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

Chapter Five: Being a Doctor Is Not Enough

Basically, you can’t separate medical problems from social, economic, and political ones, nor can you neglect the health of one racial segment or class without damage to the health of all. — Edward C. Mazique, The Milwaukee Sentinel, 14 August 1958 Eddie was now a doctor, a man respected by the black community. No longer living in the South, his relations with whites were clearly an improvement over what he had experienced in Natchez and Atlanta. Yet all of his professional achievements did not make him immune to the discrimination suffered by blacks in the nation’s capital and the surrounding areas. Memories of some of these incidents would always remain in his mind. For some reason, my car wasn’t running one day and Dr. Jimmy Gray and I decided we would take the bus over to Arlington to this particular place to study. We were received very well until we were ready to get on the bus to come home again. It was pretty much empty so we sat in the front of the bus. This was in Virginia, right across the bridge from Washington. The bus driver came and told us, “I’m sorry you have to move to the back of the bus.” I told him we were tired of sitting in the backs of buses and we were not going to move. He told me he was going to leave me in 121 CHAPTER FIVE [ Being a Doctor Is Not Enough Virginia. Anyway, we had to leave the seats where we were, to go sit in the back of the bus to cross over the Potomac River into D.C. The man had a black curtain that he drew across so that we couldn’t see where we were going. That was in the early s. Imagine going through that as a doctor and being relegated to this type of thing. It just didn’t make any sense. Things like that will do something to you. Life goes on, but when you keep on facing events like this you have to develop a way to get around it without having to stoop. I made a statement at that time that I would never cross the Potomac River to live over there in Virginia. I decided, because of that incident, I wasn’t going south or southeast any more. I always moved towards Maryland and headed north or northeast in the city. It was not just Virginia and the southern states, however, that were still segregated. The s saw discrimination in Washington housing greater than that evidenced in the s. Although restrictive covenants were struck down in a  Supreme Court decision, voluntary adherence to covenants still limited the areas in the city in which blacks could live. Places of recreation including restaurants, movie houses, theaters, and District playgrounds were still segregated. Major organizations for the city’s youth such as the Boy’s Clubs and theYMCA fought any integration efforts. Public schools were still separate and given unequal funding. And equal opportunities in employment, even at the federal level, came only after battles that were to spread over the next several decades. No matter how dismal this view of the city seemed, there were good people working at all levels to change it. One of the most effective of those challenging the segregated world that was Washington, as well as injustices everywhere in the United States, was an active civil rights lawyer named Charles Hamilton Houston. By the time they met in , “Charlie,” as Eddie called him, had been vice-dean and a professor at Howard University’s law school and had refused lucrative offers to serve as its dean. He had directed the NAACP’S legal campaign for equal rights from  to  and served as a special counsel until . He had successfully pleaded some of the Supreme Court cases most crucial to eliminating segregation. In  he argued before the Supreme Court in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada and won one of the first major court battles for equal educational opportunities. The decision denied the 122 [ CHAPTER FIVE state’s right to exclude blacks from state-supported educational programs that were offered to whites. They would no longer be allowed to meet their obligation to black students by paying their tuition and sending them to another state for their education. Now the states either had to admit blacks or create an equal facility...