Quiet No More

Confronting Racial Injustice with Dialogue and Courage

• Carmen Cauthen

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Born amidst segregation and systemic barriers, my journey is a testament to the resilience and strength of the Black community in overcoming racial inequality, particularly in healthcare. My story begins in a racially segregated hospital in 1959 Raleigh, where my family faced relentless obstacles, even with the establishment of new facilities like Wake Med Hospital. I recount my grandmother’s fervent quest to find a hospital willing to treat her, highlighting the pervasive racial barriers of the time. This narrative seeks to shed light on the profound impact of race on personal and societal levels, urging us to move beyond these constructs and recognize our shared humanity.

Celebrate with me the inspiring efforts of my mother and her role in the Panel of American Women during the tumultuous 1960s. This courageous group, consisting of diverse women, fostered empathy and understanding through open dialogue about race and religion, especially during school desegregation. Through personal anecdotes, I illustrate the power of building relationships across differences and the importance of embracing our cultural histories. 

Let us challenge preconceived notions and misinformation, actively seeking knowledge to create a more empathetic and connected society. Join this crucial conversation as we strive for unity and equality, leaving no room for silence in the face of racial injustice.

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Carmen Wimberley Cauthen is an author, speaker, and lover of history, Black history in particular. As a truth teller, she delights in finding the hidden truths about the lives of people who made a difference - whether they were unknown icons or regular everyday people.

To Learn more of Carmen:
www.carmencauthen.com
www.researchandresource.com

Speaker 1:

Unseen, unheard. We've lived like that far too long. I'm Carmen Coffin and this is Quiet, no More. Why does she talk so much about race? I know you wonder that it's okay. You can wonder. I'm going to tell you.

Speaker 1:

Race has affected every part of my life. It's affected from the place that I was born and it'll probably affect something about when I die. I have to think about that. When I said that just now, it hit me. I was born at St Agnes Hospital. When I was growing up in Raleigh, my friends would tell me, my white friends would tell me, that they were born at Rex. Almost all of them that I went to school with told me they were born at Rex Hospital. Well, in 1959, when I was born, there was Rex Hospital and there was St Agnes Hospital. There wasn't a Wake Med Wake Med didn't open until 1961.

Speaker 1:

And Blacks typically did not go to a hospital unless it was St Agnes and that was a small hospital and at that point the county was using that as the quote colored end quote hospital. It was started as a hospital, actually as a training center for nurses, by the wife of the rector of St Augustine's College, which is now St Augustine's University. It's important to know that by World War II it was not just a training center for nurses, but it was also a facility to train doctors, and while it wasn't a medical school, it was a place where Black doctors could come and do their residency. Shaw University had Leonard Medical School and it's kind of amazing that the same white doctors who were over Shaw's medical school were also over the training of the nurses at St Agnes of the nurses at St Agnes, and Dr Herbert Royster was also the head of the medical school at UNC in Chapel Hill. He was a busy man, but the importance of there being hospitals in the city that would serve the Black population is. You just can't talk about the importance of it enough, because there were people in rural communities who didn't have any hospitals, and they certainly didn't have Black hospitals A few, but not very many rural communities.

Speaker 1:

When my father was born in 1930, his mother was in fetal distress and his father drove him, drove her, from Henderson to Raleigh, and so he was born at St Agnes Hospital. Now why, do you ask, did he have to drive her from Henderson, 45 minutes away, to Raleigh? Because that was the only hospital. There was a hospital in Henderson but it only accepted white patients. So in order for her to be seen and for my father to be born safely and my grandmother to continue to live safely, my grandfather was fortunate enough to have a car and he could drive him. So when I say that every aspect of my life, from being born on, has been affected by race, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. So when Wake Med Hospital opened in 1961, for the first several months, white doctors refused to see patients there that were of color. White doctors refused to see patients there that were of color. The infant section, the nursery, had black children born in it, but white women would not come there and bear their children.

Speaker 1:

That is an effect of race. Growing up, going to school, I started out in a segregated school system, and maybe you did too, but it made it seem as though there was something different about us. We're not different, we just have different color skin. We all bleed the same. It's red, although there were times when I was growing up when I said my blood was purple because I wanted it to be different. But I know I've cut myself. It's red.

Speaker 1:

We eat, we drink, we have all the same bodily functions, we have the same heart desires and that doesn't have anything to do with race, but yet, and still sometimes with the heart desires. We have parents who don't want their children to marry or to date people who are outside of their race. Why is that? Why do people get called names because of that? That's sad.

Speaker 1:

If God created us all, then all these divisions that we put on ourselves don't need to be there, and so that's why I talk about race. It's because there are divisions, there are things that divide us, and, in the main, there are things that we created to divide us, and we need to be better than that. We need to be different than that. If you are a Christian and you believe that God created us all, didn't he create a beautiful rainbow? And so why would you disparage something that's in the rainbow, while race was constructed in America to divide people, not just to divide blacks and whites, but to divide people who were considered different. Race was constructed so that if you weren't white, anglo-saxon and Protestant, you didn't fit in. You were less than. I don't know how many of you remember that during the 1960s and the 1950s, when you consider that John F Kennedy won the presidency, that was an amazing thing because he was Catholic and Catholics were not treated as first-class citizens. Catholics were not treated as first-class citizens.

Speaker 1:

One of the things that I was really proud of my mother for and her name is California Wimberly, in case you don't know, but I was really proud of the fact that she was part of a group of women called the Panel of American Women, called the Panel of American Women, and during the 1960s, when desegregation was beginning to rear its head, especially here in Raleigh, north Carolina, there was a group of women who started an organization called Panel of American Women, and the group came out of a group of women in Kansas because a white lady was in her community and a black family was moving into the community and this was in the fifties and their house was threatened, their family was threatened, and it was just because this Black family was moving into a white community and she didn't think it was right and so she thought, well, maybe if people just talk to each other, there would be a way to change minds, and so she started the panel of American women there, and there are days today, there have been days in the last 10 or 12 years, that I've thought we need the panel back again talk wherever they were invited to come and talk and they would talk about things like what their lives were like, and there would be four to five women on the panel. There would be a WASP, white, anglo-saxon, protestant woman. She would be the moderator. There would be a Black woman, a Jewish woman and a Catholic woman and they would talk about what their lives were like and what prejudices they had had to deal with. And they would go wherever they were asked, whether it was a church or an organization, or in Raleigh, when the schools, the students, were desegregated not the teachers, but the students. They spent several days at Daniels Middle School, which is now Oberlin Middle School, talking to every English class, because that one school had the worst trouble with the desegregation of the school, with the desegregation of the school, and they would answer questions after they talked about what their life was like, and sometimes they were greeted and treated kindly, and sometimes they were treated not so kindly, but they would get asked questions like do black people's skin colors rub off? Can you get diseases from sitting beside people who are not like you? These were questions they were being asked by school children who were in middle school, because these are things that they were hearing at home.

Speaker 1:

It was fortunate for my brother and myself because we were able to be friends with some of the kids of the other parents who were part of the panel, and when the panel, when the mothers would meet, then the children would meet as well and we would spend time getting to know each other and developing relationships that lasted long, long, long after the panel disbanded. But we were able to dispel some of the notions and the rumors that we heard because we were able to meet people one-on-one and develop relationships. And you know, that's the only way to change or to dispel some of these notions that we have about people who don't look like us, who don't eat like us, who don't dress like us. It's to find someone that's not like us and to build a relationship with them. It's only when we're working heart to heart or speaking one-to-one that we can ask questions about things that we've heard from people who may not know the truth, who are just passing along a rumor.

Speaker 1:

And so race is important because it's what divides us, but race is also important because in our culture it's what makes who we are, the culture that we are part of, an important thing. It's not to make it a bad thing. It's to make it an important piece of who we are, and so the legacies, the memories, the history, the things that I, as a black child, heard from my parents, my grandparents, that I only found out because they shared with me, because when I went to school, nobody taught me that in the white classrooms and I left black classrooms when I was in second grade. So it's important to know all of these facts and to know all these truths and to not be afraid to ask questions or to do research for yourself to find out what's actually fact and what's actually something that somebody was afraid and made up.

Speaker 1:

I want to encourage you over the next couple of months, as we continue to talk about memory and history and legacy, that you stop being quiet about what you don't know, that you stop being quiet and not build relationships with people who are different from you, that you grow and that you gain new knowledge. Because if you're going to follow along with me, I'm not going to be quiet about this anymore. You've been listening to Quiet no More, where I share my journey. So you can be quiet. Let's connect at wwwCarmencoffincom.