Tragedy and Healing: The Impact of Two Black Surgeons in the Jim Crow South.

In 1956, as racial conflict in the South reached a murderous climax, Thomas H. Brewer, Sr (1894-1956), a prominent Black physician and civic leader in Columbus, Georgia, was shot and killed by a White businessowner. When his assailant was released without charges, many of the town's Black physicians and professionals left town, fearing for their safety and unwilling to live under Jim Crow. In 1964, M. Delmar Edwards (1926-2009), graduating surgery resident at the nearby Tuskegee Veterans Administration Hospital, asked two White surgeons in Columbus-Seaborn Roddenbery, III, and Abraham Conger-to serve as preceptors over his last two years of training, a requirement for board certification. They agreed, and Edwards joined their practice. Edwards filled the void left by Brewer's death. He overcame White-only restrictions to the hospital medical staff, segregated wards, and professional shunning. He eventually served in leadership roles for the hospital, including chair of the department of surgery and vice president of the hospital system. Over the next decades, he encouraged more than 70 Black physicians to settle in Columbus as full members of the city's professional community. Their stories separated by only eight years, Brewer and Edwards embodied an inflection point in the civil rights movement: the transition between murderous injustice and the integration of the Black community into the social and political mainstream of the South brought on by a Supreme Court decision, an Act of Congress, and changes in the hearts of the American people.