by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Despite his prior assertions that the white people of the South were better friends to Black people than those of the North, Dr. Monroe A. Majors, who was the first African-American physician in Los Angeles, when he resided there from 1888-1890, as well as California and anywhere west of Denver, headed, at the start of the 20th century, back to Decatur, Illinois, accompanied by his wife Georgia and daughter Grace.
The family settled in Chicago by early 1903 and the Black-owned Des Moines Bystander reported on a meeting of Black physicians in the Windy City, with more planned elsewhere in the country, for a discussion of the prevalence of tuberculosis among African-Americans. Majors was among ten speakers as the conference as it was revealed from about 30 Black doctors practicing in Chicago that 99% of all deaths among African-Americans there were from TB.
Majors’ stature was reflected in an article in the 15 August edition of the St. Paul Appeal, another African-American paper, which included comments from prominent Chicagoans, Black and white, about a letter issued by President Theodore Roosevelt on lynching. Majors’ remark was that the chief executive “has always shown himself to be right on all things pertaining to the Afro-American people” and that “he is the greatest humanitarian of the age” and his statements “on mob law will have a great moral influence all over the country.”
Two months later, the Evanston Journal noted that Majors led an effort among Black Chicagoans to commemorate Frederick Douglass in a city park in the South Side, where most African-Americans resided. A very life-like model of the bust was created by Black artist Frederick G. Hibbard and was in Majors’ possession and it was anticipated that when the bronze memorial, to be placed on a granite base, would cost $12,000. In April 1905, when planning for a Douglass memorial exhibition was underway, Majors was a member of the Illinois contingent of commissioners.
With respect to his practice, the Colorado Statesman, a Black paper in Denver, remarked in its 24 June edition that,
Dr. M.A. Majors, of Chicago has founded a system of rebucing [reducing] flesh, curing obesity, dropsy and all forms of stomach and liver complaints. He recently opened a fine office with modern appliances, in the down town district. Dr. Majors has patients in Illinois, Oregon, Utah, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, California and Texas.
The 10 August issue of a Kentucky newspaper cited the Chicago Record-Herald, which published a very interesting short description of the prominent physician:
Dr. M.A. Majors, the colored physician who recently declared that civilization has blighted the negro physically and has added nothing to his mental capacity, has traveled in all parts of the world and studied under Dr. Hazen, who for many years was court physician to King Kalakaua of the Sandwich [Hawaiian] Islands. Dr. Majors has the reputation of being the foremost authority on the chronic diseases of American negroes and stand[s] high in the ranks of anthroglogists [anthropologists].
It is not known that Majors traveled outside the United States and the reference to a Dr. Hazen is an obscure one, but it is still remarkable to see these references to his specialties and what some at least considered his eminence among African-American doctors in the United States during the early 20th century. Moreover, the remark about the blight of civilization on Black Americans is counter to the comment he made earlier and cited in part two of this post.
Still, the remarks in the second quote raised the ire of Julius F. Taylor, whose Black-owned Broad-Ax, which operated in Salt Lake City for several years in the 1890s before it relocated to Chicago. Taylor castigated Majors for “running off at the mouth,” deluding “the ignorant Colored people” with the claims of world travel and study, as well as his comments about civilization’s negative effects. The publisher concluded that Majors was then “denying the sum and the substance of the rot which he has been spewing out upon the public.”
The New York Age of 8 February 1906 recorded that Majors was among contributors, including Booker T. Washington, in the latest issue of Colored American Magazine, and the physician’s writings began to receive more attention. This included his essay “Whites on Trial” in the Colorado Statesman of 5 May, which posited that the proceeding was about whether “the white race is honorable, just and humane in all its dealings to a less fortunate element of humanity.”
Yet, Majors also wrote that “the thinking, cultivated Negro” would not rely on white kindness as it was Black people’s “obligation or responsibility that [they] must struggle against the odds” that were stacked against them. Continuing the legal procedure metaphor, the physician added that,
The white man is at the bar of judgment to give account of the talent allotted to him, and the spirit of Christian graces are constantly at war with the grosser elements of the Caucasian nature.
Sometimes the market of these kindly graces fluxuate [sic], and occasionally the temptation of domination writhes in the blood, and al the sting[s] of brutal lust stimulate to ferocity the neglected, and uncivilized angels of the white man’s spirit.
Majors also claimed that African-Americans treated white people more fairly because “the Negro is a child of the tropics, and his blood is warmer,” so they “do not charge ugliness and devilry to the white race” despite lynching and other crimes by those who felt they had impunity from the law in “marauding women and tyrannizing their husbands and brothers.”
He noted that “‘the white man’s trial’ is the plague of his soul, and it is a constant warfare between his inner soul to keep out of trouble, and to restrain a clear bill of respectability.” Majors expected that white people would treat people of color better and commented that “the white race is swollowing [sic] the allopathic dose of drastic consciousness to the worthwhile conditions of the American Negro” and that “the startling thing about the status of the Negro is that he has made himself so very fit for the noblest rights ever given to man.”
Concluding his essay, Majors asserted that,
The white man’s honor is in the balance . . . he has wavered, he has hesitated long; he has shut his eyes and ears to the harsh treatment and pitiful wail of the crushed and helpless Negro; he has often gone out of his way to trample his honor in the dust, to traduce the goodness of his own ill-fated and misdirected blood in bedarkened concealment . . . He is learning to say in his eloquence that the Negro is more greetly [greatly] sinned against than sinning, and courts of justice and equity are taking hold of the henious [heinous] bloodthirsty fiends of murderous lust, and snatching off their masks. Yes, the white man has the great burden of responsibility. He is on trial. Is he guilty? Yes. Will the Judge Time acquit him[?] No. He will have to suffer the penalty of the law.
At the end of May, Majors spoke on the “Future Mission of the Press” at a conference of the Negro Press Association. In the 2 June edition of his paper, Taylor took another swing, declaring that “Dr. M.A. Majors, who seems to be a little light in the upper part of his flighty head . . . continues to write long-winded, senseless articles for the mushroom Negro papers of this city, and to run his pretty or handsome face” in the press “to the sickening disgust of decent and intelligent people.”
Likely the “Whites on Trial” was one of these and one wonders what Taylor would have commented about another of Majors’ pointed prose pieces, appearing in the Black-owned New York Age, edited by the prominent Timothy T. Fortune, of 13 December. In it, the doctor cited Haitian revolutionary and emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines and his cry of his counting the French dead, though whether this was before he ordered the mass killing of up to 5,000 French people in Haiti is not clear.
In any case, Majors then offered this broadside:
When the South shall have suffered its first staggering blow, from the torch in the Negroes’ hands . . . then the damnable lunatics whose color now sustains them in whatever deviltry they wish to perform, will have had their first duck [dunking] in the cold waters of sober, sensible reflection and then they will behave themselves. Then when they see a Negro coming a mile down the road, they will begin to take their hats off to him long ere they reach speaking distance.
Majors rejoined the ranks of newspaper editors, as reported by the Age of 2 April 1908, when he became the managing editor of the Chicago Conservator. The Forum, an African-American newspaper published in the Illinois capital city of Springfield, remarked that “Mr. Majors is a progressive man and sounds the key note not only for a new Conservator, but a new and progressive Chicago.”
The paper continued that the physician-editor “denounced the [white] business houses that are fleecing colored people” and called “for every colored person to patronize the colored papers and businesses.” It was added that Majors was a close friend of Booker T. Washington and supported “all kinds of education” for African-Americans as well as “business as the foundation of progress and political evolution.”
There was, though, some caution from the Charleston [West Virginia] Advocate of 23 July, which quoted Majors as telling the readers of the Conservator that he “is rooted and rock-ribbed in the editorial chair,” but his contemporary said that may or not be so because “we have seen five occupants” in the seat “during the past two years.” Majors also continued occasionally publishing poems and issuing political commentary appearing in other newspapers.
Another change was a divorce that year from first wife Georgia and a second marriage in 1909 to pianist and teacher Estelle C. Bonds, with couple welcoming, in 1913, a daughter, Margaret, who later achieved wide recognition as a composer. When the federal census was conducted in 1910, Monroe and Estelle resided in the house of Estelle’s mother on Chicago’s South Side near Parkway Gardens and Englewood.
As the Teens dawned, the physician’s practice and home were located to the north in the Fuller Park area. Another long essay appeared in the Colorado Statesman and was titled “Majors’ Melange,” in which he wrote about his profession, averring,
The Negro doctor has arrived. Everywhere throughout this great nation he is proving that he can solve all the problems upon which is based the great science of the healing art . . . Frequently the leading surgeon of a city is a man of Negro blood . . . The Negro in medicine . . . gives [them] his freedom in many respects . . . [But] the uppish Negro whose brains are cracking open with the spirit and learning of the “talented tenth,” as Dr. [Booker T.] Washington calls them, are too busy fighting the white race with one hand and giving them their hard-earned dollars with the other, to think for a moment of patronizing the Negro physicians . . . It appears that the higher the Negro ascends in the scale of learning the more unfit he becomes in matters of race patronage . . . This is all wrong. Race ideals must not languish. We must return to the noble principles of self-help.
Majors continued that African-American physicians had duties beyond treating their patients in the usual manner and the “obligation to the race” included “to teach them correct sanitary habits, instruct them in dietetics” and working to get laws enacted “that redound to the betterment of the whole people.” Moreover, the Black doctor “is to be an example of decency and culture before the youths who regard [them] as a representative of a learned profession.”
He also stressed the importance of the African-American press as “one of the strongest forces of racial progress” as Black Americans “read our newspapers . . . to see ourselves, our progress in all lines, and to know what we are doing here and there.” With a million persons reading such papers, “it can be seen that new ideas are taking firm and deep hold on us, that will count very forcibly in the not distant future.”
Majors, however, also exhorted, “the Negro should stop whinning [sic]” and was too apt to cry out “race prejudice,” so he asserted that if Black people “were making no effort to struggle out of [their] insecure condition, [they] would never get hurt.” He advised, “let us stop crying like babies, and take our medicine which the best civilization on earth prescribes.” Remarkably, he claimed that “the white man gets ten knocks to the Negroes one from the white man because of the white man’s persistency to stay in the line of progress.” He lambasted the Negro Business League as a group that “looks like a laughing farce” because “these whining Negroes patronize only the white” business and “are the very fools who bring their ruin” in so doing.
While he denigrated the “lazy limber-jack of a Negro” who was “born to be a monkey” entertaining white people to the detriment of the race, “you will find fifty white men . . . only a few degrees better than that ignorant Negro.” He also scored the overly intellectual African-American with pretensions to superiority, referring to that individual who “swallows curriculums from colleges like a hog eats bunches of parsley” and was “too good to work, and to[o] knowing to see the beauty of it.”
In a letter to the editor of the Chicago Inter-Ocean of 17 November, Majors addressed the topic of “race leadership” and opined that “the negro in America is now wholly American” with mixtures of every race in their bloodlines in “cosmopolitan citizenship.” Black people were “active forces in every advanced walk of life” so this meant that “the great white race must begin to accustom itself to seeing prominent negroes.” But, just as there was no one leader of white people, even Booker T. Washington, an acknowledged “great factor in civilization,” was “not any more the leader of the negro race than he is the leader of the white race,” though he certainly what at the head of industrial education efforts for any people, not just African-Americans.
For the Black-owned Chicago Defender of 2 December, Majors wrote on “Things I Am Thankful For,” including “evidences of race progress along all lines.” He was glad to see “race uplift manifested throughout the country” as well as the purchasing of houses, education of children, church attendance and involvement and “other ennobling forces which challenge the admiration of mankind” such as “the rapidly growing tendency towards race patronage.”
He then remarked that,
In the face of obstruction and the brutal usages of a horrible tyranny we are making rapid strides in every walk of life and in every form a persistent spirit to push forward manifests itself . . . God seems yet to favor us with His beneficent smile . . . Nothing in the form of a destructive storm looms upon the horizon of our race hopes, and yet we must not forget that under our feet are the fretful humors of a race prejudice more formidable than armies.
He celebrated the advances of medical science, especially in combating tuberculosis, which meant the future growth of Black America, while “our enemies are becoming less potent and less boasting, if not fewer in numbers.” Majors then concluded in a sweeping and hopeful idealism:
But while we may transcribe our joys and grow eloquent in the use of verbiage, there is no race of people under the sun more prayerful or more thankful in the spirit and truth of things than our race, who get so little out of life to be thankful for; and yet it is something to be living in a country like this, with opportunity, some oppression to urge us out of our lethargy, some small favors, free to act, and free to will. The civilization can be trusted, if not altogether, in part, to herald the dawn of the brotherhood of man.
The featured photo for this post is from the book, African-American Heritage in Waco, Texas by Dr. Garry H. Radford, Sr. Join us soon for part four as we carry our look at the life and work of Dr. Monroe A. Majors further into the early 20th century.
Dr. Majors’ remark about the harmful effects of “civilization” on Black people struck me at first, though the media cited him without quoting his exact words.
I believe he was using irony, satirically pointing out that the so-called civilized whites were in fact the ones inflicting physical and mental abuse on Black people through acts like lynching and segregation.
I must admit, however, that I found it challenging to work through Dr. Majors’ often wordy statements in order to grasp what he was really trying to say.