by Paul R. Spitzzeri
This third post in our “The Black Pioneers of Los Angeles County” series looks at another key figure in what might be called the second generation of African-American residents of our region, following those that settled here in the 1850s-era including Biddy Mason, the Owens family, Lewis G. Green, the Halls, the Ballard family and others. This next cohort numbers the large contingent of Black migrants to our area during the Boom of the 1880s, which peaked during the administration of Los Angeles Mayor William H. Workman, nephew of Homestead founders William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste.
We have profiled the Rev. Jordan Allen, who led the First African Methodist Episcopal (also known as the Stevens A.M.E.) Church and R.C.O. Benjamin, who was the first Black attorney admitted to practice in Los Angeles and California—both men came to the Angel City in 1887 as the boom was in its most fervent ferment. We now turn our attention to Dr. Monroe Alpheus Majors (1864-1960), who was the first licensed African-American physician in Los Angeles as well as the state and, for that matter, anywhere west of Denver and the Rocky Mountains.
Majors resided in Los Angeles from Christmas 1888 until the beginning of 1890, just over a year, this being about half the time that Allen and Benjamin lived in the city, but, like them, he had a substantial and important life before and, especially, after his brief sojourn here, which we will explore in this post. As noted for the others, this was the era embodied in the recently published anthology, The New Negro: A History in Documents, 1887-1937, edited by Martha H. Patterson and Henry Louis Gates, and there seems no question that, to varying degrees, the lives and careers of the trio are part of “The New Negro” concept.
Born in Waco, Texas, almost certainly to enslaved, or formerly so, parents, Andrew Jackson Majors (born in Tennessee) and Jane Barringer (who hailed from North Carolina), who were in Texas by at least 1858, Majors moved with his family, including an elder sister Frances and an older brother Robert to the state capital of Austin when he was five years old. In the 1870 census, the enumeration of the Majors family showed that Andrew was a teamster and Jane did washing, while Frances and Robert were in school and Monroe was not quite old enough to do so, though he soon began his education, apparently at a Freedman’s Bureau institution, utilized throughout the South during Reconstruction after the Civil War.
It has been reported that, at age ten, Monroe served as a page at the capitol for the Texas legislature, while he was also said to have attended West Texas College and the Tillotson Collegiate and Normal School, the latter located in Austin. The 1880 federal census counted the Majors family in Austin, with Andrew working as a carriage driver, Robert as a school teacher and Monroe was employed as a waiter, one of the several occupations that Black men were allowed to follow, though he clearly had an aptitude and an attitude for much higher goals and aims.
Next, Majors headed to Nashville, Tennessee, the home state of his father, where he attended Central Tennessee College, founded by Northern missionaries of the Methodist Episcopal Church just after war’s end. A little over a decade later, as Reconstruction was being shut down, the Meharry Medical College was opened and was the first such institution for African-American students in the South.
The earliest located media reference to Majors was in December 1884, when he was listed as an usher for a Meharry graduation ceremony. Three months later, he served as secretary for Central Tennessee’s Theological and Sunday-School Institute and he and his fellow classmate provided the report of proceedings for the Institute’s third annual session.
At the end of 1885, during his last year of study, he was named salutatorian of his class. At the tenth annual Meharry commencement in February, he presented his thesis on yellow fever and joined nine other classmates in receiving their degrees—he was the first African-American from Texas to achieve this signal honor.
Majors immediately returned to Texas to inaugurate his medical practice, working in Brenham, a town northwest of Houston and east of Houston; Calvert, which is situated northeast of Austin and southeast of Waco and where he was its first African-American physician; and Dallas. In May 1888, he was one of a dozen doctors who, shut out of the national and state medical associations, attended a multi-day meeting in Houston of the Texas Colored Physicians Association and the group, which became the Lone Star State Medical Association, planned to return to the city for its 1889 confab, but, as we noted above, Majors left for Los Angeles by then.
It has been stated that he did so because of threats against him and other Black professionals by whites who were enraged at their level of success. How he decided upon Los Angeles as his next home would certainly be interesting to know, but he may well have heard about it from someone he knew in Texas, perhaps even R.C.O. Benjamin, who was in the Lone Star state in 1887 after abruptly leaving Alabama.
The earliest located mention of Majors in local media was the 16 February 1889 edition of the Black-owned Los Angeles Republican-Advocate, in which he placed an ad for his practice, located on Aliso Street at Los Angeles Street about where the U.S. 101 runs through downtown now, and informed readers that he “treats all diseases, including those peculiar to Women and Children,” while “Electricity also [is] Employed In Practice,” this being a common technique at the time. The issue also noted that Majors was likely to be named as a local medical examiner for the New York Life Insurance Company, though it is not known if that actually took place. It is also been said he lectured at the Los Angeles Medical College.
By early May, he’d moved to an office on First Street just east of Main, at the southern end of today’s Civic Center South complex. The East Los Angeles Exponent of the 11th, a newspaper published in what is today’s Lincoln Heights neighborhood, directed the attention of readers to a card, or short ad, by Majors in another part of the paper and added,
Dr. Majors is a regular licentiate, and hails from Meharry Medical College, Nashville, Tenn. This is the only colored Medical College in America where all the branches of medicine are taught.
Less than two weeks later, Majors married Georgia Green, a native of Huntsville, Texas and who attended Oberlin College in Ohio and Fisk University in Nashville. They had a daughter, Grace, born in Waco, Texas, in March 1890. In late July, the Exponent expanded its description of the physician, noting that he arrived in Los Angeles during the previous Yuletide season and, during the seven months since, “he has endeared himself in the hearts of our best citizens of all nationalities.”
Moreover, continued the paper, “his professional career is such that no doctor need be ashamed of, being an upright, sober and honest christian gentleman,” while it was asserted that “he knows his business thoroughly, and his treatments tend to rapid cures.” Readers were informed that “his practice is growing very rapidly in all parts of Los Angeles,” with it insinuated that this was because of his breadth of medical knowledge covering a wide variety of conditions, diseases and so forth. His office moved again, this time to the Temple Block, built by the brothers Jonathan and F.P.F. Temple and now the site of City Hall.
Among his endeavors with public enterprises was his service on a committee of African-American residents who supported sewer improvements and it seems clear his interest was from his medical background as well as his community spirit. He was a speaker, along with Major C.H. Twine, who was mentioned in the R.C.O. Benjamin post, at a pair of meetings in August at the city’s Wesleyan Chapel on Los Angeles Street, where a resolution was issued to back the idea of an outfall sewer system to the Pacific, and another gathering at the Court House.
Like Benjamin, Majors had multiple professional and personal interests, including journalism and, in November 1889, he joined William Sampson, who was briefly a partner of Benjamin in founding the Los Angeles Observer, the city’s first Black-owner newspaper in launching the weekly Los Angeles Western News. We will see him later in this post involved in the newspaper business in Chicago, as well. In the inaugural edition of the Western News, the proprietors took the unusual step in reaching out to Black women for support:
Ladies, there is no use to disguise the fact, the WESTERN NEWS needs your help, the paper is at present in its infancy, after a little we can help ourselves, but now we need your aid. No branch of business can meet with success without your help . . . we do feel as if we have a right to ask the ladies of our own race to assist in this grand this noble work, that we may place the WESTERN NEWS on the pinacle [sic] of fame . . . We trust our appeal will not be in vain. This we will say if you assist, now that we need your assistanae [assistance], rest assured that M.A. Majors and Wm. Sampson will ever feel grateful for your kindness . . . You will see a credit opposite your name, placed there by the publishers of the WESTERN NEWS, for your good deeds . . .
By the end of November, Majors relocated his medical practice to the same space in which the newspaper was printed, this being a room in the Occidental Building at the corner of Main and Arcadia streets, again very near where U.S. 101 goes through the area now. A few weeks later, he was named assistant secretary of a committee planning the celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln that freed the slaves.
Majors also developed a friendship with Benjamin and the two men posed for a photo together while living in Los Angeles, showing them seated among stacks of books with Majors holding one open as if reading while Benjamin holds papers in his hand, perhaps referencing his legal work, while looking off to one side. The physician also wrote warmly of his support for the lawyer when Benjamin was being considered for consul to Antigua.
On the last day of 1889, Majors participated in a meeting of the Afro-American Protective League, the members of which were concerned with continuing Jim Crow violence wrought by Southern whites upon African-Americans, with the result that resolutions were published including,
We are unanimously in favor of rigid and exact laws being meted out to all, regardless of the texture of hair, or the color of the skin; that our country can not long prosper without such laws governing its people and properly enforced. But seeing these laws being trampled under foot in some of the Southern states and in the hands of a raging mob . . . we petition the President and Congress of the United States to take immediate steps to bring the guilty parties to justice, and that we earnestly invoke the public press of the country to speak out in strong terms against these hellish crimes which are being perpetrated daily in some of the Southern States.
Approval of remarks by President Benjamin Harrison in his recent remarks to Congress, the resolutions also stated that,
That as citizens of the United States clothed with the elective franchise, as taxpayers, and as men struggling to elevate ourselves in the scale of intelligence, we cry aloud for justice and fair treatment and that our brethren of the South be not shot down like dogs or driven from their homes to the swamp by the fury of those who cannot control their votes nor swerve them from their loyalty as law-abiding citizens.
The meeting, however, included some repartee between Majors and J.C. Jackson involving one of them stating that the other’s effect on the League “would have no more effect than the nibbling of a dyspeptic mouse upon a greased grindstone,” though the Los Angeles Tribune of New Year’s Day 1890 remarked that “such little satirical explosions were evidently admired for their ingenuity than as conveying rancorous hostility, for the meeting adjourned in fair humor.”
The next meeting of the League was held on 6 January with Majors among a committee that paid tribute to John R. Brierly, a Los Angeles resident and member of the state Assembly who died recently. After that, however, nothing could be found of him in the local press and it has often been states that, just before the birth of Grace, Monroe and Georgia decided to head to their home state of Texas.
It does seem very plausible, as well, that the bust that followed the boom and which took place at the time that Majors came to Los Angeles was a major factor. Whatever the situation, Majors, being just 25 years old, and a pregnant Georgia made the long overland journey, sometime between early January and March, when Georgia was born, back to Texas. His time in the Angel City may have been brief, but it was impactful and notable, mainly because of his status as the first licensed Black physician there, in the Golden State and in the entire West beyond Denver and the Rocky Mountains.
We will return soon with part two and trace some of Monroe Majors’ very eventful life and work in Texas and Illinois, so check back for that.
Will Smith’s iconic images and powerful scenes in the 2022 film “Emancipation” showing the lash marks on his back and his desperate flight through the wetlands, vividly came to mind as I read the 1889 meeting resolution of the Afro-American Protective League, in which, as noted in this post, Dr. Majors participated and the members declared: “… we cry aloud for justice and fair treatment, and that our brethren of the South be not shot down like dogs or driven from their homes to the swamps …”