The Segregated Doctors

Only a minority of the U.S.'s 6,000 Negro physicians are members of the all-powerful American Medical Association, and the traditional role of their own National Medical Association (4,000 members) has been to fight for racial equality in medicine. It has had little A.M.A. sympathy or support in its efforts to get more Negroes into more medical schools, to get Negro physicians accepted in white dominated county medical societies, and to win them the privilege of treating their patients in general hospitals.

But in Manhattan last week, at the N.M.A.'s 66th annual convention, A.M.A. was ardently wooing N.M.A. It wanted Negro lobbying support in its fight against the King-Anderson bill extending social security coverage of illness costs to the aged, and against social security for self-employed physicians themselves. The Negro members found themselves on the spot, and sharply divided.

Conservatism. For the first time in N.M.A. history, a conservative leadership under outgoing President James T. Aldrich of St. Louis invited the A.M.A.'s president to address the convention. Dr. Leonard W. Larson (TIME cover, July 7) obliged and delivered a blast against the King-Anderson bill. Dr. Aldrich joined in opposing the bill, on the grounds that it would be compulsory, and in any case would "fail to provide health care for 5,000,000 aged citizens who are not covered by social security." Those not covered include a disproportionate number of Negroes, because so many have been in farming and domestic service.

Incoming President Vaughan Carrington Mason, 46, of Manhattan, criticized the King-Anderson bill, too. But, separating himself a little from all the harmony, he took after one of the A.M.A.'s favorite laws, the Kerr-Mills Act, which routes federal money to the states to set up medical-care plans for the near-indigent aged. So long as "states that do not even believe in the dignity of some of their citizens . . . deprive Negro citizens of their rights, what faith can I have that they will treat the sick, needy aged Negroes any better?"

Compromise. In the N.M.A.'s House of Delegates, the traditionally militant faction wants federal medical coverage for the aged. A compromise resolution, beginning with seven "Whereases," paid lip service to the A.M.A. doctrine that the individual should provide for his own health care in old age. But it proposed that states stop dragging their feet on legislation to provide medical care for the aged (Kerr-Mills benefits are now effective in only 20 states), and demanded "fair and equal distribution of this aid, and its benefits to the Negro aged, in those states which historically discriminate undemocratically to the disadvantage of the Negro." The delegates adopted the compromise, 171 to 44.

Furthermore, by unanimous voice vote, the Negro delegates backed pending bills --opposed by the A.M.A.--to bring physicians themselves under the general benefits of social security. And they applauded Dr. Mason's attack on the practice in segregationist states of keeping Negro physicians from full membership in county societies and keeping them out of hospitals. A little bitterly, Dr. Mason urged the A.M.A. to discipline local societies that discriminate against the Negro physician. On this topic, perhaps dearest to the heart of Negro doctors, A.M.A.'s President Larson had nothing to say.

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