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Introduction I first met Dr. Sonnie Wellington Hereford III in 1996 at a public screening of amateur film footage that he had made during Huntsville’s civil rights demonstrations of the early 1960s. As I learned from the film, Hereford had played an active part in the local sit-in campaign of 1962,which had forced the city to integrate its lunch counters and, soon afterward, its parks and theaters. Next, he had led the drive to end discrimination at Huntsville Hospital, where black patients had previously been relegated to a small, poorly furnished section called the Annex, or Colored Wing. Then, in September 1963, despite threats against his life, Hereford had held his six-year-old son’s hand as they walked up the steps of the Fifth Avenue Elementary School on Governors Drive, where Sonnie Hereford IV became the first black child to integrate the public schools of Alabama. These early victories in the civil rights movement had happened without widespread violence, and they were achieved before President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing discrimination in public facilities. The film that I watched was at that point a homemade production, but its images of black people marching in the downtown streets, some carrying posters that mocked America’s claim to be the defender of freedom against the Soviet Union while denying freedom to its own citizens, were powerful and effective .The irony was especially appropriate for Huntsville, a city that was already forging a new conception of its past. It was one now focused on the exploits of Wernher von Braun and the team of German scientists who had once built rockets for theThird Reich and were now directing America’s race to the moon at Marshall Space Flight Center. As this version was to evolve in the years after the moon landings of 1969, the racial discrimination that had once been a central feature of the town’s history rated hardly a mention, and any role that black people had played in ending segregation peacefully and thus helping the city prosper as a center for investment and technology seemed largely forgotten. 2 / Introduction When I met Hereford, I had only recently taken a position at The University of Alabama in Huntsville and was resuming research in the social history of medicine that I had started while at the University of Delaware. Broadly speaking, my interests focused on African American health care in the South, which in turn had grown out of my work on doctors and public health in pre1914 France and from my efforts to identify comparative frameworks for illustrating the links between sickness and social inequality. A study of Alabama’s black doctors, I believed, would shed light on a larger historical narrative detailing the struggle of African Americans to achieve physical health as well as social equality. In July 1997, as part of a series of oral histories that I had subsequently begun with black physicians throughout the state, I held the first of many interviews with Hereford. He made himself freely available and had ample time to talk, having by then experienced a long series of problems with the Alabama Board of Medical Examiners that had brought his medical practice to an end. At the time, I knew none of the details of Hereford’s troubles, but I indicated that I was willing to discuss them if he wished, especially in light of his belief that his treatment had been unjust and may have been linked to his earlier civil rights activities. It was still painful for him to talk about, however, and I did not press the matter. Eventually, as all hope of being restored to his profession faded, he decided to give his side of the story, which occurred in taped interviews I conducted with him in 2003 and 2004. Because we lived in the same city, it was easy to schedule our meetings, which offered a rare opportunity for me to explore in depth the background, education , and career of a black doctor. As time went on, I began to see another story unfolding that showed the enormous diversity of the black experience in medicine . It was the story of a man who, against great odds, managed to achieve his childhood dream of becoming a doctor and along the way scored important victories in the struggle for racial justice, only to see his life collapse in ruin. Hereford ’s recounting of what happened thus...

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