A flamboyant civil-rights leader —doctor, orator, activist — finally gets his due

[question everything]

AUGUST 7, 2009

Review
Demanding Rights, Courting Controversy
A flamboyant civil-rights leader —doctor, orator, activist—finally gets his due

By Mark Bauerlein
WSJ

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T.R.M. Howard — physician, landowner, activist, orator and the subject of “Black Maverick,” a compelling biography by David T. Beito and his wife, Linda Royster Beito. “Black Maverick” is a necessary biography, too: Howard played an important part in the Emmett Till story, and in the entire civil-rights era. He deserves to be better known. Howard was born in Kentucky in 1908. As a teenager, helped by a white patron, he attended college in Alabama and Nebraska, winning prizes for oratory and securing admission to the College of Medical Evangelists, a Seventh-day Adventist medical school in California. Soon after he became a newspaper columnist and joined two gubernatorial campaigns: first, that of Robert “Fighting Bob” Shuler, a radio evangelist and the leader of the Prohibitionist Party; second, that of left-wing icon Upton Sinclair. Both men lost their bids to become California’s governor, and Howard continued his medical career, returning to the South and becoming chief surgeon at a hospital in Mound Bayou, Miss.

He bought land, bred livestock, served on the board of a bank and advanced black enterprise on the premise that political power needed financial power. He led voter-registration drives, supported boycotts and lobbied Washington for services and hospitals. Theodore Bilbo, a Democratic senator from Mississippi in the late 1930s and 1940s, termed Howard “a Negro that was on the square” and assured Howard that he himself possessed “none of that prejudice that these damn New York Negroes and Jews talk about in my heart.” Famed civil-rights leader Medgar Evers was Howard’s protégé, as was (later) Jesse Jackson. In the most public period of his career (Howard died in 1976, at age 68), Jet magazine tracked him every month and Ebony highlighted him in a story on “The New Fighting South.”

As the Till trial date approached, Howard was poised to take action. He made his home a command center, welcoming Till’s mother, hosting journalists and providing safety for witnesses he’d rounded up with promises of safe passage to Chicago after the trial. Guards roamed the premises, and Howard slept with a .45 at his pillow, a submachine gun at his feet. The “not guilty” verdict returned by the jury dismayed many but inspired Howard to take the case to the public. He delivered speeches in Baltimore, Los Angeles and New York decrying lawlessness in the South and berating J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, whom he accused of foot-dragging whenever a black victim was involved.

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With Howard so prominent back then, people might wonder why he has virtually no place in the popular memory of the civil-rights movement. The Beitos have an explanation. Other aspects of Howard’s life, they argue, tainted his legacy—for one thing, his sexual habits. He married once. He and his wife never had children, but Howard did manage to father eight — yes, eight — children with other women. He also acquired a controversial medical expertise: abortion. He sometimes averaged six procedures a day before Roe v. Wade and, after Roe, turned his clinic in Chicago (where he had moved in the 1950s) into an abortion mill. Furthermore, the authors say, “the overpowering legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.” eclipsed nearly all other civil-rights figures, especially those who survived the movement without visible suffering.

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“Black Maverick,” though, makes room for exactly such a figure, and rightly so. That Howard made an important contribution is unquestionable. Three months after the Till murder, he lectured in a ­Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., the guest of ­26-year-old pastor Martin Luther King. He spoke of shootings, the FBI and a ­freedom march on ­Washington, D.C. One woman in the audience remembered years later Howard’s vivid ­description of the Till killing. Her name was Rosa Parks, and four days after Howard spoke she answered a Montgomery bus driver, “No.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052970204313604574330671918288990.html (subscription)

—Mr. Bauerlein is the author of “Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906.”