by Paul R. Spitzzeri
The personal turmoil and chaos in the life of Dr. Monroe A. Majors during the 1920s, including two bitter divorces amid accusations of physical violence, may have been attributable to a number of causes, including mental instability, anger and frustration from the loss of his eyesight, which appears to have been partially restored by surgery, and others.
How much of what happened to his medical practice and journalistic endeavors was due to his vision problems as opposed to the legal strife is unclear, but his role as associate editor of the Black-owned newspaper, the Chicago Broad-Ax, looks to have ended early in 1924, while almost all references to his work as a doctor ended around this period, as well. Note from part six of this post that, as he battled in court with one of his wives, he expressed concern that the publicity would harm his practice.
In fact, he was reported to have attended a patient in late February 1928 and, in July 1929, he penned a letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune, in which he remarked on a reported proposal from Oscar De Priest, then in the early stages of the first of three terms as the only Black member of the House of Representatives, that African-Americans form their own political party. Writing that it was hard for him to believe the De Priest would advocate such an idea, Majors continued,
If the white man organized a party all to himself in the north, it would not be long before the Negro would be forbidden to vote in the primary elections, just as he is in the south. The 14th and 15th amendments are not enforced and will not be, and the Negro vote hangs on the graces of the Republican party. Suppose the Negro went off to himself, where would he go and what he has got to take with him?
Majors argued that race had no place in and should be erased from politics and he closed, typically pugnaciously, by asserting that anyone advocating for such a proposal, which would “disturb the political peace of the nation” was simply “a traitor to organized, established principles of government” and could not represent any body or class.
When De Priest ran for a second term in 1931, Majors, who lost his large South Side house and was a boarder in another residence when the 1930 census was taken, was a supporter and was a speaker at one event, though the worsening of the Great Depression and other factors led many Black voters to switch to the Democratic Party. By this period, in his late sixties and with poor eyesight, if not completely blind, Majors decided it was time to move back to Los Angeles after more than four decades since his first brief residence there.
The reason appears to have been because his eldest daughter, Grace Boswell, resided in the South Los Angeles section with her family. The decision to relocate was reported in some newspapers in other parts of the country, with the St. Louis Argus, an African-American paper still publishing today after more than 110 years, stating in its 10 March 1933 edition that “Chicago’s medical fraternity and civic circles lost one of the most prominent and active members” when Majors headed for the Angel City “where he is planning to practice.”
That same day’s issue of the California Eagle, also Black-owned as well as run by a woman, Charlotta Bass, and her husband, Joseph, announced the news under the headline of “Pioneer Negro Doctor Returns.” The paper remarked that “one gazing upon the form of this venerable California pioneer would be quite apt to mis-judge his years” because “except for an occasional gray hair, a slight stoop in his shoulders and a few wrinkles on his brow, Dr. Majors appears to be in his early middle years.
Noting he spent many years in Chicago, the Eagle commented that “he has many interesting reminiscences of the earlier days in Los Angeles when the Negro population was less than five hundred”—in 1933, there were around 40,000 African-American residents. In fact, the only other professionals in all of California in 1888, when Majors came to town, were, he said, a Baptist pastor in San Diego and attorney R.C.O. Benjamin of Los Angeles, who was the subject of a lengthy post here recently and who was photographed with Majors as included in an earlier part of this post.
The Eagle then quoted Majors as relating,
Back in the ’80s when I first came to Los Angeles, the Southern Pacific depot [River Station north of the Plaza in modern Chinatown] was considered out in the country. The center of the city was at that time in the vicinity of Second and Main streets. Mother [Biddy] Mason, the grandmother of the late Robert [C.] Owens, lived on the corner of Main and Second [actually it was Spring and Third] and was the largest Negro property holder in the state at that time and a long time afterwards. Other leading colored citizens were George Warner, Scott Jones, Harry Reed, Jackson Jones, and a Mrs. Huddleson [Mason’s daughter, Ellen Huddleston].
The article concluded that Majors intended on residing with his daughter on East 28th Street across from the still-standing Y.M.C.A. Building designed by the famous Black architect, Paul Williams, and “will play out the string of life here in the city where first began his illustrious medical career,” although he did work as a doctor in his native Texas for a short period after graduating from medical school in 1886.
Majors’ stature was such that, when the Eagle, in its next edition, featured the Black-owned Angelus Funeral Home, it began by observing “it has been a pleasure to have with us again as our own, Dr. Majors, an interested and appreciative Los Angeles home-comer.” Stating, incorrectly, that he was “returning to his native city and state [his birthplace was Waco, Texas] after a Rip Van Winkle absence of more than two-score years this exceptional man is able to make some very worth while observations.”
One was about the Angelus, which he visited, having apparently heard about it operations along with other Black businesses. Majors was received by the staff and given a tour of the facility, while employees heard his recollections of nearly a half century prior. The article went on to laud the funeral home and ended with a quote from Majors, who praised those involved for helping the Angelus “maintain its lofty reputation,” while he remarked that “it is easy to see how this establishment soars at the top among the Negro business ventures in this great and rapidly growing city.”
Another early involvement in the Angel City’s civic affairs after his return was Majors joining, in April, the Citizens’ School Committee, which formed to ensure the election of city schools’ board members who would work to keep politics out of campuses. He was also occasionally a featured speaker at services at the Lincoln Memorial Congregational Church, long the only Black Congregational Church west of the Rocky Mountains and still operating today.
At the end of 1933, Majors was, along with lawyer Major H. Broyles and Frederick Roberts, who was the first Black member of the California Assembly and also a great-grandson of President Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, among speakers at the church “protesting the attitude of Governor [James] Rolph toward lynching.” This had to do with a mob of thousands storming the San Jose jail and hanging two men for the murder of another man, all of them white, and after which Rolph praised the mob.
In February 1934, a celebration was held at Lincoln Memorial honoring Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, with the Eagle of the 23rd, adding,
This program is sponsored by Dr. M.A. Majors, who was a personal friend of Fred Douglass [the two met in Chicago in 1893]. There will be exhibited some correspondence written in Douglass’ own hand. Some of the addresses delivered at the funeral of Douglass will be read. A musical program will be rendered in connection with the service.
A couple of months later, the paper briefly noted that Majors told its reporters that he was once the personal physician for such well-known African-American entertainers as Bob Cole, who acted, wrote stage works and composed songs in vaudeville, as well as Bert Williams, another vaudevillian who W.C. Fields once said was the funniest entertainer he’d ever seen.
The same issue of 13 April reported that,
Dr. M.A. Majors, retired physician who has practiced in Chicago, has been requested to submit a manuscript to Doubleday, Doran & Page, publishers who may publish it in book form. The company has published four books for him and when they learned he had prepared another, they asked him to submit it to them.
The new treatise has been named “The Negro in the Medical Sciences.” According to Dr. Majors, there is a silk thread of Negro anxiety, attitudes and attributes running throughout the book. It will contain matter about sixty doctors and forty-five hospitals and will deal with the factual accomplishments of our group in this field.
Unfortunately, the work was never published and Majors’ public presence declined noticeably in following years, though the 1936 Los Angeles City Directory listed him as having a medical office next to the Dunbar (Somerville) Hotel, a landmark in the South-Central neighborhood. He moved, however, that year to the San Gabriel Valley foothill town of Monrovia, where he lived for the last nearly quarter-century of his long life. In a 16 April 1937 article, the Eagle briefly referred to Black pioneers in Los Angeles including Majors who “practiced medicine here in 1889 and was the physician of Biddie [sic] Mason, [and] is still here and going strong.
The 21 August 1941 edition of the paper reported on a Men’s Day event at the Community Baptist Church in Monrovia, with the evening portion including a talk by Majors “on the progress of the Negro race.” Two months later, Eagle columnist John Fowler, the longtime columnist of “Spreading Joy,” wrote of “Famous Firsts in Los Angeles,” including the founding of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church by Mason in 1865, Benjamin as the first African-American attorney and Majors as the first Black doctor.
Grandson Hamilton Boswell, who went to the University of Southern California and earned master’s and doctoral degrees in theology, was minister at the Bowen Memorial Methodist Church and soon became prominent in San Francisco, including as a mentor to well-known politician Willie Brown, penned a lengthy tribute to Majors, published in Boswell’s “The Pulpit Voice” column in the 25 May 1944 issue of the Eagle.
With the heading of “The Patriarch,” Boswell related how he listened with rapt attention to what Majors told him of his life in “a treasury of rich memories and monumental experiences of days and years now spent.” Notably, while his medical practice was given due, the grandson wrote proudly of Majors’ literary contributions:
Although a physician by profession, the passion of the poet and literateur [sic] burned within his soul. From his pen and poetical imagination have come numerous writings which have added to the library of Negro literature. An ardent race man and zealot, his literary genius has sung many a line in the expression of the Negro’s struggle for freedom and recognition.
Majors’ friendship with Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Paul Lawrence Dunbar and others, including letters from these major African-American figures, was also mentioned, with Boswell describing how his grandfather talked about them and stating “truly a son of the past, he acclaims them as the greatest who have lived and ever will.” Majors lamented “modern race leadership . . . [as] a disgrace.”
As to politics, Majors was still a proud Lincoln-Douglass Republican, despite shifts among Black people in the prior decade or so, “but recognizes the need of more Negro non-partisanship,” while he was also accounted “a firm believer in rugged individualism and free enterprise” who lauded such capitalists as Andrew Carnegie of U.S. Steel, automaker Henry Ford and oil magnate (and near monopolist) John D. Rockefeller.
Boswell added that,
In policies to improve the status of the race, he recommends the use of interracial reconciliation, civil libertarianism and militant race consciousness. Religiously, he deplores the hypocrisy, selfishness, ignorance and complacency of the institutional church and says that man is lost without God.
The scribe remarked that he rose “on a blue Monday in Monrovia” inspired by his grandfather’s statements and “with renewed determination to carry on” and to proceed with “the drama of Negro freedom.” Boswell concluded with a memorable quote from Majors:
I have seen many changes in my years, and noted vast progress which the race has made, but despite failures we must press on, for it’s not in our stars but only behind our bars that we are underlings.
In the 1948 edition of the African-American Who’s Who, an entry for Majors is titled “Pioneer of the West” and it covered his history, including the statement that he left Los Angeles for Waco in 1890 “because of the need for more Negro doctors in the Southwest.” It was while representing Texas at the famous World’s Fair at Chicago three years later that he met Douglass and others.
The relocation to the Windy City was because of “its apparently democratic way of life and many opportunities,” while it was added that he served on the Board of Health Commissioners and, in 1905, was a founder of the Cook County Medical Association. Among his medical achievements were working on paralytic diabetes, the use of calomel to treat typhoid fever and pneumonia and aloe for dysentery, while he was said to be oft-quoted in medical journals, including the prestigious English publication, the Lancet.
His writings, including newspaper and magazine articles, several books, and his journalistic career was also lauded in the entry. In the 1950 census, he was recorded at his East Walnut house and still registered as a Republican. The following year, Majors was president of the National Association of Negro Authors, which was founded in 1893 by Frederick Douglass, though it is not clear if the role was honorary, given the chief executive’s advanced age.
Five years later, he still showed, in his nineties, an entrepreneurial spirit as he advertised in the Los Angeles Mirror that he sought “agents to sell novelty,” though what type was not stated, “to colored families” with the potential, of course, to “make big money.” Sadly, the nonagenarian was also fleeced by two boys who mowed his lawn and then demanded $15 and he helplessly replied “I’m blind and I didn’t know what else I could do.”
Remarkably, in early October 1956, he remarried Estelle Bonds, more than four decades after the annulment of their marriage. The Los Angeles Tribune reported that “he urged his second wife to return to him for four years before she consented.” Estelle still lived in the house they occupied in Chicago’s South Side until she agreed to migrate to Monrovia. The reunion, however, was short-lived and Estelle died just four months later in New York City, where her composer daughter, Margaret Bonds, though whether there was a separation or not is not known.
On 8 December 1960, Majors, aged 96, died and he was briefly remembered in the Eagle and the Baltimore Afro-American as a “pioneer race leader,” “freedom fighter,” and “editor of several militant newspapers,” as well as being the first Black doctor west of the Rocky Mountains and having famous friends, as noted above. While it was said he was buried in Los Angeles, it is not known where, though his first wife, Georgia and a brother, William, are interred at Angelus Rosedale Cemetery. Perhaps the Angel City’s first African-American physician lies there in an unmarked grave?
As we found most notably with R.C.O. Benjamin and to a certain extent with the Reverend Jordan Allen, also profiled in recent “The Black Pioneers of Los Angeles County” posts here, Monroe Alpheus Majors was a complex and complicated figure with questionable aspects of his life. Yet, he also embodied much of “The New Negro” concept that inspired these recent offerings because of the publication of the anthology The New Negro: A History in Documents, 1887-1937, edited by Henry Louis Gates and Martha H. Patterson.
Majors’ decades of medical practice, including specialties in and treatments of tropical diseases and obesity; his political and social activism, reflected in books, essays and editorials, included in newspapers he edited; and other activities spanning the era of the new book, are certainly noteworthy and deserving of remembrance, though his long life story has nuances and controversies that are also part and parcel of the fascinating tale.