The corporeal and ocular veil: Dr. Matilda A. Evans (1872-1935) and the complexity of southern history

Journal of Southern History

Volumn 70, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 3-34

  Hine, Darlene Clark ^a  

^a MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949708368     PISSN: 00224642     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/27648310     Document Type: Review

References (125)

1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903; reprint, Greenwich, Conn., 1961), 16-17. Carter Godwin Woodson argued that "[i]n organizing the people . . . and in stimulating their effort to battle for their rights the Negro physician has contributed more than any other class, with the possible exception of the Negro lawyer, toward enlarging the domain of individual liberty and securing for a despised element a hearing at the bar of public opinion."
2. Woodson, The Negro Professional Man and the Community, with Special Emphasis on the Physician and the Lawyer (1934; reprint, New York, 1969), 126. Philosopher Robert Gooding-Williams posed the provocative question as to whether Du Bois's veil was corporeal or ocular at the centennial celebration symposium on The Souls of Black Folk at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in April 2003. In a follow-up conversation a month later I suggested to him that the metaphor of "the veil" could be interpreted as representing both an ocular and a corporeal (meaning the physical body of black people that whites refused to see except as laborers, and the efforts of black people to establish themselves as significant members of the body politic and to demand the full rights of citizenship, especially the right to state-supported care for their bodies) metaphor. I gratefully take this opportunity to thank the historians who provided invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this essay: William C. Hine, Aldon D. Morris, Leslie Moch, Pero Dagbovie, Joe W. Trotter, Susan Reverby, Regina Morantz Sanchez, Deborah Gray White, Evelyn Hammonds, Nell Irvin Painter, Wanda Hendricks, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Wilma King, Stephanie Shaw, Elsa Barkley Brown, Lisa Fine, Kathleen Thompson, Hilary Mac Austin, John Inscoe, William B. Hixson, and Marshanda Smith
3. "Dr. Matilda A. Evans: Noted Physician and Surgeon, Humanitarian, Outstanding Citizen of Columbia," Columbia (S.C.) Palmetto Leader, March 22, 1930, p. 1. The Palmetto Leader was a Columbia, S.C., newspaper edited by a prominent black attorney, Nathaniel Frederick. The article is so laudatory that Dr. Evans may well have written it herself (though John R. Wilson is listed as author). The biographical details mentioned in my introductory paragraphs will be elaborated upon and documented in the pages that follow
4. Jane Van De Vrede quoted in Karen Buhler-Wilkerson, "Guarded by Standards and Directed by Strangers: Charleston, South Carolina's Response to a National Health Care Agenda, 1920-1930," Nursing History Review, 1 (1993), 143
5. Matilda A. Evans, Martha Schofield, A Pioneer Negro Educator; Historical and Philosophical Review of Reconstruction Period of South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1916)
6. Columbia Palmetto Leader, November 26, 1932, supplement
7. John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York, 1994), 102-3
8. Columbia (S.C.) State, October 29, 1931, p. 3
9. [Matilda A. Evans], A Brief History of the Evans Clinic (Columbia, S.C., 1932)
10. Evans, Martha Schofield, 82
11. Darlene Clark Hine, "Black Professionals and Race Consciousness: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 1890-1950," Journal of American History, 89 (March 2003), 1279-94
12. Hine, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (1979; new ed., Columbia, Mo., 2003), chap. 9
13. Also see Hine, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950 (Bloomington, 1989)
14. Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, eds., The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice From the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters (Lanham, Md., 1998), 7. There are striking similarities between Evans's and Cooper's construction of their families. Evans like Cooper remained childless but nevertheless reared at least seven children, three of whom were her orphaned nieces and nephews. Moreover, Evans served as a foster mother to twenty-seven children over the course of her life. Cooper's biographers noted, "Over the years Cooper reared seven children - two foster children when she was young and the five orphans she adopted just shy of her sixtieth year. . . . [S]he cared for these children on a teacher's salary while, among so much else, commuting to New York City and Paris in pursuit of her doctoral degree" (p. 8)
15. On Evans see the biographical sketch of Matilda Arabelle Evans written by her niece Jessie T. Hill, June 1992, in the Matilda Arabelle Evans Collection (South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia). For biographical studies of black women social reformers see Jacqueline Anne Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope: Black Southern Reformer (Athens, Ga., 1989)
16. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill, 1996), 177-202 (on Charlotte Hawkins Brown)
17. Elsa Barkley Brown, "Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke," Signs, 14 (Spring 1989), 610-33
18. Joyce A. Hanson, Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women's Political Activism (Columbia, Mo., 2003)
19. Merline Pitre, In Struggle Against Jim Crow: Lulu B. White and the NAACP, 1900-1957 (College Station, Tex., 1999)
20. and Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara A. Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965 (Brooklyn, 1990)
21. esp. Woods, "Modjeska Simkins and the South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, 1939-1957," pp. 99-120. Each woman blended maternal, familial, professional, and social activist roles seemingly seamlessly into a public/private identity that defined and exemplified a womanist consciousness. Yet this is not to say that they did not use the culture of dissemblance to protect and nurture an inner self while giving the impression of openness
22. Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901 (New York, 1954)
23. Historian E. H. Beardsley challenges historians to think anew about our treatment and perceptions of the black middle class in the first half of the twentieth century. "Supposedly, this group was so eager for white acceptance and so fearful of being lumped with the mass of 'shiftless' blacks, that it turned its back on the poor and virtually repudiated its own membership in the race." Beardsley, "William D. Chappelle, Jr., M.D.: A Physician and Churchman in South Carolina," A.M.E. Church Review, 117 (April-June 2001), 54-62 (quotation on p. 54)
24. I define black parallelism as the development of an ideology, strategy, and the necessary institutions and organizations to ensure survival of the community and to combat all manner of racial discrimination and segregation. Feminist scholars have employed the concept of female separatism in similar ways. Historian Estelle Freedman argues that "the creation of a separate, public female sphere helped mobilize women and gained political leverage in the larger society. A separatist political strategy, which I refer to as 'female institution building,' emerged from the middle-class women's culture of the nineteenth century." Freedman, "Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870-1930," Feminist Studies, 5 (Fall 1979), 512-29 (quotation on p. 513)
25. Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1998), 233
26. Rayford Whittingham Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (1954; rev. ed., New York, 1997), 345
27. Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895-1925 (Knoxville, 1989), 9. For many African Americans the antilynching movement was a significant dimension of the Progressive era. "[Ida B.] Wells-Barnett made lynching a legitimate focus of American reform, amenable to the signal social remedies of the Progressive era: education and protective legislation."
28. Patricia A. Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill, 2001), 122. Woman suffrage was another significant reform measure that attracted widespread support from black women. Historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn maintains that "African American women championed the suffrage movement in much the same way that Blacks generally supported the Populists and the Progressive movement - bypassing elements of the movements that deterred them, but defending basic and inclusive, democratic concepts."
29. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (Bloomington, 1998), 112-15 (quotation on p. 112)
30. Herbert M. Morais, The History of the Negro in Medicine (New York, 1967), 68. State black medical associations preceded the founding of the National Medical Association. For example, a group of black graduates of the Leonard Medical School of Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, met in 1887 to found the Old North State Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Society, Inc. The three founders included Drs. M. T. Pope (class of 1886), J. T. Williams (class of 1886), and L. A. Scruggs (class of 1886). They were joined by Dr. A. M. Moore (class of 1888), who became one of the founders of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. In 1910 there were 3,777 physicians, 478 dentists, and 2,433 trained nurses in the United States. Souvenir Program of the Old North State Medical, Dental and Pharmaceutical Society, Inc. (Fiftieth Annual Session, Golden Jubilee, June 1, 2, 3, 1937, North Carolina College for Negroes, Durham, N.C.). The name was changed in 1906 from the North Carolina Medical and Pharmaceutical Society to the North Carolina Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Society. I thank Mrs. Irene Clark of Raleigh, North Carolina, for copies of the programs of the 1930 and 1937 annual meetings
31. Hine, Black Women in White, 94
32. For an advertisement of the St. Luke's Hospital and Evans Sanitarium see Negro Health Journal, 1 (September 1916), 6. In this issue of her journal Dr. Evans reveals her entrepreneurial activities by advertising the sale of "Villanova, pure, sparkling Spring Water from Dr. M. A. Evans' farm three and one-half miles east of Columbia" (p. 4). A copy of this issue is in the Evans Collection
33. In addition to Evans's St. Luke's Hospital and Evans Sanitarium, black physicians founded two hospitals in Columbia in the 1920s, the Good Samaritan Hospital (Dr. S. E. Green, Superintendent) and Waverly Fraternal Hospital (Dr. N. A. Jenkins, Superintendent). Columbia Palmetto Leader, October 18, 1930; Vanessa Northington Gamble, Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement, 1920-1945 (New York and Oxford, 1995), 120
34. Macon, "Colored Doctors."
35. "The Rurals and the Medicos," Columbia Palmetto Leader, July 16, 1932. The editorial concluded, "We believe that a splendid service might be performed by our doctors were they to hold clinics throughout the state at regular and stated intervals. The death rate among our people is bound to continue high until there is more of concerted effort on the part of our own health forces to render both preventive and therapeutic service in the case of our rural citizens."
36. C. Calvin Smith, "Serving the Poorest of the Poor: Black Medical Practitioners in the Arkansas Delta, 1880-1960," Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 57 (Autumn 1998), 291
37. James Summerville, "Formation of a Black Medical Profession in Tennessee, 1880-1920," Journal of the Tennessee Medical Association, 76 (October 1983), 644-45
38. Jill Quadagno and Steve McDonald, "Racial Segregation in Southern Hospitals: How Medicare 'Broke the Back of Segregated Health Services,'" in Elna C. Green, ed., The New Deal and Beyond: Social Welfare in the South since 1930 (Athens, Ga., 2003), 119-37
39. Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York, 1982), 112-23. The black medical colleges were as follows: Lincoln University School of Medicine, Oxford, Pennsylvania, 1870-1874; Straight University Medical School, New Orleans, 1873-1879; Flint Medical College of New Orleans University, New Orleans, 1889-1911; Leonard Medical School of Shaw University, Raleigh, 1882-1918; Louisville National Medical College (LNMC), Louisville, 1888-1912; State University Medical Department (merged with LNMC in 1903), Louisville, 1899-1903; Hannibal Medical College, Memphis, 1889-1896; Chattanooga National Medical College, Chattanooga, 1899-1908; and University of West Tennessee College of Medicine and Surgery, in two locations - Jackson, Tennessee, 1900-1907, and Memphis, 1907-1923. The two that survived for a significant period beyond the Flexner Report were Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, D.C., 1868-present; and Meharry Medical College, Nashville, 1876-present
40. H.A. Callis, "The Need and Training of Negro Physicians," Journal of Negro Education, 4 (January 1935), 32-41
41. Vanessa Northington Gamble, The Black Community Hospital: Contemporary Dilemmas in Historical Perspective (New York, 1989), 44
42. Steven J. Peitzman, A New and Untried Course: Woman's Medical College and Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1850-1998 (New Brunswick, N.J., 2000), 116-20
43. Patricia E. Sloan, "Commitment to Equality: A View of Early Black Nursing Schools," in M. Louise Fitzpatrick, ed., Historical Studies in Nursing: Papers Presented at the 15th Annual Stewart Conference on Research in Nursing, March 1977 (New York, 1978), 68-85
44. Gamble, Black Community Hospital, 9
45. Dr. Daniel Hale Williams founded Provident Hospital in 1891. According to historian Wanda A. Hendricks, he made it "a model of black and white cooperation. It had an interracial staff, admitted patients of all races, and was governed by an interracial board of trustees." Such an example of interracial cooperation would have been impossible in the South. The nurse training school at Provident Hospital, as Hendricks notes, attracted women from twenty-four states, Canada, and the West Indies. "By 1913, 118 nurses had graduated. Many went to work in the South." Hendricks, Gender, Race, and Politics in the Midwest: Black Club Women in Illinois (Bloomington, 1998), 59-60
46. Gamble, Making a Place for Ourselves, chap. 2
47. Dennis C. Dickerson, "Family, Faith and the Making of a Black Female Physician: Emma Ann Virginia Reynolds, M.D., 1862-1917," A.M.E. Church Review, 117 (April-June 2001), 35-38. Historian Dickerson details the role that Emma Reynolds played in inspiring Daniel Hale Williams to establish the Provident Hospital and Nursing Training School in Chicago. She was its first nursing student, and she subsequently earned an M.D. degree in 1895 from Northwestern University (pp. 36-37)
48. See also Janet Wilson James, "Writing and Rewriting Nursing History: A Review Essay," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 58 (1984), 568-84
49. Hine, Black Women in White, 41-43, 63-65
50. Darlene Clark Hine, "Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance," Signs, 14 (Summer 1989), 912-20
51. Biographical sketch of Matilda Arabelle Evans written by her niece Jessie T. Hill, June 1992, in the Evans Collection. Evans's brother and sister were named Andy and Aurora
52. James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill, 1988)
53. George Brown Tindall, South Carolina Negroes, 1877-1900 (Columbia, S.C., 1952)
54. Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia, S.C., 1998), 407-52
55. Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight For We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana, 1997)
56. Schwalm, Hard Fight for We, 267-68
57. Tera Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997)
58. Booker T. Washington, "The Standard Printed Version of the Atlanta Exposition Address," Atlanta, September 18, 1895, in Louis R. Harlan, ed., The Booker T. Washington Papers (14 vols.; Urbana, 1972-1989), III, 586
59. Biographical note, Dr. Matilda Evans, Class of 1892, Oberlin Alumni Magazine, April 1930, p. 218. Evans provided this information to George M. Jones, Secretary, Oberlin College, May 30, 1908; copy of the form found in the Evans Collection
60. Among the black women graduates of the Woman's Medical College who practiced in the South were Verina M. Harris Morton Jones (class of 1888), who was the first woman to pass Mississippi State Boards. She served as resident physician at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson (class of 1891) was the first black woman to pass the Alabama State Boards. She served as resident physician at Tuskegee Institute, 1891-1894. Alice Woodby McKane (class of 1892) co-founded with her husband, Dr. Cornelius McKane, the McKane Hospital for Women and Children and Training School for Nurses in Savannah, Georgia, in 1896. Drs. Lucy Hughes Brown (class of 1894) and Matilda A. Evans (class of 1897) were the first women physicians in South Carolina. Both played leading roles in establishing hospitals and in training black women nurses in Charleston and Columbia respectively. Darlene Clark Hine, "Co-Laborers in the Work of the Lord: Nineteenth-Century Black Women Physicians," in Ruth J. Abram, ed., "Send Us A Lady Physician": Women Doctors in America, 1835-1920 (New York, 1985), 107-20
61. Bettina Aptheker, "Quest for Dignity: Black Women in the Professions, 1865-1900," in Aptheker, Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History (Amherst, Mass., 1982), 89-110
62. Peitzman, New and Untried Course, 116-20
63. Matilda A. Evans to Alfred Jones, March 13, 1907, Evans Collection. Evans wrote the letter seeking support for one of her nursing students who showed unusual promise. For a discussion of this student's postgraduate experiences see Vanessa Northington Gamble, "'I am a Negro Woman, Graduate of the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania: 1910.' The Life and Career of Dr. Melissa Evelyn Thompson Coppin," A.M.E. Church Review, 117 (April-June 2001), 39-44
64. Evans to Jones, March 13, 1907, Evans Collection (quotation); "Dr. Matilda A. Evans: Noted Physician and Surgeon," 1. One of the earliest black-authored profiles of Evans concluded that "it should be said that while Dr. Evans did not get to Africa, she has through her charity work, which has been boundless, been able to minister to thousands of her people who but for her devotion must have been without treatment and advice they so sorely needed."
65. A. B. Caldwell, History of the American Negro: South Carolina Edition (Atlanta, 1919), 396
66. Sara W. Brown, "Colored Women Physicians," Southern Workman, 52 (December 1923), 588; and information on Lucy Hughes Brown in McClennan-Banks Memorial Hospital Manuscript Collection (Waring Historical Library, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston). Lucie Bragg Anthony (Meharry Medical College, class of 1907) became supervisor of county schools in Sumter, South Carolina. She focused her efforts on a combination of "health work, literacy work, and teacher training." She facilitated the establishment of more than two dozen new schools
67. Aptheker, "Quest for Dignity," 102
68. Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South, 245-46 (quotation on p. 245)
69. Mary Roth Walsh, "Doctors Wanted, No Women Need Apply": Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835-1975 (New Haven, 1977), 186. For lawyers the black ratio was 1 to 12,315, and 1 to 718 among whites
70. Matilda Evans to Miss Crocker, Schofield School, May 5, 1922, Evans Collection. In 1896 Drs. C. C. Johnson of Columbia and A. C. McClennan of Charleston, along with a half-dozen other physicians, organized the Palmetto Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Association in order "to bring the members of the profession into closer relationship, that would create a better understanding and secure a more concerted action in solving the problems then confronting the profession." According to the program for the April 1924 meeting the membership consisted of seventy-four physicians, twenty-eight dentists, and twenty-three pharmacists. Matilda Evans participated as a discussant in two symposia, one on gonorrhea and the other on syphilis. Minutes of the Twenty-ninth Annual Session of the Palmetto Medical Association of the State of South Carolina, Rock Hill, S.C., April 22-24, 1924. One program proudly proclaimed, "[O]ther colored medical associations are older but this is the only one that has never missed a meeting since organization. When organized it consisted of eight colored physicians. Today the membership total nearly eighty." Of the twenty-seven presidents listed in the program, only Matilda A. Evans was a woman. Minutes of the Thirtieth Annual Session of the Palmetto Medical Association, State College Auditorium, Orangeburg, S.C., April 28-30, 1925. The association divided the state into four sections, each with its own medical organization: the Charleston County Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Association; the Inter-County Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Association; the Congaree Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Association; and the Piedmont Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Association. Copies of the minutes are located in the Palmetto Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Association Collection (Miller F. Whittaker Library, South Carolina State University, Orangeburg, S.C.)
71. Taylor Lane Hospital and Training School for Nurses, Fourth Annual Report (Aiken, S.C., 1906). Pages not numbered. Copy in South Caroliniana Library, Columbia, S.C
72. C. A. Johnson, "Negroes," in Helen Kohn Hennig, ed., Columbia: Capital City of South Carolina, 1786-1936 (Columbia, S.C., 1936), 303-14
73. For a critical analysis of the prevalent negative images of and attitudes toward black women during this era see Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes Toward Black Women, 1880-1920 (Brooklyn, 1990)
74. Patricia Morton, Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women (New York, 1991)
75. and Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York, 1999)
76. Black men's views are treated in Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, "Black Male Perspectives on the Nineteenth-Century Woman," in Sharon Harley and Terborg-Penn, eds., The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (Port Washington, N.Y., 1978), 23-42
77. and Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York, 1984)
78. Columbia (S.C.) State clipping in Evans Collection (quotations) (The date is smudged and indecipherable; copy in author's possession.); Negro Health Journal, 1 (September 1916)
79. See also Burnett W. Gallman, The Shoulders We Stand On (Columbia, S.C., 1999), 30-31. "In all these hospitals the training school for nurses is a conspicuous feature, and the nurses who receive this training show very great efficiency, finding employment largely among the white people, who frequently prefer them to white nurses with similar training. Some of these institutions have been built up through the enterprise of individual colored physicians. A notable example is the 'St. Luke's Hospital' at Columbia, founded and maintained in the face of many discouragements, by Dr. Matilda A. Evans. . . . Hospitals of this type are held in high esteem by the communities in which they are located and are centers of beneficence for the country around."
80. Thomas Jesse Jones, ed., Negro Education: A Study of the Private and Higher Schools for Colored People in the United States (Washington, D.C., 1917), 176
81. Caldwell, History of the American Negro, 393-94, 396 (first quotation on p. 394; second quotation on p. 396)
82. Columbia (S.C.) State clipping in Evans Collection; F. D. Kendall, M.D., to whom it may concern, in Taylor Lane Hospital and Training School for Nurses, Fourth Annual Report
83. Columbia (S.C.) State clipping in Evans Collection (first quotation); "Dr. Matilda A. Evans: Noted Physician and Surgeon," p. 1 (other quotations)
84. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 194
85. Maritcha R. Lyons, "Introduction," in S. Maria Steward, Woman in Medicine: A Paper Read Before the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs at Wilberforce, Ohio, August 6, 1914 (Wilberforce, Ohio, 1914), 4 (first and second quotations), 5 (third quotation)
86. Many professional women found it necessary to emphasize their feminine qualities as they maneuvered through the course of careers in male-dominated occupations. Occasionally a woman professional contradicted "the sentimental narrative" of being "a motherly, selfless, self-sacrificing Lady Bountiful whose only desire was to end the suffering of poor women . . . ." For an illuminating discussion of a white woman physician who transgressed the sentimental narrative see Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Conduct Unbecoming a Woman: Medicine on Trial in Turn-of-the-Century Brooklyn (New York and Oxford, 1999), 213
87. Thirteenth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1910. Volume One. Population, 1910: General Report and Analysis (Washington, D.C., 1913), 86, 180
88. Taylor Lane Hospital and Training School for Nurses, Fourth Annual Report (quotations). For a discussion of the qualities valued in the black nurse and for a comparative perspective on how different communities organized their health-care delivery see Karen Buhler-Wilkerson, "Caring in Its 'Proper Place': Race and Benevolence in Charleston, SC, 1813-1930," Nursing Research, 41 (January-February 1992), 14-20
89. Also see Susan M. Reverby, Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850-1945 (Cambridge, Eng., 1987)
90. and David Rosner, A Once Charitable Enterprise: Hospitals and Health Care in Brooklyn and New York, 1885-1915 (Cambridge, Eng., 1982)
91. George Bunch, M.D., to whom it may concern, December 28, 1906, Evans Collection
92. Taylor Lane Hospital and Training School for Nurses, Fourth Annual Report
93. W. Montague Cobb, "Special Problems in the Provision of Medical Services for Negroes," Journal of Negro Education, 18 (Summer 1949), 342
94. John T. Duncan to whom it may concern, December 6, 1906, Evans Collection
95. William Weston, M.D., to whom it may concern, in Taylor Lane Hospital and Training School for Nurses, Fourth Annual Report
96. Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, November 20, 1932, clipping in Evans Collection
97. [Evans], "Cheap Living, Poverty, Disease and Death Lay Heavy Annual Tax on People Everywhere," Negro Health Journal, 1 (September 1916), 1 (first quotation)
98. [Evans], "How Business Would Profit by the Paymennt [sic] of Better Wages to Negroes," ibid., p. 5 (other quotations). While there is no byline naming Evans as author, the style and language of the pieces sufficiently resemble her other writings that I am assuming that she wrote these articles
99. Alex Lichtenstein, "Theft, Moral Economy, and the Transition from Slavery to Freedom in the American South," in Stephan Palmié, ed., Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery (Knoxville, 1995), 176-86. Lichtenstein argues that "when slaves stole from slaveowners, they engaged in an act of resistance rooted in what I (following E. P. Thompson and other historians of eighteenth-century Britain) call a moral economy that did indeed pose an alternative view of property relations" (p. 176). Theft (or "taking," as Evans referred to it) remained "a crucial issue in defining property relationships between whites and blacks in the plantation South, even after emancipation" (p. 178)
100. Paul Lofton, "The Columbia Black Community in the 1930's," Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association (1984), 89
101. William H. Tucker, The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund (Urbana, 2002), 14-15
102. Susan L. Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women's Health Activism in America, 1890-1950 (Philadephia, 1995), 29
103. Columbia Palmetto Leader, June 21, 1930, p. 1
104. Charles Payne, "Men Led, but Women Organized: Movement Participation of Women in the Mississippi Delta," in Crawford, Rouse, and Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 1-11
105. For a discussion of how gender conventions shaped black women's involvement in the civil rights movement and an insightful discussion of social-movement theory, see Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York, 1984), 275-90
106. and Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York and Oxford, 1997)
107. Willis C. Johnson, proprietor of the Johnson-Bradley Undertakers, served as president of the board of directors of the Columbia Clinic Association. An earlier story declared, "It should be stated that all of the doctors of our group in the city are co-operating splendidly in this movement." Columbia Palmetto Leader, August 23, 1930, p. 1
108. John R. Wilson, "The Columbia Clinic An Effective Reality: Has Temporary Quarters in the Basement of Zion Baptist Church - A Number of Children Treated," Columbia Palmetto Leader, August 16, 1930, p. 1
109. [Evans], Brief History of the Evans Clinic
110. Wilson, "Columbia Clinic An Effective Reality," 1
111. "Columbia Clinic Association," 1 (quotation)
112. "Dr. Matilda A. Evans Interviewed," Columbia Palmetto Leader, September 20, 1930. In another story the Palmetto Leader noted in passing that Dr. Evans "gives poor heed to both her physical and financial limitation when a question of service arises." October 18, 1930, p. 3. Indeed, Evans was so consumed by this project that her own health began to decline. Still, in November she arranged for the clinic to host a health-education program that included visits by "certain outstanding specialists - members of the National Medical Association . . . to conduct [the] clinic along the lines of their respective speciality." "The Columbia Clinic Enlarges Its Scope of Its Endeavor," Columbia Palmetto Leader, November 8, 1930, p. 1
113. October 18, 1930, p. 1
114. W. Lewis Burke and William C. Hine, "The African American Bar and the Creation of the South Carolina State College Law School" (work-in-progress, cited with permission of the authors). Admitted to practice in 1913, Frederick served multiple leadership roles within the black community. In 1926 he spearheaded the reorganization of the city's NAACP chapter, and as editor of the Palmetto Leader he boldly pressed for black rights. Moreover, he cofounded the Victory Savings Bank. When Frederick died destitute in 1938, Columbia lost its only black lawyer
115. "Negro Annex on Columbia Hospital Grounds Not Wanted: Mass Meeting at Allen Sunday Ask for a Real Hospital for Negroes," Columbia Palmetto Leader, December 19, 1931, p. 1
116. "Negro Annex on Columbia Hospital Grounds Not Wanted," 1
117. Burke and Hine, "African American Bar and the Creation of the South Carolina State College Law School." The state's first woman lawyer was a black woman, Cassandra Elizabeth Maxwell (1910-1974) of Orangeburg, South Carolina, who was admitted to the bar in 1939. The daughter of a prosperous grocery-store proprietor, Maxwell was graduated from Claflin University's high school in 1928. She attended Spelman College and then earned a law degree from the School of Law at Howard University, where she studied with James Nabrit and Leon Ransom. In 1941 the Howard Law graduate joined the faculty of South Carolina State College Law School, where she taught classes on contracts, credit transactions, pleading, and moot-court training. In 1951 she and her husband, Dr. James Hope Birnie (a biology professor at Morehouse College), moved to Atlanta, where she started a private practice. From 1962 until her death in 1974 the Birnies lived in Philadelphia, where she joined the Pennsylvania bar and launched another private law practice. In Philadelphia she continued advocating for social causes and greater opportunity for women and children. She worked for Fair Housing and Jobs for Youth, the Children's United Fund, the League of Women Voters, the Urban League, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She was an active participant in Republican Party affairs, and President Richard Nixon appointed her as a member of the Interim Board of Directors of the Student Loan Marketing Association. She was nominated in the Republican primary as a candidate for a judgeship in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. Her bid for the seat proved unsuccessful. See "Local Woman First Black Female Attorney Admitted to S.C. Bar,"
118. Orangeburg (S.C.) Times and Democrat, February 27, 2000, p. 2
119. and Cassandra Maxwell Birnie Collection (Miller F. Whittaker Library, South Carolina State University, Orangeburg, S.C.)
120. "Deaths: Matilda Arabelle Evans," Journal of the American Medical Association, 106 (January 1936), 232
121. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent
122. Stephanie J. Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago, 1996)
123. White, Too Heavy a Load
124. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow
125. Isabel Wilkerson and Angela Mitchell, "Staying Alive! The Challenge of Improving Black America's Health," Emerge (September 1991), 24-32. "As modern medicine approaches the year 2000, the health of Black America languishes in a state reminiscent of the 1940s, when practically all hospitals were segregated and flu shots a thing of the future" (p. 24). Article graphics declare "More Blacks Die of the Eight Major Killers." Noting "Incidence of Death as Compared to Whites," the article reported the following statistics: homicide/killed by police, +500 percent; kidney failure, +176 percent; diabetes, +132 percent; stroke, +82 percent; cirrhosis/liver disease, +77 percent; heart disease, +38 percent; cancer, +32 percent; and accidents, +24 percent (p. 28)