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Interview with Dr. Albert Powell |
Citation
Please feel free to use the information from this transcript in any scholarly work. The full citation for this document is : Dr. Albert Powell, interview by Kelli Fink, December 7, 1998, OH041 Oral History Collection, Frederick Community College, Frederick, MD.
Abstract
Dr. Albert Powell is a long time resident of Frederick County, who worked as a pediatrician at Frederick Memorial Hospital and was the first doctor at the hospital to integrate black and white patients. Dr. Powell experienced several changes in the civil rights movement throughout his life and vividly details the way of life in Frederick County during the 1950's and 1960's. Dr. Powell went to the College of William and Mary and the University of North Carolina before being sent to finish up his medical schooling at the Bethesda Naval Hospital during World War II. Despite working at Frederick Memorial Hospital, Dr. Powell also worked at Children's Hospital, in Washington D.C. Throughout his tenure at Children's Hospital, Dr. Powell experienced several developments and tragedies in the civil rights movement including, the riots in downtown D.C. after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Transcript
KF = Kelli Fink (interviewer)
AP = Dr. Albert Powell (interviewee)
| KF: |
Okay Dr. Powell, so it is December third.
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| AP: |
Seventh.
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| KF: |
December seventh (laughter). December seventh, and I'm with Dr. Powell. So the reason why I am so excited about doing this is because I heard that you were the first doctor at Frederick Memorial to admit a black patient. Is that true?
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| AP: |
No, no, that's not exactly true.
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| KF: |
Okay.
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| AP: |
I was a physician, a pediatrician. And they had the black people segregated into one unit and the children were in with the adults. And the nursing service was not adequate for them and I integrated the hospital by having a little black child who needed the nursing service we had from the white ward transferred to the white ward. And so I was the first one to put white patients and black patients on the same unit. But that's they needed the medical attention but were not getting it.
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| KF: |
Do you remember what was wrong with the child?
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| AP: |
I don't recall the specific diagnosis, but I know that he needed intravenous fluids. It was a little boy, probably under a year old, I'm pretty certain. Uhm, needing intravenous fluids he needed to be monitored closely and the beds and cribs for those little babies were not in view of the nursing station. I had the baby transferred upstairs and there really was a mixing of pediatric patients and then it went to adults, and so… It was a pretty smooth transition, there really wasn't any opposition within the hospital. It's really just that nobody had done it before and it needed to be done.
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| KF: |
Do you remember what Frederick County was like when it was segregated?
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| AP: |
Oh yes, well there was a time when medical care was segregated here. When the place where the health department is there was an old folks home, a home for chronically disturbed people who had no money and needed long term care, called Monteview. And there was a building behind that, that was called the Emergency Hospital. And the Emergency Hospital was used by different people, primarily poor people and a lot of blacks were admitted there. Their level of care was much lower than it should be and so that hospital had a little infant die because of inadequate care. And so the health department came, the state health department and the Medical society, and Dr. Austin Puree, who was one of the senior physicians back in those days, he is now dead was very active with it. They had a meeting here in town and closed the Emergency Hospital and interestingly enough of course, letters to the editor bemoaned the fact that they were closing this substandard facility, because some people were quite dedicated to it. They thought it was a great place, but there was no successful opposition to close it, it was just closed. And then, all those patients including the deliveries mothers with their babies, was all then at Frederick Memorial. The original integration of the hospital, on the stand point of just having blacks in, they, they weren't integrated into the hospital, they were just at the hospital, these were adults, was when the Baker Wing was built. I'm not quite certain which Baker it was I know it was the grandfather to Gram, who owns La Paz. His grandfather's family donated the wing to the hospital called the Baker Wing, and one of their conditions was that black patients had to be admitted to the hospital the same as whites. It wasn't that black patients weren't admitted, but they did not receive the same care that everybody else did.
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| KF: |
Was it because of, like, insurance reasons that they didn't get the same care?
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| AP: |
Why didn't they get in? They were black. You have to keep in mid that in the fifties the black people were fighting for admission to school and they weren't being allowed to go. There was a separate high school here in town for blacks, Lincoln High School. There were no blacks in high school with me when I went to high school. It was only in the fifties that the Supreme Court made the decision, I think in 1954, if I'm not mistaken, I'm not positive, that said that blacks had to receive equal education. And the way to receive equal education was to do away with segregation. The other thing too, you see is that Maryland was a border state and Maryland had many of the same ideas about race as did the south. So some of the northern states, which weren't having any segregation at that time, were going differently than we did here in Maryland, like in the south. In Maryland we were actually operating as a southern state, which is an interesting phenomenon.
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| KF: |
So, just in the hospital were the employees of the hospital all white also?
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| AP: |
No, no, no. As a matter of fact Arnold Delaughter, who is still living, in fact I saw him recently in the grocery store. Arnold was the do it all person in the hospital, he was an orderly so to speak. But that man, he catheterized men, he put on traction for orthopedic patients, he adjusted things. Today he would in all probability, because he was very motivated, be a physician. But in those days, because he was black, he was an orderly and he worked in the hospital. He was our right hand person, if you needed something you called Arnold. And he's a delightful person, someone really needs to interview Arnold, he's really an outstanding person.
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| KF: |
Did you go to college around here?
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| AP: |
No, I went to William and Mary. I was there for a couple of years. Then during World War II I went down to the University of North Carolina for my junior year. As a matter of fact today is an important day in my life because in 1941 on December the seventh, an hour and fifteen minutes ago, they broke into my study time and announced that Pearl Harbor had been bombed.
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| KF: |
Oh, really?
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| AP: |
Yes, so this is a memorable day for me, so from there everything had changed.
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| KF: |
Did you go into the military?
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| AP: |
I was in the military, I was never in combat. I was a pre-med student so they kept us and sent us down to The University of North Carolina and the Bethesda Naval Hospital, and then the medical school to finish up school. Because no one knew how long the war was going to last and you knew you needed doctors, so I stayed in that, but I was in the service after that.
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| KF: |
The service was not integrated then, was it?
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| AP: |
No, not in those days, as a matter of fact the service became integrated in the sense that you would have blacks or people of color aboard a ship but they had special jobs, I mean they weren't combat people, they all were service people. And after World War II it became apparent to the Truman administration that there needed to be a lot of work done on integration in the armed forces. And they contracted with a group of people that I had some later association with, not in the beginning but later on. They contracted with a group of people who worked on how to do this integration. How to enable people to have choices of behavior when their teachings may have been what they learned growing up may have been something that was different from what was actually necessary. If you had grown up in a community where blacks were supposed to sit in the back of the bus where they drank at different drinking fountains, where they could not sit at the, uh same counter. Back in those days at People's Drug Store, they couldn't sit at the lunch counter with whites in Frederick.
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| KF: |
Oh Wow!
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| AP: |
Right, they could carry food out, but they couldn't sit at the lunch counter with whites. So if you are going to move from that, into a situation where you may be in a barracks sharing food toilets, roomspace with people of color, that was something had to be done about that. How do you get people to do that? So they developed this task force out of which grew the group process for problem solving, you know everybody uses today. But that all got started around a racial issue, around how they're going to integrate people into
the, armed forces.
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| KF: |
You said that the uhm, the lunch counters were segregated in Frederick?
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| AP: |
They weren't segregated, they couldn't eat at a lunch counter. Their only lunch counters, well I guess there were lunch counters for whites, I mean blacks, downtown, down on South Street, in that area. But they couldn't so yeah they were segregated, they couldn't uh. I had an interesting, very interesting discussion as a pediatrician in those days I made a lot of house calls, I made a lot of house calls for black families. And I never struggled with the issue of whether I was going to treat them equally or not, that was not one of my issues. And I remember one night, and I remember it vividly because we were supposed to be going someplace socially that night. And my wife is home and I got, I made this call, down on South Street and the husband of the family was at [Fort] Detrick, he was a scientist at Detrick, and he and his wife, they had this little baby and I was there to see the baby and the baby was going to be okay, and so we ended up talking which took up a long period of time. But one of the things that I remember vividly about that, because we got on this issue, one of the things I remember vividly about that was is the statement that if he was in D.C. with his wife and baby there was no place between D.C. and Frederick that they could stop to go to the toilet they couldn't get anything to eat, they had to drive directly from D.C. to Frederick. Uhm, because there, there just weren't any places that accepted blacks.
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| KF: |
Right, right.
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| AP: |
So it was a much different world, there was it was even more of a segregated issue movie houses were segregated the outstanding one that I saw was in Pacimoc City, which is down in southern Maryland, around the Eastern Shore, almost on the Virginia border, and we were down there fishing one time back in the fifties and the, the they had drinking fountains for blacks only and for whites only. I mean you couldn't even drink out of the same water fountain, separate toilets, separate places to sit, totally segregated there.
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| KF: |
Right and that's not that far away.
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| AP: |
No, Pocimoc City is not that far away, you're right, three and a half-hours.
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| KF: |
Did you ever feel, feel threatened personally for having such an open mind? Like you said that you didn't, you never had to struggle with whether or not you were going to treat your patients.
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| AP: |
No, no one ever, no one ever, the, the see I've been involved in this in a lot of different ways. When I was in 1968 I was in a child psychiatry fellowship at Children's Hospital. And uhm that was at in D.C. and that was on a Thirteenth and, between U and W on Thirteenth Street. Right in that area. And the evening that Martin Luther King, when Martin Luther King was killed, that evening there were a group of people from Frederick who were coming down and they were on Pennsylvania Avenue on the other side of the White House, at a restaurant and I was going to meet them there. And I recall leaving the hospital and going down and it was in the evening and everything seemed extremely tense, but I had no idea what was going on. And after we had been there for an hour or so, I told my wife I just felt so uneasy that I thought we should head back to Frederick and, and so we left and we came up to Fourteenth Street around ten o'clock, yeah it was about ten o'clock and we got up to Fourteenth and U and we're stopped there at the traffic light and heard the alarms go off. And that was the beginning of the riots. We were sitting right in the middle of the beginning of the riots. But we continued up we continued up for a few more blocks because I wanted to see what was happening. And and the, then we had the radio on and then we heard Martin Luther King had been killed, so that was the night Martin Luther King was killed with those riots and, and the town was electric, I mean, you know it was no question something was going to happen.
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| KF: |
What did you do?
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| AP: |
Well, we went over to Thirteenth Street and drove out of town! (laughing) See Fourteenth was a little bit more commercial in the area we were in, up in that area. But, see I was still working at Children's Hospital and we so came in there to work and that area was very active with the riots. Uhm, and lets see, either that day or the next day there was a training program I was attending in Richmond. So I had gone down to Richmond and came back and when I came back into D.C. they were bringing tanks in from Fort Meade, which was a very impressive sight. And then they brought in paratroopers and they put two paratroopers on every corner. And at all four corners there'd be the eight at every intersection and that really finally settled the whole town down. That was, I mean, I was, I never felt in danger but that was a certainly a very threatening time and the, they, that was there were a lot of things that were impressive to me about that. One of the things that was impressive was that there was a very delightful, young black woman who was a social worker that worked at Children's with us. And we had worked together a lot. And when she returned to work when we all got back together again, which was four or five weeks later and sort of functioning again she we talked about this and she said it was very strange for her because by nature she was delightful lady. She said it was very strange how freeing, being involved in that whole event turned out to be for her. It was as if they had strength they didn't have before. So then that same summer Martin Luther King was planning a poor people's march in Washington. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it was for that summer and so they had that at the time they had the poor people's march they took down by buses, rather they got some of their buses. There were literally several hundred thousand blacks from down south that came into town. And up at Fourteenth there was a People's Drug Store that was closed on Fourteenth and, it must have been Fourteenth and U, uh Fourteenth and U and the uhm, we got a call, I was at the hospital. We were the psychiatric unit there at the Children's Hospital and, and we got a call that there was somebody who was very upset down in that building. And so I was elected to go down there and I walked, I walked around to make sure of what was going on. I took a couple extra blocks basically, I circled the place. You did those kinds of things, I mean didn't do things that were gonna get you in trouble. So I looked the whole situation over and decided I could go in there, but at that point the streets were totally filled. I mean the whole intersection, everything was filled with people mostly men, it was a hot summer and I got into the building and this person wasn't having any particular problem. Then a couple of the social workers from Children's Hospital were actually at the back at that building, they were the ones who were called out. I don't know how they got in there, but they were there. And and then as I came out of the building I was walking up Fourteenth Street the crowd was you know they were just compressed and they had to set aside to let me through. And that was a little different because a chant started "What do we want?" "We don't want no white people." But they all opened up and I got through you know. So I went back to Children's Hospital and when I got back to the Psych unit there… We, we were a separate building I said you know we needed to get the kids out of there and they were saying "Oh, you know its nothing" and I said well just walk around the corner and take a look down the street. And they did and we got the kids out and then…
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| KF: |
You got the kids out of the hospital?
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| AP: |
Out, well the when they had the the uh the riots, yeah they may have left a few children there, but the majority of children at Children's Hospital had to be transferred, discharged and all. Oh that was, that was pretty wild, that was very wild. Things were being burned and uh when that all started on Fourteenth Street, within thirty seconds I mean it was all over the place. Windows were being broken, alarm signals were going off, people are running in the streets, I mean it was, it seemed to me as if it was organized. Because it happened so quickly, I mean it was just like that. And everybody had everything they needed to break windows and do everything like that. But anyway, so I've had a few experiences with that sort of thing.
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| KF: |
Do you remember when you came back to Frederick what it was like here in Frederick when Martin Luther King had been shot?
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| AP: |
Oh yes, oh yes. You see we had a curfew in Frederick, the, there were plans to burn the South end of Frederick.
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| KF: |
Oh, I never heard that.
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| AP: |
Well I got that information from the chief of police at that time.
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| KF: |
Do you remember who he was?
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| AP: |
Yeah, Charlie Main they uhm, we had a curfew so you had to be in the house at dark and stay in for the night. No one was on the streets. The riot in Frederick did not develop, but the information that was available in the community was that there was some outside people coming in and there was going to be a riot and there was going to be looting and burning and so on, but it didn't happen. But we had uh ….
Tape Cuts Off
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