A Black Physician S Struggle For Civil Rights

Biography of Edward Mazique, respected physician, contemporary of Martin Luther King, Jr., and influential Civil Rights activist in Washington, D.C.

"This powerful biography traces the career of an African American physician and civil rights advocate, Edward Craig Mazique (1911-1987), from the poverty and discrimination of Natchez, Mississippi, to his status as a prominent physician in Washington, D.C. Florence Ridlon relates how Dr. Mazique's grandfather went from being a slave to becoming one of the largest landowners in Adams County, Mississippi. This moving story of one man's accomplishments, in spite of many opposing forces, is also a chapter in the struggle of African Americans to achieve equality in the twentieth-century. At a time when blacks were being denied entry into the American Medical Association and the staffs of most hospitals, Dr. Mazique was president of the Medico-Chirurgical Society and the National Medical Association, black counterparts to the all-white District Medical Society and American Medical Association. Dr. Mazique worked closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson as well as black physicians, to expand the availability of health care at a time when many conservative physicians, both black and white, opposed the establishment of Medicare and other federal health programs. Much of this story is in Dr. Mazique's own words, taken from interviews with the author. What emerges from this biography is a picture of an exceptional but very human man, who, despite discrimination and repression, excelled beyond all expectations. FromA Black Physician's Struggle for Civil Rights "The power he had! I don't think there was a president that occupied that White House that didn't have him there for consultation. He was so respected as a human being, above and beyond medicine. When the people in the Civil Rights movement would say things to government people, they were suspect because they had to make political decisions. Eddie was someone they could call in who they not only trusted but respected. He had the type of integrity that even if government leaders wouldn't listen to his advice or follow up, the civil rights people knew when he went to see presidents and stuff, he wasn't back there lying. That was the great thing about him--his honesty and integrity."--comedian and political activist, Dick Gregory, speaking about Dr. Mazique in an interview with Florence Ridlon"

The Racial Divide in American Medicine documents the struggle for equity in health and health care by African Americans in Mississippi and the United States and the connections between what happened there and the national search for social justice in health care. Dr. Richard D. deShazo and the contributors to the volume trace the dark journey from a system of slave hospitals in the state, through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights era, to the present day. They substantiate that current health disparities are directly linked to America's history of separation, neglect, struggle, and disparities. Contributors reveal details of individual physicians' journeys for recognition both as African Americans and as professionals in Mississippi. Despite discrimination by their white colleagues and threats of violence, a small but fearless group of African American physicians fought for desegregation of American medicine and society. For example, T. R. M. Howard, MD, in the all-black city of Mound Bayou led a private investigation of the Emmett Till murder that helped trigger the civil rights movement. Later, other black physicians risked their lives and practices to provide care for white civil rights workers during the civil rights movement. DeShazo has assembled an accurate account of the lives and experiences of black physicians in Mississippi, one that gives full credit to the actions of these pioneers. DeShazo's introduction and the essays address ongoing isolation and distrust among black and white colleagues. This book will stimulate dialogue, apology, and reconciliation, with the ultimate goal of improving disparities in health and health care and addressing long-standing injustices in our country.

This book, the first to focus on the integration of the Gulf Coast, is Dr. Gilbert R. Mason's eyewitness account of harrowing episodes that occurred there during the civil rights movement. Newly opened by court order, documents from the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission's secret files enhance this riveting memoir written by a major civil rights figure in Mississippi. He joined his friends and allies Aaron Henry and the martyred Medgar Evers to combat injustices in one of the nation's most notorious bastions of segregation. In Mississippi, the civil rights struggle began in May 1959 with "w

Drawing on a variety of sources from oral histories to the records of professional organizations, Thomas J. Ward, Jr. examines the development of the African American medical profession in the South. Illuminating the contradictions of race and class, this research provides valuable new insight into class divisions within African American communities in the era of segregation.

In the summer of 1964 medical professionals, mostly white and northern, organized the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) to provide care and support for civil rights activists organizing black voters in Mississippi. They left their lives and lucrative private practices to march beside and tend the wounds of demonstrators from Freedom Summer, the March on Selma, and the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Galvanized and sometimes radicalized by their firsthand view of disenfranchised communities, the MCHR soon expanded its mission to encompass a range of causes from poverty to the war in Vietnam. They later took on the whole of the United States healthcare system. MCHR doctors soon realized fighting segregation would mean not just caring for white volunteers, but also exposing and correcting shocking inequalities in segregated health care. They pioneered community health plans and brought medical care to underserved or unserved areas. Though education was the most famous battleground for integration, the appalling injustice of segregated health care levelled equally devastating consequences. Award-winning historian John Dittmer, author of the classic civil rights history Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, has written an insightful and moving account of a group of idealists who put their careers in the service of the motto "Health Care Is a Human Right."

The first book to focus on the integration of the Mississippi Gulf Coast

In less than four months, beginning with a staff of five, an obscure office buried deep within the federal bureaucracy transformed the nation's hospitals from our most racially and economically segregated institutions into our most integrated. These powerful private institutions, which had for a half century selectively served people on the basis of race and wealth, began equally caring for all on the basis of need. The book draws the reader into the struggles of the unsung heroes of the transformation, black medical leaders whose stubborn courage helped shape the larger civil rights movement. They demanded an end to federal subsidization of discrimination in the form of Medicare payments to hospitals that embraced the "separate but equal" creed that shaped American life during the Jim Crow era. Faced with this pressure, the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations tried to play a cautious chess game, but that game led to perhaps the biggest gamble in the history of domestic policy. Leaders secretly recruited volunteer federal employees to serve as inspectors, and an invisible army of hospital workers and civil rights activists to work as agents, making it impossible for hospitals to get Medicare dollars with mere paper compliance. These triumphs did not come without casualties, yet the story offers lessons and hope for realizing this transformational dream.