When my dad graduated from medical school in 1947, he joined DC's Freedmen's Hospital for a one-year residency. During that year his mother, only thirty-eight years old, died in Freedmen's from hypertension while he was on duty. In a quiet moment of openness, he once shared with me how helpless and guilty he felt that he could not save her. From Freedmen's he was offered a huge opportunity: a residency at Chicago's prestigious St. Luke's Hospital. He was the hospital's first, and only, black resident. After attending only all-black schools, he was thrilled to break the color barrier, but even then the door opened only partway. He wasn't allowed to live with his white colleagues in the residents' quarters adjacent to the hospital. He had to find room and board on the south side of town where blacks were allowed to live, five miles away from the hospital, and travel by bus or streetcar - a very long and tiring commute after a thirty-six-hour shift. He was also instructed to enter the hospital through the back door. This he refused to do. He showed up on his first day and walked through the front door like all the white doctors. Word of his act of defiance spread quickly through the black staff. The next morning many of them were waiting out front when he arrived, and they all walked in together. Nobody objected.
Chicago was like that. It had a patchy attitude toward segregation. Some freedoms were allowed, some weren't. Marshall Field's, the famous department store, was a classic example. Black people could shop at Marshall Field's, but they couldn't work there. It was a checkered landscape that my mother's family had learned to navigate. Through education that led to financial stability, they became one of the most politically connected black families of the time, carving out a measure of status and access unavailable to most black Chicagoans. They, and others in the black middle class, built their own businesses and social network, but they were second-class citizens nonetheless, and their relative degree of freedom existed in a very narrow lane.
Valerie Jarrett "Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward" (2019)
