<Begin Segment 22>

AI: Well, and then another thing that was happening, of course, was the whole Civil Rights movement was on the upswing. And I was wondering whether the, well, this year, in fact, is the sixtieth anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision of the Supreme Court in 1954. And I was wondering, was that much of a topic of conversation, or --

EH: Well, it was exciting, but I think the Hayeses were not marchers, for one thing. He could talk to groups or teach, or get into long conversations, and, (yes). We had a lot of friends who were, Walt Hundley and a half a dozen people from that Church of the People participated. And to this day, they're active in, CORE was another, Congress of Racial Equality. Have a lot of people at, friends active in that. But, and Ralph would believe in that, but he, he just wasn't a marching kind of person. He would talk about it and lecture about it, as much as anybody wanted him to. I think his brother, Charles, did do a lot of marching as, not only as a labor person, but because he was at the heart of Chicago's residential and social action. He was a fighter for fair housing, and at the end, he was for fighting hospital, equal services and that kind of thing. That was, that was something that went on when I was at the American Council. That, that the hospitals were not taking in black patients, and there was a black, I think there was a black hospital at -- we had a friend who... I can't remember where that was. She was about to deliver and they would not let her in at the, at the closest hospital, she had to go to a black hospital, or Cook county. But here, here, interestingly enough, they did not allow, Children's Orthopedic, for instance, would not allow, I think, black physicians, Jewish physicians. And I had a doctor... see, my first-born was that, Doctor's Hospital. And that's right, the minister was a little critical of me because Doctor's Hospital was not allowing Jews, much less blacks to practice. And we had a mutual friend, George Sherwin, who was active at, at the church, was a Jewish doctor, European-educated guy. And when Fred Shorter heard that I was going to deliver at, at Doctor's Hospital, he said, "You know, George can't practice there." And that was just a gentle reminder on his part.

Eventually, by the time I was pregnant with Mark, we joined Group Health. Group Health, at that time, Group Health doctors could not practice at Children's Orthopedic. And they labeled Group Health as kind of a leftist, because the doctors were willing to accept salaries and, and doctors were not supposed to have to rely on salaries. They, they charged what they could get away with. But that was true -- in fact, we met when, when Larry was one, we were at a party when there were two black doctors who were new in town, applying, being interviewed for jobs. And interestingly enough, even at that time, Group Health was not hiring blacks, apparently. Blanche Levisio, who became head of Odessa Brown clinic, was a black pediatrician, and Group Health did not hire her. And for better or worse, when, when CAMP instituted... part of CAMP's mission, or part of the whole poverty program, mission, was to change society to be more accommodating to a cross-section of the population. Here in Seattle, if you were black and had to go to Children's Orthopedic, you had to take two or three buses to get there from Central Area. So one of the missions for CAMP, and there was a group called, department called... anyway, their mission was to negotiate and work, convince Children's Orthopedic that there needed to be branches, more accommodatable to populations like Central Area, and that's how Odessa Brown clinic got established at Yesler and Eighteenth. So that's a branch of Children's Orthopedic. Now they could go there, and this Blanche Levisio became the first doctor to oversee that program. But there was, cross-town transportation, for instance, was a big problem, and that was a major problem at Watts, that there was no cross-town, everybody had to go downtown to get any, to get back out. Like here, Central Area people would have to go downtown by bus or streetcar, bus, and if they had to go to Children's Orthopedic out of downtown, they had to get, then get back. Where there could have been, and we fought and we won the Twenty-third Avenue bus routes. And that was, that's the kind of thing that, you know, had it not been a black population, we might have accomplished it ages ago. But that's the kind of human rights issues that, basic social service needs. Medical, transportation.

AI: That those basic needs were not being met adequately, largely because of racial prejudice and discrimination.

EH: Discrimination. Uh-huh.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.