Tragedy and Healing: The Impact of 2 Black Surgeons in the Jim Crow South

In 1956, as racial conflict in the South reached a murderous climax, Thomas H Brewer Sr (1894 to 1956), a prominent Black physician and civic leader in Columbus, GA, was shot and killed by a White business owner. When his assailant was released without charges, many Black physicians and professionals left town, fearing for their safety and unwilling to live under Jim Crow. In 1964, M Delmar Edwards (1926 to 2009), graduating surgery resident at the nearby Tuskegee Veterans Administration Hospital, asked 2 White surgeons in Columbus-Seaborn Roddenbery III and Abraham Conger-to serve as preceptors during his last 2 years of training, a requirement for board certification. They agreed, and Edwards joined their practice. Edwards filled the void left by Brewer's death. He overcame White-only restrictions to the hospital medical staff, segregated wards, and professional shunning. He eventually served in leadership roles for the hospital, including chair of the department of surgery and vice president of the hospital system. During the next decades, he encouraged more than 70 Black physicians to settle in Columbus as full members of the city's professional community. Their stories separated by only 8 years, Brewer and Edwards embodied an inflection point in the civil rights movement: the transition between murderous injustice and the integration of the Black community into the social and political mainstream of the South brought on by a Supreme Court decision, an Act of Congress, and changes in the hearts of the American people.