‘Jim Crow’ and Dr. Eliza Greer

Feb 22, 2015 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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Countryman – Stories about life, in and out of Guyana, from a Guyanese perspective

By Dennis Nichols
Some social scientists have been accused of dwelling too much on the vagaries of the ‘human condition’ in general, and the Black ‘problem’, in particular. I understand, and although not a sociologist or historian, I too find certain aspects of Black history riveting, visceral, and worthy of continuous revision, whether in Guyana, the United States, or elsewhere in the

Black diaspora.
It doesn’t hurt to analyze, explore, and learn from life situations, contemporary or historical. Being human, growing, struggling, overcoming, winning, and losing, are ‘life situations’. Black history, like all human history, but especially the centuries-old past of the Africa-America-Caribbean nexus, is a fascinating, convoluted, painful, evolving story. And like it or not, we are all characters in this non-fiction tale.
Nowhere is that story told more poignantly, and more profoundly, than in the so-called New World, including of course, South America and its only English-speaking/Caribbean nation. But it is in the United States of America that it has been most effectively documented, notwithstanding the discrepancies, and oftentimes bias, of the story-tellers.
It is a pity that many of those most affected by the experience of being Black in America and the Caribbean did not have the means to adequately document their struggles and their triumphs, especially between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. So we have to trust our historians’ (White and Black) archival records, and oral traditions. (Think Alex Haley’s ‘Roots’)
Last week I mentioned some outstanding Black men and women we know of, have read about, who inspire us, and some whom we hardly know, but should know more of. I won’t mention those names again. What I will do is to recall one of the cruelest and most egregious forms of governance that helped shape the African-American experience in the U.S., and the story of a relatively unknown African-American woman who simply overcame.

Racial segregation was practiced for roughly 100 years, up to the middle of the last century, despite Blacks having been granted certain constitutional rights by Congress after the abolition of slavery, including citizenship and the right to vote. These were later nullified by the U.S. Supreme Court which virtually sanctioned the idea of ‘separate but equal’ facilities for Blacks and Whites. They were in fact separate but hardly equal.
‘Jim Crow’ laws were legally established in most of the South, with separate schools, hospitals, parks, toilets, and bars, and separate sections in cinemas, libraries, and restaurants, for Blacks and Whites. Miscegenation, the prohibiting interracial marriage, was enforced and the voting rights of Blacks were severely restricted, or denied.
It was a virtual caste system in which Blacks were relegated to the status of second-class citizens, a notion implicitly supported by some Christian ministers who iterated that Whites were the Chosen People, Blacks were cursed, and that God sanctioned racial segregation.
Throughout the South certain signs were common. ‘No Dogs, Negros, Mexicans’ was one. Others read ‘Colored Served in Rear’, ‘Rest Rooms – Whites Only’, ‘We Wash for White People Only’, (At a laundry) and dozens more.
Some ‘laws’ would have been funny were they not so real. No coloured barber could have White women as customers, a Black male could not shake hands with a White male because it implied social equality, a White child in the custody of a White parent or relative could not surrender that child into the custody of a negro, (although negro nannies sometimes breastfed White children) and beer/wine parlours could not serve Blacks and Whites in the same room at the same time.
Apart from these laws, there was unofficial ‘conversation rules’ that Blacks disregarded at the risk of battery, imprisonment, or death. According to Stetson Kennedy, author of Jim Crow Guide, they included never asserting or suggesting that a White person was lying, never laying claim to superior knowledge or intelligence, never laughing derisively at a White person, never attempting to light a White female’s cigarette, and never calling a White person by his/her first name.
Obviously, not all Whites liked or supported segregation. Nevertheless there were countless other injustices and indignities suffered by Black Americans during this period (lynching being the worst) but let the above suffice. By the way, many Guyanese who lived in Mackenzie during the first half of the last century would have told you that there was a form of racial and class segregation in Watooka, a virtual mini-apartheid, between expatriates and locals.
The story of Eliza Ann Grier, which began as segregation, was becoming entrenched in the southern United States. It may not be as compelling as those of some of the more well-known Black American heroes of that era, but it is nonetheless a cogent revision of the triumph and the tragedy endured by Blacks during that period.
Grier was born an emancipated slave in North Carolina in 1864, and as there are no records of her early life, one can only imagine the racial discrimination and lack of educational opportunity she endured while growing up with ‘Jim Crow’.
Nevertheless she had a dream to become a medical doctor, certainly not a common or riskless venture for a non-White woman. Her biography states that she attended Fisk University in Tennessee, where she studied seven years to become a teacher, and later the Women’s Medical College in Pennsylvania. During her period of study, she alternated every year of tuition with a year of picking cotton to help pay her way.
I’ve read about the back-breaking nature of this kind of labour, and Guyanese cane cutters would probably appreciate the sacrifice this young woman made to achieve her dream. She had earlier written to the medical college and admitted, “I have no money, and no source from which to get it; only as I work for every dollar.”
In 1897, Grier achieved the distinction of becoming the first African-American woman licensed to practice medicine in Georgia, and appended the title ‘Doctor’ to her name.
Grier had also observed that when she saw coloured women doing all the work in cases of accouchement (childbirth) and the fee going to ‘some White doctor who merely looked on’ she questioned why she could not get the fee herself. Back in Atlanta, Georgia, she finally got some respect and recognition, from some White doctors there who, she said, welcomed her and offered to give her an even chance. “That’s all I ask,” she is quoted as saying.
In response to Jim Crow and segregation, Grier and other Black physicians built hospitals, formed professional societies, and created educational institutions to support themselves and their communities.
Grier’s career was a brief one. She died in 1902 after only four years of practice. But today a scholarship is offered in her name for under-represented minority groups to study at the Ross University School of Medicine in, of all places, Dominica in the West Indies.
Black History Month will soon come to an end. And in Guyana and the Caribbean we are left to ponder posterity where Afro-Caribbean people, particularly youths, are concerned. What do young Guyanese and West Indians think of the legacy of people like Eliza Grier, and of systems like Jim Crow? Or are they too busy trying to emulate the gimmicks of Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna and Alkaline?

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