Salt of the Earth: Georgia Boy by Jessica A. Johnson and Wilburn H. Weddington (review)

Salt of the Earth, the autobiography of one of Columbus’ most accomplished African American physicians, is a riveting story of hardship, perseverance, family, triumph, regret, and redemption. A native of Hiram, Georgia; a small town thirty miles outside of Atlanta, Wilburn H. Weddington, Sr., was born during the period known as the roaring twenties on September 21, 1924, right around the time that jazz was sweeping across America and being hailed as “society’s contemporary music.” That year, “Everybody Loves My Baby” and “King Porter Stomp” by Jelly Roll Morton and Ira and George Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” were three of the year’s most popular recordings and dances such as the Charleston and the Black Bottom were all the rage. The book chronicles Weddington’s boyhood years when he, like generations of Blacks before him, worked the land to make ends meet, all the while being short-changed by the towns’ White landowners who set up a wage system that deliberately kept Blacks in debt; to Weddington’s matriculation at Morehouse College; to Howard University Medical School during World War II; and finally to his trek to Columbus, Ohio, courtesy of Uncle Sam. Weddington’s career has been marked by many firsts, including being the first Black admitted to the Cobb County Medical Society in 1952 to being the first Black faculty member to be promoted to full professor at The Ohio State University School of Medicine in 1991. His list of achievements is extensive and inspiring to anyone who endeavors to excel in his or her field of expertise. One might conclude that Salt of the Earth is the classic Horatio Alger story where a poor litle boy, against all odds, pulls himself up by his bootstraps; nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, Weddington infers that without hard work the good fortune that he has enjoyed over the years would not have materialized, yet he makes clear that he was the beneficiary of tremendous mentorship by many, without whom there would have been no Wilburn H. Weddington, MD. He is well aware on whose shoulders he stands.

I recommend Salt of the Earth to anyone who is interested in local Columbus history, African American history, and Americana. The photos contained therein add to the lively prose and enable the reader to not only put names to faces, but to get a sense of those whose impact on Weddington’s life was immeasurable. In Salt of the Earth, readers are not only treated to a firsthand account of Black people’s experiences with the peonage system of the Jim Crow South, but ways in which Blacks survived the vitriolic environs of small town Georgia, determined to make a way of out no way. Weddington’s recollections of his and other Black family’s tribulations should not be glossed over, as, according to archives at Tuskegee University, no state, with the exception of Mississippi, was the site of more lynchings from 1882 to 1968 than Georgia. Indeed, the year Weddington was born, Walter White published a book in which that subject was featured prominently; The Fire in the Flint, which focused on the career and heinous lynching of an uppity and politically conscious Black physician and veteran of World War I.

Weddington quotes Paul Laurence Dunbar when he says that Blacks wore “a mask” that grinned and lied in order to survive. Weddington’s stories about his days at Morehouse College and Howard University are more light-hearted, but equally compelling, as he recalled carrying Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois’s ataché case about the AU center and his encounters with Drs. Charles R. Drew and William Montaque Cobb, the renowned physician and physical anthropologist, respectively. Later in the book, Weddington gives readers insight into his personal life as a father, husband, and Christian. These passages are especially poignant and instructive to anyone for whom maintaining...