When Harlem Nearly Killed King by Hugh Pearson

Author:Hugh Pearson [Pearson, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60980-321-6
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2011-01-04T05:00:00+00:00

TEN

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IF THERE WAS anything the doctors at Harlem Hospital were used to, it was responding to trauma emergencies. Being in the midst of a community so much of which was a ghetto, it wasn’t uncommon for depressed and frustrated Negro men to take out their anger about the racial realities they confronted on each other. Someone had too much to drink and became overly sensitive about a joke. Or a man had too much to drink and got fresh with another man’s woman, or became overly sensitive when another man said something to his woman. A fight broke out. There were weapons involved—a gun or a knife—and before you knew it, an ambulance just like the one that had picked up King from Blumstein’s Department Store was rushing in the latest stabbing or gunshot victim to Harlem Hospital. This type of thing happened so often it was a staple of stereotypes regarding Negro communities and of jokes told about the usefulness of Harlem Hospital. At one point residents at Mount Sinai Hospital came to Harlem Hospital just to learn from the trauma cases. The only catch was that by 1958, often Caucasian physicians had the attitude that the majority of physicians at the hospital (being Negro) didn’t know the best way to handle what came through their facility.

This attitude was nothing new. Even though New York was a cosmopolitan city, Negro physicians in Harlem and in the rest of the city had been dealing with the medical community’s version of racial prejudice for quite some time (and members of the medical profession tended to be more conservative than members of other learned professions to begin with). For years it had been almost impossible for them to get staff appointments in the city’s large, respected public hospitals. An appointment at a municipal facility like Harlem Hospital was good for the experience. But as was true at all city hospitals, you couldn’t charge for your services. Thus for the patients who paid you, in 1958, there were few other facilities for Negro physicians to admit their patients. Notably within Harlem, there was nearby Sydenham Hospital (which opened its staff to Negro physicians in 1945), and for a time, Mount Morris Park Hospital which, before going bankrupt, had been run by a group of physicians inexperienced in management. For several years running, the lot of the Negro physician in New York City, and even in Harlem, had been a hard one, no matter how skilled he or she happened to be. Thus, particularly among those of the generation who trained prior to the 1930s, the implications of the nascent civil rights movement led to feelings of bitterness that they were in the twilight of their careers and wouldn’t be able to benefit from the new day that was dawning. This sentiment was about to have huge implications with regard to surgery on Martin Luther King, Jr.

For a long time the typical Negro physician in Harlem had been used to the following: starting his day at seven or eight A.

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