National Reports
MANKIEWICZ, SAM ROMER, FRANK
National Reports Atlanta: Joseph R. Fiszman. Boston: Courtney R. Sheldon. Chicago: Albert N. Votaw. Dallas: Bicknell Eubanks. Minneapolis: Sam Romer. New Orleans: Stephen Ryan. Richmond: Lawrence...
...There is evidence that, through covert agreements with banks and other lending agencies, areas are successfully "restricted" by virtue of the fact that Negroes cannot borrow money to finance purchases...
...The employment picture is not bright in the West, either...
...For many years, this town endured a kind of company domination tempered by paternalism, one phase of which was prepaid medical and health services...
...The application of the medical arts requires certain practical arrangements...
...When these residential patterns are coupled with a system of "permissive transfers"-merely education-ese for permitting white parents in a marginal area to remove their children from the "Negro" school-the vicious cycle is almost complete...
...But recent outcroppings of violence and the continuing economic dislocation which has followed the end of World War II suggest that this theory ought to be revised...
...The medical society denies the conspiracy charge, or that its refusal to accept doctors employed by the co-operative was a result of opposition to the plan itself...
...As far as the recipients of medical care were concerned, the new plan made only one important change-membership was no longer compulsory...
...Such acts are already on the books in Washington and Oregon...
...Nevertheless, it ran into head-on opposition from the medical societies...
...The case is being appealed...
...In effect, the doctors who are sticking with the plan face a kind of medical ostracism...
...This situation also generates another kind of segregation...
...Louis: William Wyant Jr...
...Because of this and other practices, patterns of residential segregation are becoming rigid...
...Transportation is not as crucial an area as the others, but two lawsuits are now in progress...
...Consequently, termination of a public-housing project is liable to result in mass evictions of low-paid Negroes and a resultant increase in residential tensions, leading occasionally to violence and cross-burning when a Negro attempts to move into a previously restricted area...
...The few breaks in once-solid Caucasian areas are made only by wealthy Negroes, usually in the entertainment fields, who can afford a home costing $50,000 or more...
...What is more, they have subscribed $130,000 in $100 life-memberships toward a new hospital...
...Restrictive covenants," whereby groups of property-owners agree mutually not to sell or rent to non-Caucasians, have been under heavy fire from the courts...
...These arrangements must furnish compensation to the physicians and other technicians who provide the services, and fix the conditions under which the persons who are in need have access to it...
...In 1944, the two doctors retired and several members of the community decided to organize a consumer-controlled health cooperative that would continue and improve these services...
...Two Harbors, which lies on Lake Superior only a few miles from Duluth, is a funneling point through which Mesabi iron ore starts south on its water voyage to the smelters and furnaces...
...Minnesota law does not allow incorporation of cooperative health groups-thus leaving each member a potential defendant in damage suits-and efforts to amend the law have proved fruitless...
...there is no official segregation in either lower or higher education...
...Jim Crow Housing on the West Coast By Frank Mankiewicz San Francisco Enlightened Westerners are often apt to assume that this is a region without significant racial discrimination...
...Its legality, however, was immediately challenged on a technical issue and it is pending in the courts...
...Arizona, which passed a permissive de-segregation statute in 1951, followed this with de-segregation of all state school districts, Phoenix falling into line only in 1953...
...The defendants," it says, "are making substantial incomes and large profits from the fee system as now established and practiced...
...But its legal answer joins the philosophical discussion squarely: "Defendants deny...
...Louis County Medical Society, an AMA affiliate, how a doctor gets paid is as important as how much he knows...
...The absence of so-called "traditional" segregation in schools, restaurants, and public transportation seems to support this optimistic conclusion...
...Thus, in a city which can proudly say that there is no segregation in its schools, and that Negro teachers are regularly hired on a basis of merit alone, the "separate but equal" theory can be employed as effectively as in South Carolina...
...The old hospital, bought by the cooperative, was in a ramshackle building facing condemnation as a firetrap, and the railroad refused to contribute to a fund-raising campaign for a new hospital...
...another left the plan rather than jeopardize his professional future...
...Indeed, there is one section in the legal complaint which best explains why the medical society has put so many roadblocks in the cooperative's path...
...In Los Angeles, a judge has ruled that segregation of Negro passengers on Los Angeles trains bound for the South is a violation of California civil-rights laws...
...In the field of public employment, some progress has been made and will doubtless continue...
...These arrangements are economic in character...
...This kind of compulsory pre-payment went on for 40 years without any outcry from the organized doctors...
...Public housing presents a twofold problem...
...In San Francisco the request was denied, but a Washington judge held that keeping the children in the home of such a mixed marriage would be "detrimental to the best interests" of the children, and ordered their removal...
...In most others, integration within the projects has been secured...
...This year, however, in the California case of Barrows v. lack-son, the Court closed this loophole...
...No one questioned the competence or morals of these doctors...
...The cooperative's popularity is self-evident...
...The legal complaint in the suit is particularly interesting, because part of it is a philosophical discussion of the relation between what it calls the art and the economics of medicine: "A sharp distinction exists between the art and the economics of medicine...
...Richmond: Lawrence King...
...Although a shipping center, as its name suggests, it is even more a railroad center for the Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range Railroad, a U. S. Steel subsidiary...
...Nevertheless, Western communities seem to be repeating in the case of the Negro (the "problem" is relatively new...
...This situation has inspired a renewed drive for FEPC legislation...
...In some cities-notably San Francisco and Fresno-public-housing segregation is being challenged in the courts...
...the Negro population of the eleven Western states has increased over 1.000 per cent in the fifteen years since the start of World War II) the pattern applied to previous non-Caucasian arrivals...
...Because there is a direct relationship between housing and two other "crisis" areas of race relations-education and employment-this problem has given rise to the sharpest controversy...
...For example, Joseph Bloom and Clarence Clark, physicians of standing, were denied medical-society membership while employed by the cooperative, but they were quickly accepted by the society when they began regular practices in Duluth...
...The State Public Utilities Commission has under consideration an NAACP complaint charging the existence of segregation in seating patterns on trains wholly within California...
...But, with the end of the public-housing program and closing down of many "temporary" projects, Negroes usually have nowhere to go, while their better-paid white neighbors move on...
...In education, a curious picture emerges...
...Most important, the medical society refused to admit doctors hired by the cooperative to membership...
...If children in one residential area attend one school, and that area is occupied almost exclusively by Negroes, then what could be more natural than to assign only Negro teachers to these schools...
...As yet, there are no Harlems or Bronzetowns throughout Western cities, nor is there the institutionalized dual-community pattern of the South...
...But this is not enough...
...This is true despite recently published findings that, in selected districts of the San Francisco Bay area, Negro occupancy has been actually found to enhance, rather than detract from, the value of the property...
...It is no overstatement to say that the only steady employment available to Negroes in this area lies in Civil Service and the armed forces...
...Originally attracted to this region by high-paying wartime industrial jobs, many Negroes have remained to learn the truth of the old "last hired, first fired" adage...
...San Francisco: Frank Mankiewicz...
...The cooperative and townspeople were undismayed by the rebuff...
...deny that there is a like application of medical skills and techniques regardless of whether the practitioner maintains his own office or engages in a group health venture...
...The railroad contracted for these services with a private hospital and clinic owned by two doctors and took the pre-payments out of the employes' pay envelopes...
...There was not much "freedom of choice" either of hospitals or of doctors, since affiliation was compulsory for all railroad employes...
...One doctor was removed from fellowship in the AMA scientific assembly because he could not join the local society...
...participation of a substantial number of persons in the [cooperative] plan diminishes the number of persons in the fee system...
...A majority of citizens in this city of 5,000 sharply disagree...
...Indeed, it was his opposition to these "transfers" which figured largely in the nationally publicized dismissal a few years ago of Pasadena Superintendent of Schools Willard Goslin...
...Despite strong campaigns in the other states, however, sparked by the NAACP and allied civil-rights organizations-campaigns, incidentally, in which Communist and front organizations eager to participate were effectively rebuffed by sophisticated minority-group leadership- there is little chance that the legislative picture will be improved in the near future...
...In 1948, the Supreme Court declared these covenants unenforceable in the state courts, but left unanswered the question of whether damages could be collected from one who violated the agreement...
...They are independent and in no sense a part or aspect of the art of medicine...
...that a sharp distinction exists between the art and the economics of medicine...
...Now real-estate operators, anxious to show purchasers a prospectively all-white community, are busy finding ways to circumvent these two decisions...
...In two recent cases, divorced husbands tried to take the custody of children away from their Caucasian mothers on the grounds of subsequent "association" with and marriage to a Negro...
...Under the spur of threatened NAACP legal action, several cities have de-segregated their police and fire departments and others can be expected to follow suit, although not without a struggle...
...Although he may not realize it, the Westerner cannot afford to be smug about race relations in his sprawling area...
...When turned down, the railroad offered $300,000 to a private hospital venture, initiated after the cooperative began raising money for a new hospital...
...As a result, a case is now pending in court that may settle the issue not only in Minnesota but elsewhere in the United States...
...Colorado also has a modified public-service law, but its enforcement provisions are weak...
...Just as Chinatowns and Little Tokyos are a part of most Western cities, and just as Mexican-Americans have gradually been forced into the cities' old, abandoned residential sections, there are today systematic attempts to force total residential segregation upon the Negro...
...A Hurdle for Cooperative Medicine By Sam Romer Two Harbors, Minnesota According to the St...
...But the tight pattern of residential segregation has brought about segregation in the elementary and high schools of every fairly large city...
...Indeed, the recently published annual report of the NAACP's Western Region offers ample evidence that- from the standpoint of race relations -the West is in a very real sense "the New Frontier...
...some two-thirds of Two Harbor's population is affiliated voluntarily with it...
...a $700,000 hospital would get only about $335,000 in Hill-Burton funds, leaving a gap of $235,000...
...The railroad offered to put up the money "if the group's by-laws are approved by the medical society" and if the voting structure allowed one vote for each $100, rather than the present one-vote-per-member control...
...This whole problem was brought into the courts when the cooperative asked $100,000 in damages from the society on the grounds that it was conspiring "to discourage and prevent the plaintiffs from securing adequate medical service and products in an economical manner and through means of their own choosing...
...The town operates a municipal liquor store, and an initiative proposal was put on the ballot to allot $200,000 from liquor-store profits, over a 10-year period, to the new hospital...
...The issue brought the greatest turnout of voters in any election, and the final result was 1,236 to 1,153 for the proposal...
...they think a good doctor practices good medicine whether he is paid by fee or by salary...
...They were opposed merely because they were being paid a salary and not collecting fees...
...One further area deserves mention...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 18
