s father, she was eager to shield John from the racial realities of the day as much as possible. But, at the same time, she was determined to compensate for them. With this in mind she set out to fulfill John’s dream to the greatest extent possible.

  “Come over here, John,” she instructed him, after calling her sister’s home in Brooklyn. “You said you wanted to meet Lindbergh? Well, I have a surprise for you.”

  Excitedly John made his way over to his aunt’s house. She put him in her car, and headed for the Lindbergh home. John was certain he was finally going to get his chance. When they arrived, rather than go through the front door, they made their way to the back, to the servants’ entrance, and were allowed inside. When they got there, his aunt told him, “John, I’d like you to meet someone special. This here is Mr. Lindbergh’s cook.” That was the surprise. John was meeting not Lindbergh himself, but the next best thing a Negro in that day and age could expect, Lindbergh’s cook. “She acted as though she was trotting out Lindbergh himself,” Cordice would recall sixty-five years later. “I never did let her know how disappointed I was.”

  This was the first really hard-hitting introduction John had to the limitations of race, the first splash of cold water in his face, just as other talented, determined Negroes like Aubré Maynard had also received in their young lives. There would soon be others.

  As his father recommended, not long after arriving in the city, John made his way to the registrar’s office at Columbia University. He asked the woman at the front desk about enrolling. She completely ignored him. John felt that the place had a cold ambiance. He asked the woman behind the desk, once more, whom he should see about enrolling. Finally, in a rude voice she informed him he had to make an appointment, then handed him a catalog. John headed for the subway with the catalog in hand, shocked by such treatment. He wondered if he really did belong at Columbia. It was the first time he really began doubting himself, the first time he faced all the insecurities drummed into a Negro’s head.

  When he returned to Brooklyn, he had a talk with his aunt’s husband, who began informing him of other realities as well. He told his uncle that he wanted to be an aviator, or maybe an engineer. “Are you out of your mind?” replied his uncle. “This world isn’t going to let a colored man be an engineer. You have an opportunity to be a doctor, to go back home and do something good. I think that’s what you ought to do.”

  That fall, John took evening classes at a local high school for a semester to bolster his academic record, thinking that with a strong extra layer of education there was no way Columbia would turn him down. Then he applied to the college. He was told that it didn’t admit students midyear. The registrar told him that, by contrast, NYU did admit students in the middle of the academic year and that if he wanted to, he could start classes at NYU and then reapply to Columbia as a transfer student for his sophomore year. John started classes at NYU and liked the place so much that he just forgot all about Columbia. And he took his uncle’s advice; he took premed courses with the intention of following in his father’s footsteps, becoming a doctor.

  John went on to graduate from NYU, then attend NYU Medical School. He started in 1940. The following year the U.S. entered into World War II, so the academic schedule of his class was accelerated so that it graduated in December 1943, instead of May 1944. At the time he attended the medical school, there were only three Negro students, the other two being two years ahead of him. All three would frequently go up to Harlem Hospital to talk to the legendary Negro NYU medical alumnus named Aubré Maynard.

  The following year a graduate of Meharry Medical College who would intern and do his residency training in surgery at Harlem Hospital would get to know Maynard, too. John Parker would work night and day at the hospital and hear about how important it was to be on your toes when Little Napoleon, the attending surgeon, came through; that, given the manner in which he enjoyed grilling you, it was best to stay away from him if you could. So during his internship, Parker strove to steer clear of Maynard. He was always dog-tired anyway. One day his wife got a line on a short vacation rental up at Oak Bluffs, the Negro resort community on Martha’s Vineyard. She was eager to take her exhausted husband up there, along with her mother and father, who were visiting at the time. So finally Parker found the time and they went. Upon their arrival, his in-laws were eager to know who it was with the car with the New York plates who vacationed in a very nice cottage next door. So they made themselves nosy and introduced themselves to a nice, short, erudite, dark-skinned West Indian man, who told them he was a surgeon, and that he practiced at Harlem Hospital. They returned to their own cottage and told John they had met a surgeon next door who said he practiced at Harlem Hospital, and that his last name was Maynard. They told him that they told the man they had a son-in-law who was interning there, and that he guessed who they were referring to. After that, dread built up in Parker.

  All that week he avoided going next door, or even in the direction of next door, until finally he realized that he had to say something. Parker could see Maynard sitting in the nice backyard of the next-door cottage reading newspapers, with a stack of surgical journals piled beside him. So he walked up to Maynard and introduced himself. “Ahhhh, Parker,” replied Maynard. “I was wondering when you were going to make it over here.” At that Maynard picked up one of the journals and said to him, “Tell me what you know about the problem discussed in the first case in here.” From that day on, Parker’s vacation was ruined.

  Such behavior on the part of Maynard was displayed by at least one other Negro surgeon at the hospital, his predecessor as chief of the department, Louis T. Wright, the man who had successfully agitated for Negro staff to be appointed to the hospital in the first place. Wright was older than Maynard. He had attended Harvard Medical School as one of only two Negroes out of eighty-seven matriculants in the class of 1915. He graduated cum laude, ranking fourth in the class, but wasn’t elected to Alpha Omega Alpha, the honorary medical society, because he had been blackballed by a Jewish student from Memphis. After his internship at Freedman’s Hospital (where he published the first scientific paper ever from a Negro hospital, proving that, contrary to scientific opinion, the Schick test for the presence of diphtheria, was, indeed, valid for Negroes, even though their skin was dark), he returned to his hometown of Atlanta and began practicing medicine with his stepfather. In addition he helped launch a branch of a new civil rights organization with another young Atlantan, a life insurance salesman named Walter White. The two men were preparing for as many frustrated Atlantans as possible to meet with the new field secretary of the organization, who was coming through the city to try to convince
them that agitating for Negro rights through the association he was now part of was better than sticking to the Booker T. Washington formula of gradualism. When James Weldon Johnson came though Atlanta and discovered how well White organized the group and how well he could speak publicly, he offered him a job as assistant field secretary of the NAACP, requiring that he move to New York City. White wasn’t sure if that was the best thing for him to do. So he discussed the offer with Wright, who told him to go ahead and move to New York City because if he stayed in Atlanta, he’d stagnate.

  Shortly after that Wright left too, unable to stomach Jim Crow any longer. He enlisted in the Army Medical Corps during World War I, where his entire battalion was gassed with phosgene, leaving him slightly debilitated with a lung disease that over time would turn into full-blown TB. After being discharged from the army, he headed to New York City, where he served as an assistant physician in a venereal disease clinic. At the same time he was appointed clinical assistant visiting surgeon on the staff of Harlem Hospital, meaning he could treat patients in the outpatient clinic but not the hospital itself. He would be the first Negro appointed to the staff, period. With the aid of Negro politicians and community leaders in Harlem, Wright agitated some more, organizing the Negro physicians in the community, who in 1925 sent telegrams at two o’clock in the morning to Mayor Jimmy Walker and other operatives in the Tammany Hall political machine, demanding that they be appointed to the staff inside the hospital. The bold move resulted in the appointment of the five Negroes, including Wright himself, to the staff of the hospital.