T. R. M. Howard: Doctor, Entrepreneur, Civil Rights Pioneer - Softcover

Beito, David T.; Beito, Linda Royster

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1598133136 ISBN 13: 9781598133134

Verlag: Independent Institute, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

T.R.M. Howard: Doctor, Entrepreneur, Civil Rights Pioneer tells the remarkable story of one of the early leaders of the Civil Rights Movement.

A renaissance man, T.R.M. Howard (1908-1976) was a respected surgeon, important black community leader, and successful businessman. Howard's story reveals the importance of the black middle class, their endurance and entrepreneurship in the midst of Jim Crow, and their critical role in the early Civil Rights Movement.

In this powerful biography, David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito shine a light on the life and accomplishments of this civil rights leader. Howard founded black community organizations, organized civil rights rallies and boycotts, championed free enterprise and the Second Amendment, critiqued Big Government and socialism, mentored Medgar Evers, fought the Ku Klux Klan, and helped lead the fight for justice for Emmett Till and others. Raised in poverty and witness to racial violence from a young age, Howard was passionate about justice and equality. Ambitious, zealous, and sometimes paradoxical, T.R.M. Howard provides a complete and fascinating portrait of an important leader all too often forgotten.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

David T. Beito is a research fellow at the Independent Institute and professor emeritus at the University of Alabama. He received his PhD in history at the University of Wisconsin and is the author of T.R.M. Howard: Doctor, Entrepreneur, and Civil Rights Pioneer (with Linda Royster Beito) and From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967. He is also co-editor of The Voluntary City: Choice, Community and Civil Society and the forthcoming Rose Lane Says: Thoughts on Liberty and Equality, 1942-1945.

Linda Royster Beito is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and Professor of Social Sciences and Dean of Arts and Science at Stillman College, where she has received several awards for excellence in teaching and was inducted into the Zeta Phi Beta Hall of Fame. She received her M.S. in criminal justice and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Alabama, and she has been Assistant Professor of Political Science and Criminal Justice at the University of South Alabama.

Jerry W. Mitchell is the Investigative Reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, MS, who convinced authorities to reopen seemingly cold murder cases from the Civil Rights Era. Mitchell's work so far has helped put at least four Klansmen behind bars: Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers, Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers for ordering the fatal firebombing of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer in 1966, Bobby Cherry for the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four girls and Edgar Ray Killen, for helping orchestrate the June 21, 1964, killings of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.

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T. R. M. Howard

Doctor, Entrepreneur, Civil Rights Pioneer

By David T. Beito, Linda Royster Beito

The Independent Institute

Copyright © 2018 Independent Institute
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-59813-313-4

Contents

Foreword by Jerry W. Mitchell, 
Introduction, 
1 Up from the Black Patch, 
2 The Education of a "Race Man", 
3 Fraternalist, Entrepreneur, Planter, and Segregation-Era Pragmatist, 
4 A "Modern 'Moses'" for Civil Rights in Mississippi, 
5 "The Most Hated, and the Best Loved, Man in Mississippi", 
6 "Hell to Pay in Mississippi": The Murder of Emmett Till, 
7 "Time Bomb": Howard, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Emmett Till Mystery, 
8 Taking On the Machine in Chicago: A Republican Campaign for Congress, 
9 Triumph and Tragedy: The Friendship Medical Center, 
Afterword, 
Notes, 
Acknowledgments, 
About the Authors, 
Illustrations, 

CHAPTER 1

Up from the Black Patch

IT WAS JANUARY 1956. As T. R. M. Howard looked back, he had many reasons to feel a sense of pride. He was one of the wealthiest blacks in Mississippi, had treated thousands of patients as chief surgeon in two of the state's largest black hospitals, and had won election to the presidency of the National Medical Association, the leading black medical society in the United States. His national reputation as a civil rights leader seemed secure. As the founder of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, he had mentored an emerging generation of activists, including Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer. In September 1955, Howard had played a pivotal role finding witnesses and evidence in the Emmett Till murder case. At the beginning of 1956, his prospects for a greater future on the national stage looked bright. The Chicago Defender had just ranked him first in its annual honor roll.

At age forty-seven, Howard had risen far from his humble origins living in abject rural poverty amid pervasive racial violence. These characteristics set him apart from most of his approximate peers in age and prominence on the national civil rights scene just before the rise of Martin Luther King Jr. They were far more likely to come from middle-class and urban backgrounds. He was born as Theodore Roosevelt Howard on March 2, 1908, in Murray, Calloway County, Kentucky. His parents were Arthur Howard and Mary Chandler Howard. Like their parents before them, they were unskilled tobacco-factory workers. As an article in Howard's college paper later stated, Arthur, inspired by a "spirit of patriotism," had insisted that their first child be named after President Roosevelt. It proved an apt choice, for Theodore's life would often mirror that of his famous namesake.

The Howards had lived for decades in the Black Patch area of western Kentucky and northwestern Tennessee, so named because of the highly prized olive-colored dark-leaf tobacco grown there. They initially labored to grow the crop but later worked in the factories to refine it for chewing purposes. The Black Patch had cast its lot with the Confederacy and segregation was rigid. In the Tennessee portion, blacks almost completely lost the franchise after Reconstruction, but in Kentucky they continued to vote, usually for Republicans, and to serve on juries. But these rights were tenuous and circumscribed by whites, who voted overwhelmingly Democratic.

The Howards originally hailed from Henry County, Tennessee, just south of Calloway County. Theodore's paternal grandfather, Richard Howard, was born a slave in 1863 or 1864. In common with most blacks in the region, he never advanced beyond the economic margins of society. Like his wife, Mary Lassiter Howard, he could neither read nor write. Her father, Andrew Lassiter, was about twenty years old when the Civil War ended. He was Theodore's most direct link to slavery. Theodore may have had Lassiter in mind when he later referred to a story from his "grandfather" who "just before the Civil War ... had begun to 'feel something.' It was something that works just like religion. He didn't explain what it was, but he said, 'There was something in there that made me feel the war would soon be over and I would soon be free.'"

In 1907 Arthur Howard, then only seventeen, married Mary Chandler, who was a year younger. Like the Howards, the Chandlers had an uninterrupted family history of grim poverty and backbreaking toil. Mary's father, Henry Chandler, was born in May 1865, only a month after Robert E. Lee's surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia. He left the farm to be a laborer in a nearby tobacco factory, a typical occupation for blacks in Murray. His wife, Almeda, was a washerwoman in a private home. She was the first of Howard's known ancestors to read and write. Like their parents, Arthur and Mary drifted into semiurban unskilled labor. Arthur secured employment as a twister of chewing tobacco in a factory in Murray, but he may have supplemented the family income through moonshining. Roughly one-third of the town's 2,139 inhabitants were black in 1910, a proportion much higher than the county average.

Mary Howard brought her son Theodore into the world at a time when tensions in Murray were especially high. The year 1908 was probably the most violent in the town's history. As the tobacco wars encroached on Calloway County, locals felt compelled to choose sides. The trouble had started after 1904 when leading Black Patch farmers formed the Planter's Protective Association. The goal was to counter the buying power of the big tobacco companies by pooling their crops in association-owned warehouses. By selling collectively, they hoped to get a higher price than what the tobacco trust usually paid. Within a year, seven out of ten farmers in the Black Patch pledged their crops to the association. But even this level of cooperation did not bring enough market control to determine the price. Independent growers throttled the association's plan by continuing to sell at lower prices directly to the companies. In 1905, frustrated by the failure to establish a cartel to oppose the big companies through voluntary cooperation, some members of the association turned to terror by forming the Night Riders.

Hooded and prowling by night, the Night Riders terrorized all those who did not toe the line for the Planter's Protective Association. Night Riders traveled in mounted patrols that burned crops, warehouses, and factories, destroyed seedbeds, and, in some cases, committed murder. For a brief period, race was not an issue and some black farmers even joined the association. This changed as resentment mounted against the big companies who flaunted "racial etiquette" by purchasing tobacco from blacks at lower prices. The association discovered that blacks might be convenient scapegoats to hide its failure to coerce independent growers. By 1907 many Night Riders in western Kentucky went on a rampage, determined to drive out black farmers. An incidental goal was to make a killing of another sort by snatching up abandoned black property at bargain rates. In desperation, Governor Augustus E. Willson took measures to enforce law and order. He went so far as to take the serious step of announcing his intention to pardon individuals who shot Night Riders.

At the beginning of 1908, the epidemic of violence edged perilously close to Murray. In February and March, whites inspired by the Night Riders attacked blacks in Marshall County (bordering Calloway on the north). Local blacks pleaded in vain for legal protection as they bore the brunt of a sustained campaign...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Independent Institute
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1598133136
• ISBN 13: 9781598133134
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 356
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar