Filed under: News, Race and Civil Rights
Recently, the country's first black doctor was properly memorialized. Relatives of the doctor were unaware that they were related to a man who had been the subjects of several books. Consequently, the doctor lay in an unmarked Brooklyn grave for 145 years.
White descendants of James McCune Smith gathered Sunday to unveil the new tombstone on his grave site. The scourge of racism is largely responsible for Smith going unnoticed for so long.
The AP writes:
The story of why Smith was nearly overlooked by history and buried in an unmarked grave is in part due to the centuries-old practice of light-skinned blacks passing as white to escape racial prejudice. Smith's mother had been a slave; his father was white. Three of his children lived to adulthood, and they all apparently passed as white, scholars say.
Greta Blau, Smith's great-great-great-granddaughter, made the connection after she took a course at Hunter College on the history of blacks in New York. She did some research and realized that James McCune Smith, the trailblazing black doctor, was the same James McCune Smith whose name was inscribed in a family Bible belonging to ... her grandmother.
Her first response was, "But he was black. I'm white."
Smith was denied entry to medical schools in the United States and earned his medical degree in Glasgow, Scotland.
He returned to New York to practice and also became an anti-slavery advocate through his writings:
"As early as 1859, Dr. McCune Smith said that race was not biological but was a social category," Dr. Vanessa Northington Gamble, a medical doctor and historian at George Washington University told the AP. "I feel that I am standing on the shoulders of Dr. James McCune Smith."
Blau theorizes that all of Smith's descendants began passing for white after his death -- and for good reason.
Blau's professor, Joanne Edey-Rhodes, said that to be black in Smith's day was "a horrible condition":
"Black people were a despised group, and to many, we still are a despised group in the world," she said. "I think that it is so important that at this time in history, that a family that is classified as white can say, 'I have this African American ancestor' and be able to do it without any shame, without having to hide it."
Much has changed since Smith wanted to become a doctor. We have a black president and there is opportunity in this country.
However, it's important to look back at history to see the struggles that blacks have had to endure and still endure. Looking at Smith's struggles, African Americans should never take it for granted when they have an opportunity to earn an education. Before young men throw away their lives by shooting people in the street over nonsense, they should be forced to study the lengths that Smith went through to get an education and understand that despite his accomplishments, some members of his family felt it was more beneficial to deny their heritage because of the racism in this country.
Today, Smith's relatives say they are proud of their heritage.
"Now I can say I'm English, Irish, African American and French, which I feel very proud of," said Blau's aunt, Elizabeth Strazar.