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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview
R-0014, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
Dr. Salter Cochran and his wife, Doris Cochran, discuss their activism in the Weldon-Roanoke Rapids area of North Carolina. Extremely well-educated, worldly, and, in Salter's case, with military experience, the Cochrans arrived in North Carolina with progressive views on race and a determination to push for racial justice. They were distressed to find entrenched racism among white residents and a reluctance to challenge it among African Americans. Additionally, the Cochrans' activism inhibited friendships and even inspired threats of violence. But it also succeeded in desegregating some of the area's institutions, including a school (which their children were the first to integrate) and a hospital. Outsiders though they were, they continued to agitate for racial justice in forums ranging from PTA meetings to medical society conventions. As they recall their decades of activism, they reflect on racism and justice, and they evaluate the successes and failures of the movement to which they contributed. This interview will provide readers with a great deal of information about race, desegregation, poverty, and health in North Carolina.
Salter and Doris Cochran reflect on the many challenges that faced them in their efforts to desegregate medical care and public education in Weldon, North Carolina.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
I'm interviewing Dr. Salter Cochran and his wife, Doris Cochran, about their activism in the Weldon-Roanoke Rapids area, and the activism of health care professionals. Mrs. Cochran, if you could start by talking about your background a little bit. Where are you from?
I was born in Denver, Colorado, and my parents were easterners. My mother was educated at Howard University, my father at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. My father pursued a career in the Methodist ministry after being discharged from the service in World War I. Because they were adventurous, the two of them decided to move all over the country, which was sort of distressing to their families, from that generation who were so used to being in a fixed situation. I was the last of four children born in Denver. From there we went to Portland, Oregon, and from there to Oakland and Berkeley, California. I was educated on the west coast. I went back to Denver to finish high school, and then went to Howard University. That's where I met my husband.
When did you come to Howard?
1945. That was because my father had been appointed to teach at Howard at that time, so the whole family moved. I was the last member of the family to leave the nest, since others were married or adults, so I was with my parents when he was appointed to teach at Howard. Salter and I married while we were still in school. From there, we moved here to Weldon, which was his mother's home. She was born in Scotland Neck, and then her family moved to Weldon, and that's when we came down in 1950. From there, we worked together. Salt was in Korea, perhaps he can tell you about that. I was trained as a musician—a violinist, and theory major in music at Howard. I had never lived in the South before moving to Washington, so it was all a very new experience for me.
That must have been a really exciting time to come to the South and Howard, right at the end of World War II. Do you remember any experiences from then that really stick out in your mind?
All of them were negative!
Not all of them.
Coming to Washington, first, and then Weldon, too.
Going to Washington was quite an experience because I had never lived in segregation before that time. It was different. It was surprising in many aspects, but there is a sort of umbrella protection on a campus, you're insulated from reality in a way. That part of it wasn't traumatic, at least, but it was difficult to put together the pieces of the whole picture of segregation. In our nation's capital—that was a big joke, a sick joke. That, as you said, was quite interesting. There were a lot of veterans on campus at that time. Very serious about their work, very dedicated to getting through and doing the best that they possibly could. A lot of them were married with families. So there was a serious atmosphere on campus at that time.
Dr. Cochran, if you could tell about your background.
I was born in Washington, DC, 1922. I was brought up in segregation. However, during my course of secondary education, I went to some of the better public schools in Washington. I graduated from Dunbar High School, which was an outstanding black high school. They've written books about it. My wife's mother finished there in 1914. I finished in 1939. Because of segregation, we had some of the best teachers. Very few didn't have PhDs in this high school, because they had nowhere to go after they got their degrees, because of the separation in education. During the high school days, you were exposed to a whole lot of bigotry within the city. As my wife mentioned, there was an umbrella around Howard and other educational institutions in the area. It was quite an odd situation. You had all these people with these big brains, that could have contributed to society, and they were limited within a certain scope of education in the city. My wife had a godfather who wrote many books, E. Franklin Frazier. Look him up when you go back. Allain Locke in philosophy. And they were all teachers of mine. E. Franklin was a character.
He grew up with my father in Baltimore. E. Franklin Frazier and my father were boyhood friends.
I was exposed to education that was limited in its scope, so I missed some of the things that she was exposed to in growing up. The cultural aspects of living. They didn't stress that at Howard, they stressed basic education, because the student body was constituted of a lot of people from backgrounds even worse than mine, from the South. That made some difference in basic and cultural education. But they did have quite a few people who did stress culture, like Allain Locke and Franklin Frazier. My experience there was enlightening, as far as basic education is concerned. But limited.
This was at Howard?
Yes. It was an excellent institution at that time, it's still good now. Phylicia Rashad and her sister are graduates of Howard.
My mother graduated from Howard. When we moved to California, she did her graduate work at University of California, and had no trouble with her transcripts going from Howard to U.C.-Berkeley. It showed that there was a good quality of education at that time at Howard.
Dr. Cochran, how did you decide to go into medicine? Was that something you decided at Howard?
I didn't choose it. My mother chose it when I was four years
old, and mentioned it constantly. She was a single parent. My father had
a good mind, but alcoholism took over, and he died at an early age. My
mother was rearing two children, I had a sister. We both got college
educations, and I got further education. She influenced me more than
anything, because she mentioned it constantly. I wasn't sure!
We had unusual high schools that offered four languages, five years of
Latin, and two years each of French, German and Spanish, three years of
chemistry, two years of biology, and three years of physics. That was in
high school. And the introduction to calculus in 1938. That was rare. I
had brilliant kids in my class. There were five to seven hundred, a
large class. It could have been more than that, because they merged. All
of them
When did you enter medical school, and was that also at Howard?
Yes, in 1944, and I finished in 1948. Courtesy of the army, we went free. You've heard of the V-12 program? That was the Navy.
ASTP—Army Specialized Training Program.
We were excluded from the Navy program. That's where you had segregation, too. But we were in the Army specialized training program, for which they supplied everything. They eventually sent me to the front lines of Korea for 13 months, while the North Koreans and the Chinese were shooting at us.
So that must have been shortly after you arrived in Weldon.
Yes, we hadn't been here two years before they came after me. They sent an entourage, didn't they?
The threat had always been there, because he owed the government. That
was one thing that kept us from starting our family any earlier than we
did, because we knew that this was on the horizon.
Absolutely. So many people I've talked to have said they either fought in World War II or Korea, and came back and didn't intend to stop fighting.
We were in World War II when I was in medical school, but we had to go to basic training. We had to get up early in the morning, meet at 6:30 before we went to medical school. We were in uniform, too.
But you weren't sent overseas in World War II.
No, they saved that little situation for me to go to Korea, and rushed me over there real quick, up to the front lines.
So you graduated from medical school in 1948, which was the year Truman desegregated the armed services. It was a historical turning point as you were finishing school.
It was a segregated set-up, because we had training out at Fort Myer
before I went to medical school. We had to take care of the horses and
the manure. This was a ceremonial group. Any time a president died, they
accompanied the body down Pennsylvania Avenue. The soldiers who were in
the regular army were jealous of us. They all Caucasian. There was a
young captain over there who said, "Y'all are going
to medical school?" There was some consternation that he had
such an educated group doing menial tasks. I was shoveling horse manure.
That disturbed him. This guy was from the South, a young boy, though, 23
or 24. He was a captain, so he had some political influence. We had two
women in there who were in the WACs. They couldn't
Were you in a specialized medical corps unit?
It was specialized until they got to college. Then they had a whole battalion of medical students, and some were in the school of engineering. These were young kids that joined the army for their specialized training.
So all the people you were serving with were either getting ready to go into medical or engineering school?
They were young kids who had never had any previous exposure to college at all.
When you got out of medical school and got ready to enter the medical profession, did you feel like things were changing, and there were a lot of opportunities opening up? Because it seems like some black doctors have felt that they were in a status quo that was very difficult to break, but then there's a turning point where the younger physicians start to really question a lot of the problems.
We had problems when we graduated. We were limited to black hospitals throughout the country, except a few in California, and maybe an occasional internship. They limited blacks in medical schools all over the country. They'd accept maybe two or three. Carolina's accepted none.
Until 1951.
We were married in 1947—we've been married for 50 years this year. My wife has been very supportive of anything that we've done. I interned at a predominantly black hospital in Baltimore called Provident. I got further training in a small clinic in Tarboro, Quigless Clinic. I got the board [certification] in 1950. We set up here in 1950. While I was taking the board, I had to stay at St. Augustine Hospital, which was a predominantly black hospital in Raleigh. You weren't able to stay in the hotels. The amazing thing about taking the exams—all the white students crowded around us. They thought we knew more than they did! In the final analysis, we did know more, because we were trained in medical school that you were going to meet all kinds of obstacles.
Dr. [Charles] Drew taught him.
Yes, the blood plasma man. He was a personal friend of mine most of my life. His sister finished high school with me. Eva Drew, who's a friend of mine. She's still living up in New York. That's early. We had been used to facing these things, but we were sort of in isolation in Washington. I was in the college crowd, but we were isolated in northwest Washington, and parts of northeast. But none in the suburbs all around. I knew nothing about that. You couldn't go to a theater there. You went to predominantly black theaters. I was prepared for it [segregation in Weldon], but my wife wasn't, with her background of being born in Denver, and going to Oregon where there were two thousand black people in the whole state. Her father was an AME [Afro-Methodist Episcopal] minister, so she's tell you more about that.
Do you remember at this time if you could have trained or practiced at any of the VA [Veterans' Administration] Hospitals?
No, they were kind of radical, too, considering the whole situation. They didn't encourage you to come. The only VA hospital you could go to was down in Tuskegee, where they did that experiment you hear so much about [The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment]. Dr. Drew got killed going down there for a seminar. He got killed at Haw River. That was the only veterans hospital I know. They did not encourage us to come to veterans hospitals. In fact, in the service, we integrated for the first time at the hospital at San Antonio. They cut our tour short. We were supposed to be there for 60 days, but we stayed for 30. They were rushing me to Korea. This was in 1952. I stayed there in combat for about nine months. There were 300 of us that they shipped out. Now they were integrated. And we would go downtown in San Antone, and they looked at us right strangely. But these lieutenants and captains, I'd go in a mixed group, and nobody would say anything. Texas had that segregation law. We got ready to fly back, and saw "colored" and "white" on the doors, and I didn't notice the doors, because I was going in. I knew what was practiced, but they said nothing, because there were about 300 of us. I imagine they were afraid to approach any of the officers. All of them were officers.
During the Korean War, he may not tell you this, he was decorated twice with the Bronze Star. Plus, they were in front of the MASH hospitals on the lines. They were in the bunkers in front of MASH during his whole stay in Korea.
Five miles in front of MASH. The enemy was two or three hundred yards in front of you constantly. You moved them back, halfway up to North Korea, almost to the Chinese line, and then you came back, because they had three and a half million against our quarter of a million or half million. We had superior firepower, but we didn't have superior manpower. That's the reason you had the DMZ [demilitarized zone] line, because neither group could move the other.
What were some of your memories when you came to Weldon?
My mother and father were both trained social workers, and their lives were very broad. As a result, they shared with us the experiences. . .
Can I interrupt? Their lives weren't always like that.
I'm speaking of when I knew them.
Because they were victims of the same things I was, in Baltimore and Washington. Her mother finished the same high school I did.
And Howard University. So, by being social workers and sharing with
us—we even socialized together, my parents and our
generation. I have three siblings. As a result, I think it gave us a
step up in understanding society in general, people in general. It was a
very interesting life, because we moved from community to community. By
my father being a minister, you were welcomed in the community, you
didn't have to forge your way through. At the same time, you
met so many diverse people. The church in Oakland and Berkeley that my
father had was integrated way back in the '30s and
'40s. It had a small minority of other races, but they were
there. There was an on-going exchange of rabbis and ministers within the
ministerial alliances in Oregon, California, and Colorado. So we were
really exposed to lots of different types of people. My older sister
And this was at a church here in Weldon?
Yes, yes.
First Baptist.
After that, I told my husband, "I've never been a very religious person, maybe spiritual, but not religious. But this does it for me. I just don't think I can become a part of that type of mentality. I've got to stay on the outside and find out what allows it persist, and see what I can do from the other end. But it's not going to work for me to be a part of it." I had grown up in a family that wasn't terribly religious, because we weren't even told that we had to go to church in my family, it was a matter of being exposed to all kinds of religions, and accepting what was acceptable to you. After that experience, the idea of becoming a part of the religious atmosphere in Weldon [was impossible]. And that set us apart, because in the black community, if you're not first, from that community, and you don't have the accent, that's sort of a startling aspect to you, and then if you're not a part of the church, there is something definitely wrong there! So that set me apart.
It's the slave mentality again.
So it was harder for people to look at me and say, "She'll be a part of us," than it was for them to look at my husband, because his family had been very involved in the religious community in Weldon, especially his grandmother. That was a revelation, number one. After that, I think I made up my mind with Salter that we'd do the best we could to bring to the people the best medicine and the best image of self-realization of some sort that we possibly could. It started off by our working very hard to create a physical plant. No one would let us have any property that we could house an office in, and we had to fend for ourselves.
They wanted to put us in the cotton gin!
We really had nowhere to go.
So you really had a hard time getting even office space?
Oh, yes. His aunt was still living in Weldon, his mother's sister. They had a big, lovely family home there. Across the street from the family home, there was an old, old house that had been built by slave labor in 18. . .
1853.
I have one of the original bricks.
It was a former clinic in the nineteenth century.
Yes, a former medical clinic, two stories. It was dilapidated, but when I looked at it, I told Salter, "Rather than renting from someone who doesn't want you there anyway, in a piece of a place that you'll have to pay a terrific rent for, let's fix this place up. We can do it." Salt said, "No, Doris, I don't see how!" Luckily, my mother and father had taught us to work with a hammer, saw, and nails when we were children.
Moving from parsonage to parsonage.
Yes, and my mother always believed in exercising whatever you could to create some type of aesthetic surroundings for yourself. So I said, "We can do it, we can do it." When we went in the old building, it didn't even have running water in it.
Birds were flying in and out.
It had a dead cat in the hall. Salt said, "No, Doris, this will never work." I said, "Yes, it will." So we found people that would help us.
Did you own the building?
The family owned it, but it had been deserted for years.
Two doctors who were my cousins, after the Civil War—
Most Southerners do have a lot of cousins!
I think that's the only thing that really saved him, because when he came back from Korea, he was quite militant. One of the judges in this area was a cousin of his. I think that he put out the word not to bother him, not to touch him. I think that was the one thing that kept him from being hurt, because otherwise, he could have been physically hurt.
I can imagine, in the early '50s.
We were victims of a lot of physical threats, and some shootings.
Some mysterious telephone calls.
Of which we believed the FBI was behind.
A lot of threatening things had happened.
We were renovating the place initially, and couldn't get 1,500 dollars. I was a new doctor, and every white doctor that came in the area—one did come in before I went in the service, didn't he? And they loaned him 40,000 dollars right away.
Forty thousand dollars?
That was after you came back.
No, he came in while I was gone.
And this was the local banks?
I had to have two signatures, my mother's and my aunt's, to get 1,500 dollars. We couldn't buy any materials, and I had an old lady that I used to go over and see when none of the other doctors would. She was Caucasian. She called down to the place and told them they'd better let me have anything I wanted.
And plus, we had a military surplus store in Rocky Mount, and I used to jump in the car and run down there to get paint and whatever else we could find at a very low cost. We physically worked along with other carpenters, and re-did that place.
The first time, we had a one-room apartment in the building.
With offices in the front.
So you lived in that building.
Yes, before I went to war.
I'm not sure I understood what you just said. The other black physician here in Weldon didn't have access to the hospital, but they said as long as he didn't have access you could?
No. If he [the older doctor] agreed to come on as a staff member, limited, I'm sure, they would allow him [Dr. Cochran] to do so, but he didn't agree.
So that enabled him to block me. They knew I had been trained.
I think that was a ruse. I really don't think they would have let that man in there. Plus, he had, I'm sure, been traumatized. He had witnessed lynchings.
Oh my god.
Growing up in Henderson.
After he was an adult, I'm sure that he felt loathe to get into. . .
They used to send him mail on civil rights. All this happened before I went into the army in the later part of '51.
Was this Dr. Tinsley?
Yes.
And he was basically afraid to accept privileges even if they were offered?
I think so, but I think it was a ruse. I don't think that they would really have done so. But he had witnessed lynchings, and he was part of the NAACP. He had been the victim of threats, both written and telephoned, over the years, and I'm sure that was one reason why he was not willing to get involved.
They turned me down, but within 30 days, if a white physician showed up, he'd get immediate privileges.
My husband continued to apply to the hospital for years, annually.
It took them 12 years for them to put me in there.
So when did you finally get privileges?
1961, '62. The only reason that came about was that they were getting ready to lose the Hill-Burton funds. They had put my picture in the paper when I was in combat in Korea, first time they'd ever done that for a black.
When you were decorated. We have that scrapbook with all that stuff in it.
I'm skipping around. That was in '53 when they decorated me. We're dividing it from '50 to '52, when I went into the service. Then after '54 when I came back.
The main spokesman's going to be my wife, and I'll fill in. This is not the role I usually play. I usually run the talking! I think she is better organized than I am.
I don't know about that!
We had been talking about Dr. Tinsley. About how old was he when y'all got here?
He had known my family since my mother was pregnant with me. He had known her as a child.
He was born in the 1880s, wasn't he?
He came here in 1908, and he was 31 or 32. He died in 1961.
He went to Leonard Medical School at Shaw University. He was an interesting man.
Very intelligent, but he feared the system.
He had witnessed so much, and he had reason to fear what was going on.
He had been active in the NAACP?
Oh yeah, he was president. But they could intimidate him.
I think the older he got, and then he was by himself after he lost his wife.
1948 she died.
And his children had moved away, and he was by himself. I'm sure it was difficult for him as he grew older to fight those battles. You get battle-weary after a while.
He didn't have a charming personality, either.
He was very abrupt.
If you didn't do it his way, he was not understanding of your way. He would break it off sharply. He had known my family all my life. He had lived behind me. He moved his family out of here, for one thing. Washington, DC. They lived two blocks over from me in Washington. I had known him all my life.
I believe Mrs. Cochran said that when you came back from Korea, you were very militant.
Oh yeah, I became very militant. That was a frightening thing as far as the establishment was concerned. They didn't know really exactly how to handle us. And they still don't, after all these years, they really don't understand.
I think it's because in small communities, if you're an outsider, you remain an outsider in many aspects. I think that was by and large part of it. Plus, we were different from the people that were here because our backgrounds were quite different, and our aspirations were quite different, too. That's hard to cope with, change is always hard to deal with.
When we came back, and were trying to remodel the building—we spent a couple of hundred thousand dollars to remodel it. Eventually, we remodeled it, and it was the most modern office in the area. It looks pretty close to the same way it looked then when we remodeled it. The house structure was solid, because they hewed the lumber.
We decided to have our living quarters above the office. It was a large building, and my husband and I both said, with rearing a family, we needed to have some proximity there, because otherwise, they wouldn't have a chance to see their dad. So we decided to have our living quarters upstairs. I think a lot of that was safety in proximity, too. So that's what we did. The children grew up knowing what their father did, and sharing his work, and he sharing his time with them. So it worked out well for us.
It was difficult, because they didn't give me immediate staff privileges, and you were working at a definite disadvantage. After I returned, it was over seven years. And every white physician came and got his in 30 days. We had two white physicians in the area, Dr. Blow and Dr. Suiter in Weldon, and they were courteously polite. You know how people are? It still didn't solve my problems. We couldn't even go to clinics at Duke then. We went to clinics at the black hospital, Lincoln in Durham. We had quite a few liberal physicians at Duke who would come over and lecture all day on one- and two-day lecture sessions. They would keep us abreast of what was happening in the field of medicine.
So these doctors would lecture at Lincoln?
They called it Lincoln Clinic, and it was an all-day clinic, and part of the next day. We went for years doing that, and going maybe to seminars outside the state.
That's where I went to deliver all my babies, had to drive all the way down to Lincoln [approximately 80 miles]. For two reasons: I was Rh negative, and I didn't want to be relegated to a segregated area in the hospital here.
So there was a hospital here, but it was segregated.
In Roanoke Rapids [5 miles from Weldon]. It's the old hospital, and you're dealing with doctors who hadn't been used to treating black people like human beings. That was disturbing to them when I got on the staff. I sort of half-way intimidated and forced them to do things. I was delivering babies there in '61, '62, and they told me you had to send the babies downstairs to the colored section, as they said. I started sending them upstairs where everybody else was. And they thought I was a belligerent soul. Eventually, I integrated that hospital, didn't I, Doris? Because I started sending the patients upstairs. Everybody was afraid to say anything to me, because they would cut off the federal funds. It was the law then. Which was late—they had passed the thing a long time ago. I was the only minority physician there for 15 years. I caught hell.
Our children integrated the schools, by the way.
In Halifax County in 1964. Our son Tony went all the way through 12 grades, and he finished in 1976.
They integrated Weldon's school. They were the first blacks in Weldon or in the whole county to integrate. John Salter, I don't know if you've heard of him, he was with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
He was here in the late '50s and early '60s.
He helped us organize parents for integration, to get depositions. In fact, we housed a lot of the law students who were helping us to get depositions.
You know where they came from? The Ivy League. Georgetown, Yale, Harvard.
They stayed at our house. We had army cots. And they helped us take care of the children, because we were really immersed in civil rights at that time.
And we believe the FBI tapped our phones.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Our phones were tapped at the time, and we could tell that they were. So we contacted the FBI to tell them what we thought. They came to our house.
And acted so cavalier about it.
So we said, "You probably are responsible for it." It was amusing, but at the same time, I couldn't allow my children to answer the telephone, because we'd get so many threats on the phone. We didn't know what was going on. We had to be very careful.
And they did us physically in, too. They would take me out, threaten to put me in jail, and put me in there. But they were afraid to lock me up.
They locked up a very good friend of ours several times, who was a lawyer—James Walker, the man who integrated the University of North Carolina Law School.
And he didn't have many friends. He's the guy who came here in 1954 and started the civil rights movement. It was before Christmas, I had just come home. He was supposed to come down and talk to some other blacks in Weldon about the situation, and they backed out. They told him, "That young doctor that just came out of the army might be interested." That was the latter part of '54. So we joined him, and I ended up spending a whole lot of money with him. Cause nobody else would spend either time or money with civil rights.
We helped to finance his efforts.
We were threatened many times, and he was jailed at least a couple of hundred times.
You had said earlier that you wanted to mention the integration of UNC Medical School, which I'm also interested in. Edward Diggs was the first black student admitted in 1951 to the first four-year class, and James Slade was the second, two years after that.
When we got here, Duke was the only four-year medical school in the state, and ECU was just a normal school in 1950. The president of ECU was a friend of Doris'.
Not really. I met him—Leo Jenkins. I think I was the first black member of the hospital board that was created before the construction of the new hospital in 1972. Our civil rights organization, the Halifax County Voters' Movement, had been pushing for a seat on various boards, school boards, hospital boards, wherever we could make our presence known. So I was appointed to the hospital board.
I was on the old staff [of Roanoke Rapids Hospital] for ten years. I was
the only minority. They never would make me chief of staff for anything.
I was too outspoken. They had some fear, but I didn't show
too much fear. We used to have speakers from the John Birch Society come
over from Rocky Mount, and they would tell black jokes. I would get up
in the meeting with about 70 doctors there, and I was the only black
doctor, and tell them to get the "H" back to Rocky
Mount. The Philippino doctor was over there, telling me to "Sit
In what situation were you listening to someone from the John Birch Society?!
Most of the Rocky Mount doctors belonged to the Birch Society back in the '50s and '60s. They would come over here as speakers for meetings of the county medical society. That was in the old hospital. They didn't pull too much of that in the new one.
Because things were integrated there.
More than they had been at the other. We still were occupying jobs at the lower end of the totem pole.
I never will forget, speaking of the integration of the hospital. The board was formed for the new hospital before it was completed, so we could be in on the planning of the hospital. The Hill-Burton funds were mentioned tirelessly, to the extent that we could not have double rooms, we must have single rooms. I said, "You're going to spend more money to segregate individually than you would if you were to have double rooms. It would be a lot cheaper." But they said people in this community just would not accept that. So the hospital was built with all individual rooms, instead of accommodating more than one bed per room.
The hospital in Rocky Mount did the same thing.
Yes, that's right.
But see, the hospital in Rocky Mount integrated before ours. We were one
of the last ones. What tickled me about the integration of the old
hospital, which was in '61 or '62 that I went over
there, until '72 when they built the new one, they gave me
courtesy staff membership, because I lived outside of town. But they had
been giving all doctors in Weldon courtesy staff privileges, they
didn't give them full privileges. Full staff and courtesy
staff, I couldn't tell the difference between the two,
because you could do everything the other guy did, on courtesy staff.
But what tickled me is, we had a place up at Gaston Lake, and we were
out having a good time with the kids one Sunday [shortly after Cochran
came on staff at the old Roanoke Rapids Hospital]. They had told me I
couldn't work the emergency room, the people in the community
wouldn't accept it. See, the people in the community accepted
a whole lot more things than these doctors wanted you to believe. It was
an economic thing. They didn't want you to meet any of the
people that may come to you as patients. So this doctor was driving by
in his boat, and saw me out there, and I was enjoying the children. His
name was Woody Boone. He stopped and said, "What are you
doing?" And I said, "Man, I'm out
here!" I wasn't working the emergency room or taking
care of business or those problems that they had, so I could just sit
there and relax, and said, "Well, this is the best
life." The next day, I don't mean a week, he asked
me, "Would you work the emergency room one day a
month?" And they never understood that my wife and me,
we'd sit up here, and just say, "Well, go
Just to get this clear—you finally got staff privileges at the old hospital in '62, and even thought there wasn't any official policy of integration, you started sending patients to the second floor, which used to be the white ward.
Yes, that's right. They said something about it, but nobody had the guts to come up to me and tell me.
Was the old hospital built with any Hill-Burton funds?
They received some after it was built. Hill-Burton hadn't been running long when we first got here. The hospital was built in 1914.
In fact, Salter's grandfather donated money to the building of that hospital. David Smith.
My grandfather, who was mostly Caucasian, had about 90 acres. There's his picture up there [points to photograph on wall]. He's the one who had all the money. He owned a block downtown in Weldon. But we didn't receive any of that when we got here in the '50s. They lost quite a bit of money in the crash, my grandmother did. In place of the welfare department, that didn't exist for black people, she was the welfare department. So we were pretty substantially well off. We owned about 350 rental houses at one time, that's a lot.
So in the early '60s, at this old hospital, do you remember any talk of "Well, we might lose our Hill-Burton funds."
Oh, yeah, they talked about it. I was there. I got sick at that time,
and they put me in the hospital. They gave me a private
room—they cleared out the morgue!
I don't think it was literally the morgue—it might have looked like it, but it wasn't quite.
But they cleared out a room that had no windows in it. I hyperventilated a few times, and had an inverted T-wave, which meant they thought I had a heart attack. My doctor was this Puerto Rican, Angie Patella. Angie was trying to appease and be part of the picture, until his brother came up from Puerto Rico. He was blacker than Angie, and they looked at him, and Angie had a little rougher time after that. He was Castillian.
So you were sick around '62 or '63?
Yeah, I was overworked, and I smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. My wife threatened to move me, but they never did put me upstairs [in the white section of the hospital].
So they were still scrambling and looking for loopholes?
Oh yeah.
But from what you said, Mrs. Cochran, it sounded like they didn't fully integrate officially until the new hospital was built in 1972?
I believe so—isn't that correct, Salter?
Yes.
It sounds like there was a real gradual transition.
Yes, yes.
Well, the babies were in the same place. That's about the only integration they did, in the nursery.
Until '72, the other patients remained segregated?
Well, they sort of kept them isolated up on OB. It's kind of hard to segregate, since they had to work on available space.
The doctors' offices were definitely segregated. I became a part of the Medical Auxiliary, so I had an opportunity to go in some of the offices to meet with some of the wives, and the offices definitely had "colored" and "white" waiting rooms. So the attitudes were pretty much the same, regardless of where the funds for the hospitals were coming from.
But the hospital that was built in 1972 was built with Hill-Burton funds, and they really pushed for it. . .
The other one was partially built, they had an annex. That's what frightened them, because the new annex was built with Hill-Burton funds.
Do you remember when the annex was built?
It was added after I came out of the army, after '54. They were really nervous about that. In fact, they left the annex standing there for a while before they tore the old hospital down. It's ironic—they went all out of their way. I had a guy who was from the Balkans, named Cromke. He was mean as the dickens, but he liked me. I had three or four doctors that I could get information from. They'd interact with me, but if I got in trouble, I was in trouble. Those guys didn't want to help you. I believe they were less trained than I was. The intelligence level didn't impress me, because they were dealing with poor whites and blacks. This is a mill town. Stephens was there, and Beard, and what's that one with two names?
West Point-Pepperell?
Yeah, that's right.
My mother used to work for J. P. Stephens in LaGrange, Georgia.
The mills would treat people like dogs. My wife was instrumental in the unions—you know that movie, Norma Rae? I was the only doctor that opposed the rest of the doctors in the area.
They were against the unions. We worked with some of the employees during the civil rights movement.
My wife was informing these people of their rights. She knew about unions and organizing.
Some of the black mill workers stayed at our house.
You say the doctors of the community took a stand against unions?
It was socialized medicine!
They didn't do it overtly, but they were not for unions.
I was on the outside looking in. The mills paid certain doctors to take care of their patients. That's a form of socialized medicine. I never had been part of the picture. The mills always encouraged people not to come to me, because I have always been client-involved. Because if you get institutionally involved, you know you aren't helping people. It's managed care.
In other words, a lot of the mill workers, when they were injured, would be sent right back on the job, rather than treated completely. My husband, of course, wasn't for that. He was for the patient, the worker. They opposed that posture. He always let it be known that he was not going to send a mill worker back before they had recovered from whatever injuries they had sustained. So that put him on the outside.
This was prior to 1970, or maybe early '70s.
The white doctors in this area were in favor of working for the mills?
Yes.
That was their only way of making a living. This area has been known as the poverty strip. When you have mills, you know you have lower incomes.
If I understand you right, it's kind of ironic that these doctors would support this what you might call "managed care" in the mills, but every white doctor I've talked to or read about in the North Carolina Medical Journal is very against any kind of socialized medicine.
It wasn't labeled as such. They didn't look at it that way. They saw it as an opportunity for them to have a steady income, and help the mills stay where they were.
You hit upon a point. Back in the mid-'60s, after I came on the staff, I became president of the Old North State Medical Society [for one term in 1968-69]. I was very militant, I wore a dashiki, and I would bring things up before the legislature. Because we were not members of the North Carolina Medical Society until the late '60s.
I know that they gave scientific membership in 1955, but when were blacks admitted as full members?
By the late '60s. We were members of the Old North State [Medical Society] all those years.
So what were some of the things you lobbied the legislature on?
We lobbied them on membership, which was a waste of time.
So you went to the state legislature to get that?
We went to the state legislature when we were involved on the school separation bill in 1969.
A lot of the areas here wanted to create separate school districts within the townships, because blacks were living in the rural areas, and this would re-segregate the schools after integration, since the townships were predominantly white. So both Salter and myself appeared before the legislature to protest this, along with James Walker. He didn't appear, but he helped us to prepare. We had a lot of difficulties to overcome, because our mail was held up. Whenever we were approved to appear, they'd hold our mail at the post office, and we'd get a notice a couple of hours before time for us to be there, and we'd have to get in the car and speed all they way to Raleigh.
They gave us more than a couple of hours, they gave us overnight, but we
had to put people to work on machines to get out the folders to pass
out. Julian Allsbrook—you saw Julian Allsbrook Highway on the
way in?—he was instrumental in the Senate for a number of
years. So his colleagues asked him,
Right. I'm familiar with the Durham situation.
They gerrymandered it.
This area is divided into three districts for the same purpose. Roanoke Rapids is one school district, Weldon is another, and then the county.
Which one would be the so-called black school district?
The county. Most of the blacks live in rural areas, so they draw that line accordingly.
It's changed now. In Weldon, it's predominantly black. Roanoke Rapids is still predominantly white.
But they're changing, because there are a lot of blacks moving in the mill houses, which are deteriorating.
Have the economic opportunities changed, because if I'm not mistaken, most of the mill workers back in the '50s would have been white.
They were.
Most of them are black, now. But the upper echelon is still predominantly white. The same thing in the hospital. There's not a black within the first eight spots in the hospital, never has been.
So it sounds like the economic structure of the community changed over time.
To some extent, yes. You have a lot of blacks now who are in services, where before, you didn't see a black person behind a counter anywhere, you didn't see them in a restaurant, you didn't see them anywhere. Of course, that's changed.
They were house people, domestic servants.
You had said that your own children have chosen not to stay in this area. Do you feel there's been kind of an exodus from this area?
Oh, yes. Through the years.
It's been both blacks and whites.
Yes, it's happened here. There are no opportunities for them here. Plus, there's no acceptance, by and large, in the majority of organizations here. The service organizations like Rotary Club are still predominantly white, so that you're really not an integral part of the community.
Of the infrastructure.
The churches, of course, are still segregated—eleven o'clock on Sundays is the most segregated hour in America, as they say. You do not have an ongoing, diverse community, which would be ideal. You still have blacks completely separated from the white community. With a few exceptions.
Have some of the institutions that the black community relied on under segregation to fight for civil rights—have those institutions survived?
No, they have not. Primarily because during the time that we were working in civil rights, most of the professionals, like teachers, could not become a part of it, because they would have lost their jobs. Like Willa [Cofield Johnson] in Enfield, was fired from her job because she was involved in picketing the schools. Other people who would have joined her would have lost their jobs. So you could really understand, to survive, they were not able to become a part of the civil rights picture. As a result of that, through the years, young people, rather than having to put up with all the difficulties and lack of opportunities, have gotten their educations and just left. You've had quite a few young people, we can name any number of black kids, who have left never to return. So you have a dearth of young professionals.
All of them were my patients. We had a doctor who became an endocrinologist, and he didn't come back.
But you do have some who have back, like Ike Miller, who have joined predominantly white medical groups. There are quite a few East Indians in our area.
We should tell you about the change in the medical profession towards minorities. However, the East Indians don't consider themselves minorities. They are treated as minorities, I don't know how they don't realize it. They will utilize their talent, because they are well-trained in medicine. They have one, two and three boards [certifications in medical specialties]. But I question the acceptance of these people.
Plus, they're not the top people in hospital administration. It's still predominantly white, and always has been.
Isn't there a difference between minorities who are native to this country and foreign-born people? Is there a difference in treatment? DC and
Oh, yes.
Definitely so. There's more acceptance in the community of foreign minorities than indigenous blacks. At the same time, in a lot of areas here, you find that most of the East Indians especially, socialize among themselves, and have their own place, and work together, not specifically with the community in most aspects. There are a few who are more Westernized in their thinking, I guess.
Sounds like they stay self-segregated.
I don't they think they realize it, and don't want to accept it, but I tell them, "Turn your hand over, look at the back of your hand."
But you find that more whites are willing to go to East Indians or Asians or other minorities for medical treatment than would ever go to blacks. Even some foreign blacks are more accepted. We have an African in this area who has a large white clientele. It's still that old slave mentality.
But Dr. Tinsley had a large white clientele in Weldon, and he had a rat-trap for an office.
But they didn't go to his office, Salter, not as much as he went to them.
But he'd charge all kinds of prices, and they'd pay it.
Were the whites in his practice mill workers?
No, he had some upper class, some blue-bloods.
Can you speculate on why you think that was?
Well, he was better. He improvised, and knew about drugs and how they would work together. He was ahead of his time.
So he was well-trained and very good at what he did.
He went to all these seminars all over the country, even before it was popular.
So he was recognized as an authority.
When nobody else could handle a case, they'd recommend Tinsley, and he's jump in there and do some miracle. Of course, immediately, they called us root doctors. We weren't supposed to have but limited intelligence. I used to tell other doctors that, and make them mad! Because you read their minds, and they knew that wasn't true. This was frightening to a person,