In this Book
- Beside the Troubled Waters: A Black Doctor Remembers Life, Medicine, and Civil Rights in an Alabama Town
- Book
- 2011
- Published by: The University of Alabama Press
A memoir by an African American physician in Alabama whose story in many ways typifies the lives and careers of black doctors in the south during the segregationist era
Beside the Troubled Waters is a memoir by an African American physician in Alabama whose story in many ways typifies the lives and careers of black doctors in the south during the segregationist era while also illustrating the diversity of the black experience in the medical profession. Based on interviews conducted with Hereford over ten years, the account includes his childhood and youth as the son of a black sharecropper and Primitive Baptist minister in Madison County, Alabama, during the Depression; his education at Huntsville’s all-black CouncillSchool and medical training at MeharryMedicalCollege in Nashville; his medical practice in Huntsville’s black community beginning in 1956; his efforts to overcome the racism he met in the white medical community; his participation in the civil rights movement in Huntsville; and his later problems with the Medicaid program and state medical authorities, which eventually led to the loss of his license.
Table of Contents

- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-x
- Introduction
- pp. 1-9
- 1. Through a Glass Darkly
- pp. 11-36
- 2. To Be a Doctor
- pp. 37-54
- 4. Bringing Freedom to the Rocket City
- pp. 86-110
- 5. Integrating the Hospital and the Schools
- pp. 111-126
- 6. Troubles and Trials
- pp. 127-143
- Bibliography
- pp. 167-171
Additional Information
Copyright
2011