Under the Knife: How a Wealthy Negro Surgeon Wielded Power in the Jim Crow South
- ISBN-10
- 0684846519
- ISBN-13
- 9780684846514
- Series
- Under the Knife
- Category
- Social Science / Ethnic Studies / American / African American & Black Studies
- Pages
- 249
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2000
- Publisher
- Free Press
- Author
- Hugh Pearson
Description
Hugh Pearson grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, encouraged by his parents to believe that nothing was beyond his reach. If he needed any further inspiration, he could look to his great-uncle, Dr. Joseph Griffin. Although Griffin had stayed in the Deep South, he managed to become a pillar of his community at a time when Afro-Americans -- then called Negroes -- rarely prospered. He became the first Negro surgeon in south Georgia, donating millions of dollars to Afro-American institutions and building the largest private hospital for Afro-Americans in the State. Griffin inspired Louis Sullivan, who later became President Bush's Secretary of Health and Human Services, to go into medicine and a young Hosea Williams, who grew up to be one of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s most trusted aides, to aspire to be someone important. He served as a father figure to Donald Hollowell, the lawyer who became a mentor to Vernon Jordan and earned the nickname Georgia's "Mr. Civil Rights" for his legal battles on behalf of Martin Luther King, Jr., and other activists. In Under the Knife, Pearson embarks on a personal journey to learn more about his great-uncle and the rest of the men in his family. What he has uncovered are cold truths about the moral complexities of success and power in a racist society. His uncle's fortune was largely built on performing backdoor abortions for women of all colors, on treating sexually transmitted diseases in Caucasian men too embarrassed to seek help from their regular doctors, and on coercing donations of property from many patients when they couldn't afford to pay their medical bills. Pearson concludes that the same drive and willingness to bend the rules that helped men like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan become wealthy and powerful in less enlightened eras were just as necessary in an ambitious Afro-American man like his great-uncle, who faced a far more difficult path. Pearson discusses his great-uncle's relationships with southern Jews who befriended him and uncovers the buried history of Afro-American physicians in the Jim Crow era. He dramatizes the struggles of other successful men in his family, charting his forefathers' rise from slavery to ownership of large Georgia farms and flourishing businesses in Jacksonville, Florida, and the accomplishments of his own father, who became the first person of any color in his rural Georgia county to earn a medical degree. With Under the Knife, Hugh Pearson brings to life the pains and triumphs, as well as the ambiguities and fortitude, involved in the rise of middle-class and wealthy Afro-Americans, and restores the true legacy of an overlooked and oversimplified part of the American experience.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2020-06-26
- - pages
- Paperback
- Temple University Press
Similar books
-
Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations
By Arnold van de LaarFrom the story of the desperate man from seventeenth-century Amsterdam who grimly cut a stone out of his own bladder to Bob Marley's deadly toe, Under the Knife offers a wealth of fascinating and unforgettable insights into medicine and ...
-
UNDER THE KNIFE
By Tess GerritsenA fan-favorite novel by internationally bestselling author Tess Gerritsen For attorney David Ransom, it begins as an open-and-shut case: malpractice.
-
Health Care Under the Knife: Moving Beyond Capitalism for Our Health
By Working Group for Health Beyond CapitalismDisobedience : doctor workers unite! / Howard Waitzkin -- Becoming employees : the deprofessionalization and emerging social class position of health professionals / Matt Anderson -- The degradation of medical labor and the meaning of ...
-
Under the Knife: A Novel
By Kelly ParsonsTerrifying and captivating, Kelly Parsons's Under the Knife is a heart pounding thriller that will have readers on the edge of their seats up to the very last page.
-
Surgeon Under the Knife
By William A. NolenSurgeon Under the Knife
-
The Knife
By Ross RitchellIt's hot and getting hotter this summer in Afghanipakiraqistan - the preferred name for the ambiguous stretch of the world where the U.S. Special Forces operate with little outside attention.
-
Women Under the Knife: A History of Surgery
By Ann G. DallyA disturbing and extraordinary history of how modern surgery developed through experiments on women.
-
Under the Knife
By Krista Franklin"Part memoir, part treatise, part collage and experiment, Krista Franklin's Under the Knife is an excavation; a dig at the sites of the construction and demolition of the poet/artist's selves."--The publisher
-
Slash: Paper Under the Knife
By David Revere McFadden-A survey of contemporary artists who use cut paper - from small-scale intricate cuttings to monumental architectural interventions and sculpture - as an art form Eclectic, eccentric and tirelessly innovative,...
-
Doing Harm
By Kelly ParsonsBotching a major surgery when his ambition for a prestigious job gets the better of him, Steve Mitchell learns that a patient who died under mysterious circumstances was targeted by a sociopath who holds information capable of destroying ...