SYMHC Classics: William Montague Cobb

This 2021 episode covers William Montague Cobb, who was the first Black person in the U.S. to earn a PhD in physical anthropology. He was also an activist and an anatomy professor at Howard University. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. After our Friday behind the scenes discussion of
William Montague Cobb, we are rerunning our episode on him
just for the sake of clarity. There is a reference
in this episode to an upcoming Saturday Classic about the
nineteen thirty six Olympic Games. That Saturday Classic already ran
back in twenty one when the original episode came out.

(00:25):
We were not rerunning that Saturday Classic a second time
on a subsequent Saturday after this one. This episode originally
came out on February seventeenth, twenty twenty one. Enjoy Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,

(00:51):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frye. I have a weekly virtual lunch with
a friend of mine and sometimes one of us basically
briefs the other one on whatever project we are working
on right now, And when we were talking about this
week's episode, I started out saying something like he was
a physical anthropologist who did a lot of work to

(01:14):
debunk the racist theories of other anthropologists, And then later
on in this conversation, I said something like, on top
of being an anthropologist, he was an activist and did
all kinds of work to desegregate hospitals and advocate for
the passage of the Medicare bill. And then later on
it was like, oh, and he was also an anatomy
professor at Howard, so he was teaching anatomy to a

(01:34):
whole generation of black doctors and dentists. And at that point,
my friend said, wait, how can one person do that much?
And that's correct, that is a lot. And then on
top of that three completely different things. A. W. Montague
Cobb put out a sheerly enormous volume of work. He
was also the first black person in the United States

(01:57):
to earn a PhD in anthropology. He was the only
Black American working at that level in the field for decades.
And he wrote prolifically about anthropology and racial equity and
medical history and on and on. So he's who we're
talking about today. And William Montague Cobb was born in Washington,
D C. On October twelfth, nineteen oh four. He was

(02:19):
known to his friends and family as Monty. His mother
was Alexine Montague Cobb, and she was born in Washington,
d c. But her parents were from Massachusetts. Several sources
note that she had indigenous ancestry. In our episode on
Paul Cuffey, we talked about how marriages between African and
indigenous people were common in Massachusetts in the eighteenth century,

(02:41):
but beyond that, there really wasn't clear detail that Tracy
was able to dig up on Alexine's family history and
her providence in that regard. So Monty's father, William Elmer Cobb,
was originally from Selma, Alabama, and he had moved to
the Washington, DC area at the end of the nineteenth
century to work at the government printing office. Eventually he

(03:05):
started his own business as a printer. Before the young
Monty started school, his mother, who had been a school teacher,
taught him the basics of reading, writing, and math, and
the family also attended Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church. One of
Monty's childhood fascinations was a book that belonged to his grandfather.
This book included illustrations of people of different races and ethnicities,

(03:29):
and they were shown in traditional forms of dress, and
he was really struck by how all these different people
from all around the world were drawn, as he described
them quote with equal dignity. Cobb attended segregated public schools
in Washington, d c. And for high school, he attended
Paul Lawrence Dunbar High. When we've talked about school segregation before,

(03:52):
we have often talked about huge disparities in funding, resources,
and instructional quality, with schools for white children typically having
more of everything, more money, better facilities, and white teachers
who were also vastly better paid than their black counterparts.
And while segregation was still fundamentally discriminatory, Dunbar was something

(04:16):
of an exception to this pattern. Yeah, Dunbar had been
established in eighteen seventy. It was the first public high
school for black students in the United States, and by
the time Cobb attended it had a reputation as a
truly elite school. It was the best high school for
black students in the US. It was one of the
best public high schools in the country overall. Many of

(04:39):
the faculty had advanced degrees, although this was often because
they were kept out of university positions because of their race.
Some of the faculty at Dunbar were actually alumni who
had gone on to graduate school and then had come
back to Dunbar to teach. The teacher's pay was also
equivalent to that of white teachers in Washington, DC public schools,
but not necessarily that of people with the same degree

(05:02):
who were working in another area besides being school teachers.
As an academic high school, Dunbar tried to prepare its
students to attend college, and recent graduates were often invited
back to the school to talk to current students about
their colleges and universities. Some of the students who came
back to Dunbar while Cobb was there had gone on

(05:22):
to Amherst College in Massachusetts. After Cobb graduated from Dunbar
in nineteen twenty one, he went on to get a
bachelor's degree at Amherst. He was one of four black
students in his class there. Cobb had done really well
at Dunbar and that continued at Amherst. In addition to
excelling at his academic work, he was also a gifted athlete.

(05:43):
He ran cross country and he boxed. That was actually
something he had taught himself out of a book as
a teenager for the sake of self defense. He won
intramural championships in both cross country and boxing before graduating
from Amherston nineteen twenty five. Thanks to his strong ACA
academic performance in biology, Cobb earned Amherst's Harvey Blodgett Scholarship,

(06:05):
which allowed him to continue his studies at Woods Whole
Marine Biology Laboratory on Cape Cod. At Woods Hole, Cob
worked under doctor Ernest Everett just Just, was an experimental
embryologist who was also on the faculty at Howard University.
Cobb's research work at Woods Hull included observing fertilization and

(06:25):
embryonic development of marine animals under a microscope and taking
detailed notes and sketching what he had observed. From there,
Cobb decided to pursue a degree in medicine at Howard University,
and his motivation for this was, in his words, quote,
I just felt a doctor was respected and made sick
people well. To earn money for his tuition, he spent

(06:48):
his summers working as a waiter on a Great Lakes
steamship as well as harvesting grain in Saskatchewan. At Howard,
he joined the Omega psci Fi fraternity, and in nineteen
twenty six he helped establish fraternity's Kappa Psi chapter for
students at the university's professional schools, including its medical school.
He continued to excel academically, and in his last year

(07:10):
of medical school, he was invited to teach a course
in embryology. Based on his academic performance and his earlier
work at Woods Hole, Cobb earned his MD from Howard
in nineteen twenty nine. That same year, he married Hilda B. Smith.
They would go on to have two daughters, Carolyn and
Hilda Emilia, who would be known as Amelia. Cobb completed

(07:32):
his internship at Howard University Hospital, which at the time
was known as the Freedman's Hospital. He passed his board
exams and he got a license to practice medicine and
surgery in nineteen thirty. But Cobb's experience teaching that embryology
course had also shifted his focus for his career. He
decided that instead of becoming a practicing doctor, he would

(07:53):
become a teacher, teaching other people to become doctors, dentists,
and surgeons. This goal aligned very well with Howard's goals
as a black university. Although most of the medical students
at Howard were black, most of the faculty were white,
and they were working part time. Mordecai Johnson, who was
Howard University's first black president, thought that its student body

(08:16):
would be better served if there were more full time
black professors, but this really presented a challenge. The university
was training black doctors, but there really were not many
black people who were qualified to fill these teaching roles.
So the university decided to invest in its own graduates
and to prepare them to teach at the medical school.

(08:37):
Numa PG. Adams was dean at the medical School at Howard.
Like Mordecai Johnson, he was the first black person to
fill that role. Cobb was one of the medical school
alumni Adams selected for this effort. Cobb chose anatomy as
his focus for further study because, in his words, quote,
anatomy is the kindergarten of medicine. He didn't mean that

(08:58):
anatomy was an easy place time, but instead that it
was the foundation on which the study of medicine rested.
He went on to Western Reserve University that is now
case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio to study both
anatomy and physical anthropology. We will talk about that after
a sponsor break. Anthropology is the study of humanity, and

(09:29):
today the field of physical anthropology is largely focused on
human evolution, including genetic research into humans and our homined ancestors.
But in the early years of the field, when it
was very first branching off from the related field of anatomy,
physical anthropology was largely focused on researching human development and

(09:51):
human diversity through the study of the human body, and
a lot of that research tried to categorize humanity into
different races. One of the earliest figures in this research
was German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who is sometimes called
the father of physical anthropology. His study of human anatomy,
particularly the cranium, led him to propose that all of

(10:14):
humanity could be divided into five races, and he defined
those races as Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian, and American. In
the US, physician and anthropologist Samuel Morton started collecting skulls
meant to represent each of those races, and he started
doing that in eighteen thirty. This work led him to

(10:37):
build a huge collection of skulls, measuring them and drawing
conclusions based on those measurements. A lot of this work
was explicitly racist. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
many but certainly not all physical anthropologists used measurements of
the human body not just to try to sort people
into categories by race, but also to rank those categories

(11:02):
according to their superiority or their worth. Morton, for example,
used his cranial measurements to try to prove that white
people were superior to all other races. Czech anthropologist Alesh Hrdlichkea,
who worked primarily in the United States, is regarded as
one of the founders of the field of physical anthropology

(11:22):
in the US, and he also supported the idea that
white people, specifically white men, were superior and that physical
anthropology as a field could prove that superiority. An outlier
in all of this was Thomas Wingate Todd, professor of
anatomy at Western Reserve University Medical School. Todd's own work

(11:43):
in anatomy and physical anthropology led him to conclude that
race did not influence brain development and that the racist
conclusions his colleagues had drawn from things like skull measurements
were baseless. His research suggested that physiological differences that fell
along demographically were due to social and environmental conditions, not

(12:04):
to innate race related traits that conferred some kind of superiority.
He was deeply critical of Hrdlichke's conclusions about the supremacy
of white men. Thomas Wingate Todd was also William Montague
Cobb's mentor at Western Reserve University and his pH d
thesis advisor. While at Western Reserve, Cobb worked at the

(12:25):
Hammon Museum of Comparative Anatomy and Anthropology, and he embarked
on a massive survey of the skeletal collections that were
available for anthropological research. This included the ham and Todd
collection at Western Reserve and collections that were held at
the US National Museum, which is now the Smithsonian. The

(12:46):
curator of the collection at the National Museum was A.
Lesh Hrlichke. As a side note, in his later years,
Cobb speculated on why Todd, who as we said was
his thesis advisor, had sent him to work under herd
Lychka on this project in spite of knowing about that
man's racist views. One reason was just physical proximity, since

(13:09):
the National Museum's collection was in Washington, d c. Where
Cobb lived and had lived for almost all of his life.
But Cob also concluded that another reason was that Todd
just wanted to see how herd Lychka would square Cobb's
intelligence and academic excellence with his views of people with
African ancestry as inferior. Although Cobb describes herd Lychka as

(13:32):
generally treating him with outward respect, he also describes him
as quote inventing a reason why he was different from
other black people that, in herd Lychke's word, Cobb's quote
vigor stemmed from his multi racial ancestry. Cobb finished his
PhD in anatomy in physical anthropology in nineteen thirty two.

(13:54):
That made him the first black man in the United
States to earn a PhD in the field of anthropology.
His dissertation was published the following year under the title
Human Archives, and in addition to it detailing the research
collections in Cleveland and in Washington, DC, this dissertation also
surveyed methods for documenting, processing, and preserving these types of collections.

(14:18):
So Cobb's goal with this dissertation was not just to
meet the requirements for his PhD. It was also to
give him the foundational knowledge that he would need to
establish such a research collection at Howard. As we said earlier,
the field of physical anthropology was brand new. At this point.
It was so new that the first meeting of the

(14:39):
American Association of Physical Anthropologists that Cobb attended was only
the second one ever to have been held, and Cobb
was really the only black voice in the field until
the nineteen fifties. After completing his PhD, Cobb returned to
Howard as planned. Although he often spent summers working with
the collections at Case Western and at the Smithsonian, he

(15:03):
also did extensive research into the human cranium and connections
between the bones of the cranium and the bones of
the face. He drew conclusions about how these bones grew
and develop over the course of a person's life. One
of his discoveries in this research related to the closure
of the craniofacial sutures. At the time, one method that

(15:25):
researchers used to determine age when they were analyzing a
person's remains was to analyze the closure of the sutures
of the cranium, and Cobb concluded that this just wasn't
a reliable method because a range of biological factors could
affect the way a person's sutures closed. At Howard, Cobb
spent the next few years both teaching anatomy and establishing

(15:48):
the university's Laboratory of Anatomy and Physical Anthropology. His work
involved preserving the skeletons that had been part of anatomy
student's cadaver labs, as well as keeping meticulous records involving
their medical history and demographic data. Cobb continued preserving skeletons
for this collection until nineteen sixty five, for a total

(16:09):
of nine hundred eighty seven sets of skeletal remains. He
also took X rays, medical records, and demographic data from
more than nine hundred living persons to add to the collection.
The W. Montague Cobb Research Laboratory still exists at Howard today,
as does this collection, and in terms of skeletal collections,

(16:30):
it's unique. Along with remains from the New York African
Burial Ground that are also at Howard, the Cobb collection
is the only such collection of skeletal remains housed at
a historically black university, and it's also unique in terms
of the skeletons themselves. They represent the skeletal remains of
people who donated their bodies to the university or that

(16:52):
the university purchased so overwhelmingly they represent black residents of Washington,
d C. Who died between nineteen thirty one in nineteen
sixty five. So, in addition to what they represent in
terms of the study of human anatomy, physiology, and anthropology,
they also represent a source of information specifically about the
black population of Washington, d C. Over more than three decades.

(17:15):
In nineteen forty two, Cobb became a full professor at Howard,
and in nineteen forty nine he was named chair of
the Anatomy department, as a role that he held until
nineteen sixty nine. As a professor, he became known for
taking an interdisciplinary approach to the subject. He recited poetry
to illustrate concepts, and he played the violin while students

(17:38):
worked on their dissections. He also thought basic skills in
drawing were critical to studying anatomy, that understanding proportions and
representations would give students a fuller understanding of the human body.
Students would draw a human figure and its skeletal structure,
then fill in the remaining anatomical features layer by layer.

(18:00):
Method of anatomical study through drawing was popular in anatomy
classrooms at the start of Cobb's career. But by the
nineteen sixties it had really fallen out of favor, and
in nineteen sixty nine, first year medical students at Howard
launched a protest against Cobb, both as an anatomy professor
and as the chair of the Department of Anatomy. Students

(18:22):
felt that his anatomy classes were too theatrical and too
free form, and they were not focused on preparing them
to pass their board exams, whereas to me, I'm like,
you get to learn art with your science. That's amazing.
Clearly different priorities. Although Cobb was removed from his position
as department chair after this, fifty eight members of the

(18:44):
faculty signed a petition protesting this removal. In the end,
Cobb was named Howard's first distinguished Professor. That's a role
he held until nineteen seventy three, when he reached the
school's mandatory retirement age of seventy A dinner held in
his honor that year was attended by many of the
same people who had protested against him in nineteen sixty nine,

(19:07):
students who were now in their last year of medical school.
According to Cobb's colleague Charles H. Epps, who would later
be named dean of the medical school. By this point,
many of the students felt that they hadn't been entirely
fair to Cobb in their earlier protest. Yeah, there was
also some discussion that he was sort of the most
high profile person in the medical school, and so it

(19:31):
made him an easy target for students who sort of
felt the whole medical school system was too paternalistic and
became like an emblem of all of the frustrations of
the students at the time. After his retirement, though, Cobb
held the title of Distinguished Professor Emeritus, and he continued
working at twelve other colleges and universities by doing guest professorships.

(19:55):
By Cobb's own account, he taught anatomy to as many
as six thousand medical and dental students, most of whom
were black, over the course of his career. And we're
going to talk about his work outside the anatomy classroom
after we first paused for a sponsor break. Before the break,

(20:21):
we talked about how when W. Montague Cobb first entered
the field of physical anthropology, a lot of people in
that field were promoting racist views and drawing racist conclusions
in their work. Thomas Wingate Todd, who was Cobb's doctoral advisor,
was one of the people pushing back against this scientific racism.

(20:41):
Another was Julian Herman Lewis. Lewis pointed out that a
lot of anatomical research that existed at the time focused
only on white subjects but did not actually say so.
So the subjects of a particular piece of research would
be described with something like quote normal, healthy, mails, but
they were really only white people. Lewis's nineteen forty two

(21:05):
book The Biology of the Negro picked apart the idea
that Black Americans were somehow biologically inferior, but that book
didn't really get widespread recognition. There was also Franz Boas,
who is sometimes called the father of American anthropology, and
to be clear, his work was not without fault. He
robbed indigenous people's burial sites in order to collect remains

(21:28):
to study and also sell. But he also really stressed
that human beings were fundamentally biologically equal, with the differences
among them being due to historical, environmental, and developmental factors.
And of course there was also w. Montague kob himself.
Throughout his career, in every area he worked in, he

(21:51):
was deeply focused on dispelling racist ideas and trying to
ensure racial equality, especially for Black Americans. He didn't try
to spell the idea of race in general, but he
did emphasize humanity's diversity in the social and historical factors
that contributed to that diversity, rather than framing race as
biologically determined, with some races inherently superior to others. Cobb's

(22:16):
most high profile work to debunk racism through anthropology followed
the nineteen thirty six Olympic Games held in Berlin, Germany.
That's the Olympic Games at which Jesse Owens earned four
gold medals. We actually are going to replay that episode
as a Saturday Classic coming up soon. Sometimes people interpret
Owen's exceptional performance as undermining Adolf Hitler's vision of Aryan supremacy,

(22:41):
but really there was a lot of discussion about Owen's
wins at the Olympic Games that was used to back
up the racist assertion that his athletic performance was due
to his race and that black people's purportedly innate athletic
abilities came at the expense of their intellectual abilities. And

(23:02):
this was not just a belief that was circulating within
the world of physical anthropology. It quickly made its way
into mainstream writing about athletics and race. Cobb worked to
debunk this assertion, examining and taking X rays of runners,
including Owens himself. In nineteen thirty six, he published Race

(23:23):
and Runners, which began with an overview of recent performance
by black runners, before detailing other shifting demographic trends that
had played out over the history of the sport. He
analyzed runner's physical characteristics and their performance. He noted that
Owens had several physical traits that were purportedly more common
in white runners, not the traits supposedly unique to black

(23:46):
runners that would have, according to that widely circulated theory,
given him an advantage. He concluded, quote, no particular racial
or national group has ever exercised a monopoly or supremacy
in a particular kind of event. The popularity of different
events with different groups of people has and probably will

(24:07):
always vary, though not necessarily in the same direction. He
went on to say, quote the physiques of champion negro
and white sprinters in general, and of Jesse Owen's in particular,
revealed nothing to indicate that Negroid physical characters are anatomically
concerned with the present dominance of Negro athletes in national

(24:29):
competition in the short dashes and the broad jump. There
is not a single physical characteristic which all the Negro
stars in question have in common which would definitely identify
them as Negroes. Cobb wrote other articles on this subject
over the course of the next decade and more, including
ones that were published in popular magazines. For example, in

(24:51):
Negro Digest in nineteen forty seven, he wrote, quote, science
has not revealed a single trait particular to the Negro
alone to which his athletic achievements could be attributed. In
nineteen thirty nine, Cobb published the Negro as a biological
element in the American population that was published in the
Journal of Negro Education, and this was a broad look

(25:14):
at black Americans from an anthropological perspective. He wrote, quote,
in the United States today, law and custom decree that
any citizen who is known to have African blood, however diluted,
is a Negro. Consequently, from American negroes, individuals may be
selected who might serve as examples of nearly every physical

(25:35):
type in the world, from West African to Nordic. He
also concluded that this diversity was temporary because in most
of the US, intermarriages between black and white people were
either socially taboo or legally banned. He thought over time,
the country's black population would become more homogeneous. Of course,
those laws and social norms have certainly shifted in the

(25:58):
decades since he wrote that paper. Yeah, we have a
two part episode on Loving versus Virginia, which is the
Supreme Court decision that struck down anti missigination laws for
more on that. So so far, this might all sound
pretty academic, and there is value in debunking racist ideas,
especially considering that these ideas made their way into things

(26:21):
like mainstream magazines and high school anatomy and physiology textbooks.
I feel like we have read from such textbooks and
previous episodes of the show that repeat these same basic ideas.
But Cobb's work also focused on things that you might
describe as more immediately practical, like integrating the American medical system.

(26:44):
Cobb felt that the country segregated medical system was harming
people of every race. In much of his work, Cobb
noted that Indigenous, Asian, and Hispanic and Latino patients were
often treated similarly to black patients, but overall his work
was more focused on the needs of black people than
on these other groups. In Cobb's view, discrimination with slowing

(27:06):
medical progress and lowering the quality of care for everyone,
but especially for black patients. It was also restricting opportunities
for black doctors. After the nineteen ten Flexner Report, Mahari
and Howard, which we've talked about before, were the only
black medical schools, and up until the nineteen forties, black
doctors could only do their residencies at a handful of

(27:29):
black hospitals. Afterward, they could only work in those same
hospitals or in private practice, and this was holding back
the entire medical field. So Cobbs started this integration work
in the nineteen forties by advocating for black doctors to
be accepted on staff at white hospitals and to be

(27:50):
allowed admission into white's only professional societies. This included the
Medical Society of the District of Columbia and the American
Medical Association. There had been other organizations established for black
doctors because of this exclusion. That included the Medicoturgical Society
of the District of Columbia that had been established for

(28:12):
black physicians in eighteen eighty four and the National Medical Association,
which was established in eighteen ninety five. He also wrote
specifically about workplace and social factors that affected black nurses,
noting that black people had historically performed critical and often
dangerous and unpleasant work during emergencies like wars and disease outbreaks,

(28:34):
but then were denied the dignity of the title nurse
because of their race. He traced that history through to
nursing schools and professional associations excluding black people. In nineteen
fifty seven, Cobb helped organize the first m Hotep National
Conference on Hospital Integration, which was focused on integration all
through the hospital system, the patients, the staff, the administration,

(28:57):
the residents and interns at teaching hospitals, all all of it.
This conference was named for m Hotep, who was advisor
to the Third Dynasty pharaoh Josser, who we've talked about
on the show before, and later was worshiped as an
Egyptian god of medicine. This conference was sponsored by the
National Medical Association's Council on Medical Education and Hospitals, by

(29:19):
the NAACP's National Health Committee, and by the Medicoturgical Society
of the District of Columbia. It was held annually until
nineteen sixty three. The conference became less necessary after the
passage of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four,
which Cobb had aggressively supported. Title six of the Act
reads quote, no person in the United States shall, on

(29:43):
the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded
from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be
subjected to discrimination, under any program or activity receiving federal
financial assistance. Then another law that Cobb's report made that
title apply to hospitals all over the country. That was

(30:04):
the Social Security Act Amendments, also called the Medicare and
Medicaid Act of nineteen sixty five. Basically, Medicare provided hospital
insurance and medical insurance to people aged sixty five and older,
and Medicaid provided medical assistance for people with low incomes.
So the passage of Medicare and Medicaid meant that essentially

(30:25):
every hospital in the United States would be accepting federal
financial assistance. In other words, together, the Medicaid Bill and
the Civil Rights Act essentially made hospital segregation illegal nationwide.
This was one of the reasons the American Medical Association
had opposed the Medicare Bill. In fact, The only member

(30:46):
of a professional medical society who had openly supported medicare
was W. Montague Cobb. Cobb endorsed the bill and testified
on its behalf before Congress. When President Lyndon Johnson's find
the legislation, Cobb was invited to witness the signing. This
was not the first time that Cobb had so publicly

(31:07):
opposed the AMA. Back in nineteen forty six, he had
testified before Congress in favor of the National Health Act,
which would have created a National Health Insurance Plan. Cobb
endorsed the bill on behalf of the NAACP before Congress,
and he described the bill as having the potential quote
to close the gap between advances in medical technology on

(31:29):
the one hand, and the social and economic arrangements by
which medical services are made available on the other. In
his testimony, he described health conditions in the US as
quote far from satisfactory, with quote the plight of the
Negro worse than that of the white. The AMA opposed

(31:50):
this legislation and inaccurately branded its socialized medicine. It ultimately failed.
Cobb's advocacy for black doctors and other black professionals also
extended beyond their day to day working environments. In nineteen
fifty five, the American Association for the Advancement of Science
held its conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Cobb vigorously opposed this

(32:13):
choice of venue because Atlantis hotels were segregated. The AAAS
worked out a compromise which was for black attendees to
be allowed into the host hotels for meetings, but not
as overnight guests. Instead, they would stay at Atlanta University.
Cobb boycotted the meeting, and the next year the AAAS

(32:33):
implemented anti segregation policies for its conference locations. You like
a lot of the compromises we've talked about on the show,
it's not really a compromise. And the people it was
offered to were like, are you kidding me? Cobb advocated
for the same change at the American Association of Anatomists
two years later. In nineteen sixty five, he traveled to Selma,

(32:54):
Alabama to support the physicians who had volunteered to offer
aid during the Selma to MCGA March. These are really
just some of the biggest highlights of w. Montagukob's career.
He served as president of the Medicoturgical Society of the
District of Columbia from nineteen forty five to nineteen forty seven,
and then again from nineteen fifty one to nineteen fifty four.

(33:16):
He served as editor of the Journal of the National
Medical Association for twenty eight years, starting in nineteen forty nine,
and during that time he helped expand it from a
temporary publication of the NMA to a respected medical journal.
In nineteen fifty seven, he was named president of the
American Association of Physical Anthropologists. He served in that role

(33:37):
for two years. In nineteen sixty five, he served on
the executive committee of the White House Conference on Health.
He was the executive president of the NAACP from nineteen
seventy six to nineteen eighty three, and he was on
the NAACP board for thirty one years. Over the course
of his career, he wrote more than one thousy one

(33:57):
hundred papers in his field, as well as series of
two hundred biographies of black doctors, and for most of
that time he also taught anatomy and shared the anatomy
department at Howard University. I am exhausted just reading that
list so much. Cobb's wife, Hilda, died in nineteen seventy six,
they had been married for forty seven years. A year later,

(34:21):
Cobb played the role of W. E. B. Du Bois
in a production called Without a Doubt at the Kennedy Center.
This production was something his daughter, Amelia Cobb Gray, had
compiled and directed, and this was his stage debut. In
nineteen eighty, Cobb was awarded the Henry Gray Award from
the American Association of Anatomists, which is its highest award.

(34:41):
Cobb continued his advocacy into his very last years. In
nineteen eighty two, the YMCA planned to close it's Anthony
Bowen branch in Washington, d c. And this was in
Cobb's childhood neighborhood, and it had also been the first
branch that the YMCA had established for black members. Cobb
argued vocally against this closure, both because of the branch's

(35:03):
historical significance and because the neighborhood itself was desperately in
need of recreation and other services. The YMCA ultimately agreed
not to close the branch, but it did move it
into a different facility, citing the original building's disrepair. In
nineteen ninety w. Montaguekab was awarded the American Medical Association

(35:23):
Distinguished Service Award. He died on November twentieth of that
same year at the age of eighty six. In his
own words, quote, when I go down, I hope I'll
go down still pushing for something in the forward direction
that is mind blowing levels of achievement. I feel so lazy.

(35:51):
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe
to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.