Healing a Nation:
How Three Graduates of the U-M Medical School Wrote Their
Own Chapter in the History of Civil Rights in America
by David Barton Smith, Ph.D.
For most of the 20th century, a quiet, largely private, and
unheralded struggle was waged to end the division of patients
and physicians in America's hospitals by race. Three of the
lonely champions central to this struggle were graduates of
the University of Michigan Medical School. Each played a distinctive
and key role in assuring its success.
One was an academic physician familiar with the political maneuvering
that goes on inside the Washington beltway. The second was a
community leader and practicing physician in a rigidly segregated
southern community. The third worked as an activist, organizing
northern liberal support for the cause of racial equality in
medicine. Together, their individual sagas form a larger story
of the civil rights struggle in America that has been largely
left untold. Yet, they accomplished some of the most significant
and lasting changes of the civil rights era.
Paul D. Cornely
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Paul D. Cornely graduated from the U-M Medical School in 1931.
Like other black physicians, his choice of internship was limited
to the few historically black hospitals that provided such training,
such as Lincoln Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, where he
did his internship. Frustrated in his subsequent search for
a surgical residency, Cornely returned to U-M and earned his
doctorate in public health.
Obtaining a faculty position in public health at Howard University,
he began a career dedicated to documenting racial disparities
in health care in America and exploring strategies for their
elimination. He teamed up with Howard colleague and anatomy
professor W. Montague Cobb in orchestrating a protracted legal
and political campaign against hospital segregation. He began
publishing the results of surveys of segregated practices in
the nation's hospitals and worked with Cobb in organizing a
series of national conferences focused on ending hospital segregation.
Neither Howard University nor the Department of Health Education
and Welfare dared provide space for them, fearful of the political
backlash. Most conferences were held, instead, at a local church
in Washington, D.C. The crusaders found encouragement in the
1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, appearing as it
did to nullify provisions in the 1946 Hill-Burton legislation
permitting the use of federal funds for the construction of
hospitals on a "separate but equal" basis. The conferences
led to court challenges and eventually to federal legislation,
including Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits
the allocation of any federal funds to any program or organization
that discriminates on the basis of race.
Hubert A. Eaton
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A critical part of the story, however, involves Hubert A. Eaton,
who graduated from the U-M Medical School in 1942. After leaving
Michigan, Eaton returned to Wilmington, North Carolina, to assume
his father-in-law's medical practice. By 1947 the practice was
thriving and he had settled into a comfortable life style. He
had his own tennis court next to his home, and continued to
play championship-caliber tennis. Such was his interest in tennis
that he and his family welcomed Althea Gibson in her teen years
as a member of the Eaton household in preparation for her debut
on the world tennis circuit.
An incident in 1947, however, shifted Eaton's interests to
other challenges. Called to testify in court concerning a liability
case related to a patient, he suffered an indignity that was
to change his life. The Bible he was to swear upon was switched
awkwardly by the court clerk at the last minute, replaced with
a beat up copy covered in dirty adhesive tape labeled "Colored."
It became a personal turning point for him and the beginning
of a long, determined and often lonely battle to end racial
discrimination.
Wilmington had two hospitals. One was a small substandard facility
for blacks. The other, a more generously endowed facility, James
Walker Memorial, maintained about 25 beds for black patients
in a ward that had only two toilets and was completely separate
from the main hospital building. In order to reach the delivery
room, operating room or other diagnostic facilities, the black
patient had to be wheeled or walked 30 yards across an open
space. The medical staff didn't just deny black physician applications
for privileges; the hospital actually had by-laws that restricted
staff privileges to white physicians. Yet Walker Memorial paid
no taxes and received public dollars for its support.
In 1954, Eaton, along with several other black physicians he
had persuaded to join him, applied for privileges at Walker
Memorial, with no illusions about the rejection that would,
and did, follow. In March 1956, Eaton filed suit in U.S. Federal
District Court, the first of its kind in the nation and a key
test case, thus joining the hospital desegregation efforts supported
by Cornely and his Howard colleagues. It took Eaton more than
eight years, but in April 1964 he won a victory in the Federal
Appeals Court. The case brought attention to the use of public
funds in hospitals that discriminated against blacks and helped
assure the passage of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
John L.S. Holloman Jr. |
It would now be up to John L.S. Holloman Jr. to bring to final
fruition the struggle begun by his fellow alumni, the Howard
professor and the black practitioner in the segregated medical
community of Wilmington, North Carolina.
Holloman graduated from Michigan in 1943, the year after Eaton.
He practiced in New York, eventually becoming an active member
of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR). The group
would shock the medical establishment by picketing the American
Medical Association meetings in 1963 for its failure to bar
medical societies that refused to accept black physicians as
members. In 1965 he assumed the presidency of MCHR, which sent
volunteer civil rights hospital inspectors into the South during
the summer of 1965. This hastily pulled together effort would
serve as the blueprint for the Title VI Medicare certification
process for the following year.
The group was frustrated by the federal inaction in addressing
the clear violations they found in conducting their volunteer
inspections. This culminated in a protest demonstration led
by Holloman in the office of John Gardner, then secretary of
Health, Education and Welfare, in December 1965. The pressure
created by Holloman's group helped; the Title VI certification
effort for Medicare that was to start in July 1966 became a
deadly serious one rather than a paper compliance charade. Holloman
would serve as a consultant to the Office of Equal Health Opportunity
responsible for making sure that hospitals receiving Medicare
funds did not have segregated accommodations and did not discriminate
against physicians in terms of privileges on the basis of race.
The transformation, under the threat of lost Medicare dollars,
was remarkable. Almost 1,000 hospitals quietly and uneventfully
ended segregated accommodations and discriminatory medical privileges,
and the medical world was transformed. It was almost as if,
as one black physician observed, "it had always been this
way."
The University of Michigan Medical School's sesquicentennial
year coincidentally marks the beginning of a national effort,
Healthy People 2010. One of the key goals of this effort is
the elimination of the remaining racial disparities in the U.S.
in health use and outcomes by the year 2010. While clearly much
remains to be done, the struggle waged by University of Michigan
Medical School alumni Paul Cornely, Hubert Eaton and John Holloman
Jr. did change the landscape of medical care in the United States
forever. Three very different medical graduates worked as a
team and won a remarkable victory. In the truest sense of the
word, they each earned the title, "Champion," that
word so often embraced with enthusiasm in their alma mater's
fight song, The Victors.
References:
Hubert A. Eaton, Every Man Should Try (Wilmington, NC: Bonaparte
Press, 1984), p 3.
Eaton v. Grubbs, 329 F.2d 710, 715 (1964).
Author's Note:
David Smith, who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan
School of Public Health in 1969, is currently professor and
program director of the HealthCare Management Program at Temple
University in Philadelphia. He is the author of Health Care
Divided: Race and Healing a Nation, published by the U-M Press
in 1999 and supported by a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy
Research Investigator Award. This article is based on his research
for the book.
The U-M Kellogg Project collects oral histories about segregated
hospitals in southeastern
Michigan; visit its Web site for additional information: www.med.umich.edu/haahc.
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