03/06/2023
This engaging, memorably told memoir from Stallworth, an anesthesiologist now retired after a 45 year medical career, builds up to the provocative question in its title. It’s asked of Stallworth in 1970, by an elderly white patient at Case Western Reserve Hospital in Youngstown, Ohio, where Stallworth, at intern at age 24, was the only Black doctor. Stallworth’s response—he essentially says that he’s both—may surprise readers. In this instance, he notes, he heard neither “hatred or evil intent,” the way he had, growing up in Birmingham, when that slur had been hurled “by policemen and by politicians on TV campaigning for mayor or governor.” Stallworth saw the man as “a male patient, an elderly male born in another century, in the 1890s”—and saw himself as a doctor. So, he got to work.
Stallworth’s memoir abounds in rich, often surprising scenes, some as complex as that one. His lifetime of thinking through these incidents informs every page, starting with his vivid recounting of a 1950s Alabama childhood of ice-cream, marbles, Conkoleen, and questions about the segregated world around him: at a department store, spying an empty lunch counter, he “couldn’t help but wonder how White Only food tasted, and why was it White Only?” Arresting portraits of friends, family, teachers, and others bring the era to life, as young Stallworth and his father deliver Jet and Ebony magazine around the city known as the most segregated in America.
Also arresting are Stallworth’s accounts of horseplay at Howard University, of seeing a host of notable entertainers (countless luminaries at the Howard Theatre; a young Richard Pryor; a Gene Krupa show at New York’s Cafe Metropole attended by Cassius Clay), of his personal connection to those lost in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, of the time he got lost as a Chicago bus driver with furious passengers. The storytelling is conversational, illuminating, and often funny, as this fiercely independent thinker offers a vital contribution to the historical record.
Takeaway: The arresting memoir of a Black doctor’s journey and 1950s Alabama upbringing.
Great for fans of: Charles M. Blow’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, Damon Tweedy’s Black Man in a White Coat.
Production grades Cover: B+ Design and typography: A Illustrations: B Editing: A Marketing copy: B+
2023-01-26
Stallworth reflects on his experience growing up as a Black child in the 1950s and ’60s in segregated Birmingham and his subsequent career as a doctor.
Stallworth grew up in Lincoln Park, a “Colored neighborhood” in Birmingham, Alabama, before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a time during which Martin Luther King Jr. called Birmingham “the most segregated city in the United States.” Schools, trains, water fountains, even dressing rooms in clothing stores were segregated. As the author observes: “My first required reading was the Jim Crow ‘White Only’ and ‘Colored Only’ signs plastered everywhere, even on city buses.” He didn’t cross the city line and leave Birmingham until he was 16, when he attended Howard University with the lifelong hope of becoming a doctor. He graduated from Meharry Medical College and became an anesthesiologist, but even after such accomplishment, bigotry continued to doggedly pursue him. A White patient, astonished at the sight of him, asked the question that became the title of Stallworth’s book. This thoughtful memoir is more impressionistic than documentary. In place of a comprehensive autobiography, the author provides a pastiche of anecdotes, some relating to racial identity. His writing style is unadorned, his delivery an easy and almost intimately familiar one (“I had not traveled by airplane, train, bus, boat, or even a taxi, but I boarded that train without a second thought, with no hesitation, curious to see what was inside of ‘The Southerner,’ which was a silver, streamlined train”). The stories he conveys are captivating and astutely tied into the tumultuous history of the times. The author recounts when he learned of Emmett Till’s brutal murder. He was not quite 10 at the time and saw Till’s mutilated face on the cover of Jetmagazine, which he delivered. This is an extraordinary remembrance—as emotionally affecting as it is historically edifying.
A fascinating, moving memoir that focuses on one of the most tempestuous periods in American history.
