When Harlem Nearly Killed King (11 page)

Shortly after that Wright left too, unable to stomach Jim Crow any longer. He enlisted in the Army Medical Corps during World War I, where his entire battalion was gassed with phosgene, leaving him slightly debilitated with a lung disease that over time would turn into full-blown TB. After being discharged from the army, he headed to New York City, where he served as an assistant physician in a venereal disease clinic. At the same time he was appointed clinical assistant visiting surgeon on the staff of Harlem Hospital, meaning he could treat patients in the outpatient clinic but not the hospital itself. He would be the first Negro appointed to the staff, period. With the aid of Negro politicians and community leaders in Harlem, Wright
agitated some more, organizing the Negro physicians in the community, who in 1925 sent telegrams at two o’clock in the morning to Mayor Jimmy Walker and other operatives in the Tammany Hall political machine, demanding that they be appointed to the staff inside the hospital. The bold move resulted in the appointment of the five Negroes, including Wright himself, to the staff of the hospital.

The following year, 1926, Aubré Maynard and three other Negroes joined the class of new interns inside the hospital. Almost in tandem Maynard and Wright began making strides inside the hospital. Though they were never close personal friends, they respected each other, one from the West Indies, the other from the Deep South, both stubbornly intent on rising above the insults meted out to Negroes in their day and proving that they were as good as their Caucasian counterparts. After finishing his two-year internship (often called a houseship in those days), Maynard obtained a junior position on the hospital staff. He and Wright both learned as much as they could from the surgical cases coming through, setting high standards for themselves and for the other Negro physicians. Three years later Wright was appointed a police surgeon for the city of New York, scoring higher on the exam than all but one other applicant for one of the positions (who bested him by less than a percentage point). With this post, in which he would agree to look the other way at the rampant corruption and abuse he became privy to, Wright was able to secure a steady income while making further strides at Harlem Hospital and organizing a surgical society for budding Negro surgeons. Maynard became one of the first to enthusiastically join the organization.

So stringent were both men in what they expected from other Negro physicians and surgeons that a debate soon raged regarding which Negro physicians and surgeons were qualified to join the hospital staff (or remain on staff) and which were not. By that time, Wright had been given the green light by the city hospital bureaucracy, as well as the predominantly Caucasian staff of Harlem Hospital itself, to virtually choose which Negroes would be appointed and which ones would receive internships. Soon Wright decided that certain Negro staff members had to go because in his opinion they didn’t measure up. By 1932 the issue became so alienating that Wright’s faction (including Maynard) was publicly denounced by opposing Negro physicians in the community, who marshaled the aide of Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and began protesting at City Hall what Wright was doing to remove the Negro physicians on staff whom he didn’t think belonged at the hospital. It would take a few years for the controversy to blow over.

Meanwhile Wright also became active in civil rights. By the early 1930s, Walter White succeeded James Weldon Johnson and became executive secretary of the NAACP. Remembering the feistiness of his fellow Atlanta native, he convinced him to join the NAACP board of directors, which Wright began chairing in 1936. Wright became a relentless fighter for national civil rights, as well as a stubborn opponent of government-organized segregation in the construction of medical facilities for Negroes. He also became personal physician to several notable Negro celebrities, including W.E.B. Du Bois, and a friend to people such as Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Simultaneously he began making further strides in his field. In 1934 he became only
the second Negro surgeon to be admitted to the American College of Surgeons. Four years later he became a diplomat of the newly organized American Board of Surgery. He also became a medical and surgical researcher, devising a plate for certain types of fractures of the femur. In 1938,
Life
magazine named him the most eminent Negro physician in the United States In 1943 Wright was named chairman of the Department of Surgery and, in subsequent years, headed a research team that supported numerous medical investigations in the use of newly created antibiotics. His Harlem Hospital team would be the first to use the drug Aureomycin in human beings.

John Cordice would be part of Wright’s investigative team in the use of antibiotics. But he would never forget how difficult it was to get close to the man and even interview for a surgical residency after he returned from his stint in the army, which he had entered after completing his nine-month internship at Harlem Hospital. The year of his discharge was 1947. During his internship he had seen Wright intensely grill others aspiring for residency slots in surgery at the hospital. Most such candidates were unsuccessful in gaining a spot. Only a certain number were going to Negroes. By the early forties the hospital staff was still quite integrated, indeed, the most integrated of any in the country. And given the position Wright was in as a police surgeon for the city, he had to meet a certain quid pro quo, allowing a certain number of Caucasians into the surgical training program at the hospital (as Maynard would be after him, Wright was the sole Negro M.D. heading a department in the hospital).

So Cordice was anxious to obtain one of the positions. But the question was, How? Back home in Durham everyone was anxious to
see him return. John wasn’t sure he wanted to. There was one physician in the community who might be able to cajole Wright into granting him a residency slot. Clyde Donnell had been the only other Negro in the class of 1915 at Harvard Medical School. After graduating, Donnell married Martha Merrick, the daughter of one of the founders of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. This meant that Donnell had married into wealth. He became vice president in charge of the medical department at the company, a position that only required him to review medical claims. He was well aware of what Wright was up to at Harlem Hospital, and Wright remembered him well, too. So Cordice returned home and told Donnell of his interest in a surgical residency under Wright. Donnell looked at him and wondered why that was necessary.

“Cordice, let me tell you something,” he said. “You’re out of your mind. What you need to do is come back here to Durham, work with your dad, and be somebody. You don’t need to go up there [to Harlem hospital]. First of all, Louis is crazy as hell. All he’s going to do is work you to death. And you’ll get no credit for what you do. You’ll be busy writing papers, and so on. You aren’t going to go anywhere with that. I wouldn’t recommend it. And not only that, [Louis] is sick you know. He has TB. First thing you know, you’ll get it too. You know, your sister died of TB. You don’t want to make that trip. Trust me.”

These were still the days when after completing an internship, an M.D. could learn by doing. And both Cordice and Donnell were aware of the keen competition among Negro medical graduates for the few surgical training slots available to them.

“How else am I going to get my surgical training?” asked John. “How am I going to pass my boards?”

“You don’t need any damn boards,” Donnell replied. “That’s for white folks.”

Cordice ignored the advice and repeated to Donnell that he absolutely had to obtain a residency training slot at Harlem Hospital. He begged Donnell to put in a call to Wright. Reluctantly Donnell told him he would see what he could do.

After returning to New York City upon his honorable discharge from the army, Cordice had begun working in the pathology lab up at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. It was April 1947. Residency training appointments in surgery started in July. So after heading to Durham to talk to Donnell, John returned to the Bronx. A few weeks later he received a call from Dr. Wright’s secretary at Harlem Hospital giving him an appointment to see Wright. Excitedly, Cordice made his way to the appointment. Though Wright had passed him by when Cordice was an intern, this was the first time he now viewed John as anything but another face in the Harlem Hospital crowd.

So now he entered Wright’s office. After the requisite greetings, Wright told him to have a seat. Nervously Cordice did as instructed. Wright sat behind his desk, then looked at him directly. “You wanna work here?” he asked John.

“Of course I do,” replied John.

“Well, I’ll tell you something. If you come to work for me, you’re going to work. This is not going to be child’s play. And as for calling Clyde Donnell to try to get an in with me—Clyde is lazy as hell. He wasted his Harvard education, went down to Durham and
married some gal whose father founded North Carolina Mutual, and all he’s been doing ever since is drinking corn liquor and resting!”

All John felt he could say to that was, “Yes sir! Yes sir!”

A few weeks later Cordice received notification that he should report to Harlem Hospital on July 1st. Wright’s secretary informed him that he wasn’t getting a residency training slot. Instead he would be an emergency room fellow, a position for which he wouldn’t be paid. But he would get room and board in the house staff quarters. And while working in the emergency room he would be competing with another guy for an actual residency training slot the following year. Cordice felt compelled to take the deal. He worked hard in the emergency room, and at the end of the year not only did he receive a residency appointment in the hospital, so did the guy he was competing with.

Upon becoming part of the surgical house staff, Cordice became part of Wright’s team investigating the use of Aureomycin in humans. This was an interest Wright began developing largely because of his increasingly debilitated physical condition (due to the past ravages of TB), which made it difficult for him to continue performing surgery, necessitating that he sit as he operated, then that he leave the operating room altogether, unable to withstand anesthetic vapors any longer. Wright succeeded in distinguishing research as a respected branch of the hospital. Residents on staff like Cordice became part of a 1948
Life
magazine feature spread, lauding Wright’s team for what they were up to. John even wrote a paper on the use of Aureomycin in tubercular cervical lymphadenopathy. His paper was published in the prestigious
Yearbook of Surgery
, which in Cordice’s view, made
Wright not as tough and “crazy” as Clyde Donnell implied. John knew that there were many surgical department chiefs who would have taken complete credit for his research and published such a paper under their own names, giving him second or third credit. Such tactics were common not only in academic medicine but in academia, period. And the reasoning had to do with hierarchy, with being a good team player. As such, any discoveries or breakthrough progress made under the leadership of the person responsible for admitting you to the department or the company were supposed to be credited to the man or woman at the helm of the ship, so to speak.

So Cordice became part of the department. He conducted research, examined surgical cases, and soon began performing surgery. He also began observing the other man in the department with the reputation for uncompromising excellence—that fellow graduate of NYU’s School of Medicine, Aubré de Lambert Maynard. Yet Cordice already had reservations about him. He had begun to feel that way while he was still an intern. One morning he was told that Maynard would be operating. The case involved a very wizened, well-respected old lady in the community who had abdominal cancer. Cordice scrubbed and observed as Maynard and his assistants opened her abdomen, only to see that the tumor was everywhere. Clearly her case was hopeless. There was nothing Maynard could do for her. John had been expecting to see in Maynard some indication of compassion for what lay before him—whether in his body language or in the way he addressed those assisting him—something to show that he was saddened by what he saw, the type of thing Cordice had observed
in other surgeons at the hospital. But he observed the exact opposite. All Maynard did was suck in his teeth, make some sutures, and close the elderly woman back up without saying one word. John was shocked.

And now he was back at Harlem Hospital as a surgical resident. In 1952 Wright died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-two. The issue became who was going to succeed him as chairman of the department. What Cordice had observed about Maynard in the operating room that day in 1944 was among the many things that troubled other physicians and surgeons at the hospital about him. Yes, he was good at the theory of surgery. But there was that attitude, and the sense that he was a prima donna. The hospital board met in November 1952 to choose Wright’s successor. Everyone was adamant that no matter how good Aubré Maynard was as a surgeon, he was not going to be chairman of the department. The board voted. They chose Dr. Ralph Young. Yet word had it that, knowing he was sick, Wright had already spoken to the director of the New York City Department of Hospitals about the man who should succeed him in the event of his untimely demise. Allegedly, he told Dr. Marcus Kogel, the Commissioner of Hospitals, that that man should be Aubré Maynard, even though throughout the time they knew each other, Wright and Maynard had never been pals, so to speak. Allegedly Wright thought his replacement should be Maynard precisely because he was good. So after receiving the recommendation of Harlem Hospital’s board that Ralph Young be named the new chairman of the department, Kogel overruled the board and named Maynard chairman. The board insisted it wouldn’t stand for
Maynard chairing the department. But Kogel held his ground and Maynard became chairman anyway.

John Cordice had just completed his training in general surgery. Before completing it, he had written another paper (this time regarding heart surgery) that was scheduled for publication. At the time of completion, Maynard was chief of the Division of Thoracic Surgery, which he had established in 1947 at the request of Wright. Upon receiving notification about its desire to publish the paper, Maynard instructed the journal that he, Aubré Maynard, was to receive first credit for the research. In fact, he had had absolutely nothing to do with the research. Of course, he was just following the usual procedure of plenty of department and division heads in academia. Yet, by then, Cordice was used to the fair treatment meted out by Wright. By contrast, not only was there no question in Maynard’s mind that, as chief of the Division of Thoracic Surgery, his name should go first, there was even some doubt as to whose name should go second.