A Black Physician's Struggle for Civil Rights: Edward C. Mazique, M.D.

Chapter Four: The Nation’s Capital: A City of Inconsistencies

There is a time to do everything. There is a time for striking, a time when you don’t strike. There is a time when you move forward, there is a time when you retreat and think and decide, refurbish your forces and make new plans and go out again. When I came up to Washington and walked into church and found they would tell me to come back here to sit, the timing was then. I just kept walking and walked out of the church. — Edward C. Mazique, interview with author, 1984 Over the years, race relations in Washington, D.C., were anything but consistent. At times, blacks and whites peacefully coexisted. At other times, there was animosity and hostility between the races. During some eras, whites even commingled and socialized with blacks with ease and grace. It is impossible to understand what Washington was like when Eddie arrived without knowing a bit of the history of these race relations. Washington, D.C., and the then-adjacent municipality of Georgetown were centers of liberalism in the pre–Civil War South. With the exception of New Orleans, they offered their black residents a more cohesive community and greater opportunities than were provided by any other southern city. By the outbreak of the Civil War, blacks in the District owned $, worth of real estate and supported their own churches and schools. The Civil War found blacks streaming into Washington, threatening to upset the fragile social relationships between the long-time black and white residents. Housing and food were insufficient and the resulting 95 CHAPTER FOUR [ The Nation’s Capital A City of Inconsistencies health conditions were deplorable. This increase in poor, unemployed blacks brought with it an increase in white hostility. However, from the conclusion of the CivilWar through the s there was a rapid growth of civil rights for the District’s black residents. Washington served as a showcase for laws the various legislators believed should be enacted to protect and extend the rights of black citizens, laws that, since their jobs were dependent on voters in their own states, at times they would hesitate to propose in their home locales. As a result, antidiscrimination laws were tougher in Washington than in the rest of the country. Blacks were allowed to serve on juries. Racial discrimination was forbidden in most places of entertainment, barber shops, bars, bathing houses, and ice cream parlors, and the word white was removed from the District charter wherever it appeared. Education was viewed as an important means of upgrading the quality of life for black residents and, in , Howard University, including a medical department, was chartered to serve as a model for biracial education. In  and , there was even talk in Congress of abrogating the charter of the District Medical Society after they refused to admit to membership three qualified physicians of African descent. Race relations seemed to be improving so much that when a stronger antidiscrimination law was proposed by a black councilman, two of his fellow black councilmen argued it was unnecessary since racial prejudice was rapidly disappearing. By the late s, however, such optimism was gone as conditions for blacks began to worsen again. The gulf between the blacks who had succeeded and those who remained in poverty increased, taking away any sense of oneness in the black community. Supreme Court decisions started working against integration. In , theWaite Court declared the Civil Rights Act unconstitutional in the states, and in Plessy v. Ferguson () it was determined that if facilities were “separate but equal” they met the requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment. Segregated housing began to be the norm in D.C. and, by the end of the century, equality under the law had pretty much disappeared. In , in the midst of these worsening racial conditions, black physicians, prohibited from joining the District Medical Society (the local organization sanctioned by the American Medical Association) because of race, founded their own medical society, the Medico-Chirurgical Society, to further professional improvement, with functions paralleling its white counterpart. By the early s the living conditions for the very poor blacks had somewhat improved while the middle- and upper-class blacks became subject to greater and greater humiliations and defeats. The 96 [ CHAPTER FOUR genial relations that had existed between the upper classes of people of different races had all but disappeared. A social worker observed, in  in Washington, “the separation of the races...