"Fire Her! Fire Her!"

For four months, blonde, Tampa-born Dr. Deborah Coggins, 32, served as the first woman health officer of Florida's Madison. Taylor and Jefferson counties. One day last August, she was consulting with Ethel Kirkland, who is in charge of the Florida State Board of Health's mid wife training program. Dr. Coggins suggested that they carry on business over their lunch. Because Ethel Kirkland is a Negro, Dr. Coggins carefully asked the manager of the Madison Hotel (allwhite) restaurant if they could use a private room; the manager did not object, and neither did anybody else except--as Dr. Coggins thought about it later--"maybe the waitress."

Last week in a public meeting, the three county commissions heeded a growing public uproar, in effect kicked Dr. Coggins out of her job. She had had no hearing; the protests of state officials and a couple of local residents that her "indiscretion" be "forgiven" were overruled. "Fire her! Fire her!" cried Jesse Lott of Monticello from the audience. "When we give one inch, we are going to give the whole thing. It is time to stand up and be white men, not jellybacks." When one of Dr. Coggins' friends asked a county commissioner if he had not eaten with Negroes on hunting trips, he replied: "They eat after we're through." Florida's Governor LeRoy Collins angrily denounced the firing. "I am sick about it ... an evil act," but Collins had no power to intervene.

Amid all the tumult Dr. Coggins painstakingly sidestepped a martyr's role. "I should have known better," she explained to a reporter. "But I wasn't sponsoring integration; I was just doing my job. Look, this is a small community." Then she added: "I guess saying that, I sound like I've been brainwashed. Well, maybe I have. I don't know."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.