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5. Integrating the Hospital and the Schools
- The University of Alabama Press
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5 Integrating the Hospital and the Schools In the midst of our sit-in campaign, the leaders of the Community Services Committee elected me a committee of one to go and talk to the hospital administrator about integrating the hospital. The administrator’s name was Mr. Larry Rigsby, and I had several meetings with him. At the first one, Mr. Rigsby told me: “Dr. Hereford, I can see it coming. I know we’re gonna have to do something. Let me just think this over for a day or two, and you come back, and we’ll meet again, and I’ll tell you what I’ve decided , and you can tell me whether you and your committee will be pleased with that.” So at our second meeting, Mr. Rigsby says: “I’ll tell you what I’ve decided, and you tell me what you think about it. In about two, three weeks, I’ll just quietly walk over one morning, and I’ll tell the nurses in the newborn nursery to accept black babies. And then, another eight, ten days, we’ll integrate the pediatric ward. And then, after that has soaked in, and they get used to that, we’ll integrate labor and delivery, and the postpartum ward. And assuming that things are still going along fine, we’ll do medicine. And then we’ll do surgery.” And I brought that back to my committee, and my committee seemed satis fied with it, and we took it to the mass meeting. And everybody was quietly relieved, because the administrator didn’t want demonstrations, and we didn’t want to have to put on demonstrations. Mr. Rigsby did it just like he said he’d do. He walked over one morning, and he told the nurses running the newborn nursery, “We’re gonna have all the babies born today and from now on, you accept them.” Sure enough, the pediatrics ward was integrated, and I don’t know if Mr. Rigsby got the idea from some other hospital or if he came up with the idea himself, but it sure did seem like a wonderful plan to me because in the newborn and pediatrics wards, the kids didn’t know they were not supposed to like each other anyway. And then the labor and delivery, when those women came 112 / Chapter 5 in there in pain getting ready to have a baby, I don’t think they cared about who was next door to them. So that seemed to work out just fine. It took about twelve months for the hospital to complete its desegregation and for people to become acclimatized to it. In the meantime, Mr. Rigsby had started integrating the eating facilities. When I had started practicing, there’d been no eating facilities at all for the black doctors and black nurses, who would have to take brown bags with them. Back in the old days, the nursing shifts were twelve hours long, and you can imagine a person going to work as a nurse, a nurse’s aide, or an orderly to work in a place for twelve hours and have no eating facilities whatsoever. So the black nurses used to eat right there on the unit from their brown bags, in the Colored Wing. Later, some of them were assigned to duties on the white side, though never in administrative capacities. They also had black maids, orderlies , and nurse’s aides working over there, but none could eat in the cafeteria . Well, about 1960 or 1961, the hospital had set up one small room where black people had two tables.They could come through the line with their trays and pick up the food, but they knew they needed to go to the side room after they picked up the food. It was only after the hospital integrated that they actually integrated the cafeteria. For the first few days, when I went to the cafeteria to eat, you could cut the tension with a knife. But it gradually got better and better, and in eight or ten days, you could tell it was just a little bit different, and in another two or three months, there were black nurses and white nurses sitting at the same table,laughing and talking. We’re all working together on a unit at the same time, lunch break at the same time, walk back to the unit. When we started our sit-ins and marches, and once integration came...