February 17, 2021 • 40 mins
W. Montague Cobb was the first Black person in the U.S. to earn a PhD in physical anthropology, worked to debunk racist theories in the field, was an activist for desegregation and Medicare, and was an anatomy professor at Howard University.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I have
a weekly virtual lunch with a friend of mine and
sometimes one of us basically briefs the other one on
(00:23):
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 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
(00:44):
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 whole generation of black doctors and dentists.
And at that point my friend said, wait, how can
one person do that much? Uh? And that's correct, that
is a lot, and that on top of that that
(01:06):
three completely different things. W Montague Cob put out a
sheerly enormous volume of work. He was also the first
black person in the United States 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
(01:30):
on and on. So he's who we're talking about today.
And William Montague Cob was born in Washington, d C.
On October twelfth, nineteen o four. He was known to
his friends and family as Monty. His mother was Alexean
Montague Cob, and she was born in Washington, d C.
But her parents were from Massachusetts. Several sources note that
(01:50):
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, but beyond that,
there really wasn't clear detail that Tracy was able to
dig up on alex Sean's family history and her her
provenance in that regard. So Monty's father, William Elmer Cobb,
(02:15):
was originally from Selma, Alabama, and he had moved to
the Washington, d C. Area at the end of the
nineteenth century. To work at the government printing office. Eventually
he 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,
(02:36):
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, 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,
(02:58):
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, we have often talked about huge disparities
in funding, resources, and instructional quality, with schools for white
(03:20):
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 of an exception to this pattern. Yeah,
Dunbar had been established in eighteen seventy. It was the
(03:42):
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 the faculty had advanced degrees, although this was
(04:02):
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,
d c. Public schools, but not necessarily that of people
with the same degree who were working in another area.
(04:24):
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 to Amherst College in Massachusetts. After
(04:45):
Cobb graduated from Dunbar in nine 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. He ran cross country and he boxed.
That was actually something he had taught himself out of
(05:07):
a book as a teenager for the sake of self defense.
He won intramural championships in both cross country and boxing
before graduating from Amerston. Thanks to his strong academic performance
in biology, Cobb earned amersts Harvey Blodget Scholarship, which allowed
him to continue his studies at woods Hole Marine Biology
(05:29):
Laboratory on Cape cod. At woods Hole, Cobb worked under
Dr Ernest Everett just Just, was an experimental embryologist who
was also on the faculty at Howard University. Cobb's research
work at woods Hole included observing fertilization and embryonic development
of marine animals under a microscope and taking detailed notes
(05:51):
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 his summers
working as a waiter on a Great Lake steamship, as
(06:12):
well as harvesting grain and Saskatchewan. At Howard, he joined
the Omega sci Fi fraternity in six he helped establish
the 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 of medical school, he was
invited to teach a course in embryology. Based on his
(06:35):
academic performance and his earlier work at Woods Hole, Cobb
earned his m d from Howard In that same year
he married Hilda B. Smith. They would go on to
have two daughters, Caroline and Hilda Emilia, who would be
known as Amelia. Cobb completed his internship at Howard University Hospital,
(06:55):
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 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 become a teacher, teaching other people to become doctors, dentists,
(07:18):
and surgeons. This goal aligned very well with Howard's goals
as a black university. Although most of the medical students
that 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
would be better served if there were more full time
(07:39):
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.
Numa P. G. Adams was dean at the Medical schoo
(08:00):
wool 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 anatomy was an easy playtime, but instead
(08:21):
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,
(08:47):
and today the field of physical anthropology is largely focused
on human evolution, including genetic research into humans and are
hominid 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
(09:08):
human development and 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
(09:32):
that all of 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
(09:54):
led him to 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
(10:18):
rank those categories 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. Check
anthropologist A. Less Herd Litchka, who worked primarily in the
United States, is regarded as one of the founders of
the field of physical anthropology in the US, and he
(10:42):
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 in anatomy and physical anthropology
(11:03):
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 demographic lines were due
to social and environmental conditions, not to innate race related
traits that conferred some kind of superiority. He was deeply
(11:28):
critical of her Lichas 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 Hammand Museum of
Comparative Anatomy and Anthropology, and he embarked on a massive
(11:49):
survey of the skeletal collections that were available for anthropological research.
This included the Hammond Todd collection at Western Reserve and
collections that were held the U. S. National Museum which
is now the Smithsonian. The curator of the collection at
the National Museum was lesh her Lita. As a side note,
(12:11):
in his later years, Cobbs speculated on why Todd, who
as we said, was his thesis adviser, had sent him
to work under her lit on this project in spite
of knowing about that man's racist views. One reason was
just physical proximity, since the National Museum's collection was in Washington,
d c. Where Cobb lived and had lived for almost
(12:33):
all of his life. But Cobb also concluded that another
reason was that Todd just wanted to see how her
Litchka would square Cobb's intelligence and academic excellence with his
views of people with African ancestry as inferior. Although Cobb
describes her Lisa as generally treating him with outward respect,
(12:53):
he also describes him as quote inventing a reason why
he was different from other black people that, in her
Lichka's word, Cobb's quote vigor stemmed from his multi racial ancestry.
Cobb finished his PhD in Anatomy and Physical Anthropology in
n two that made him the first black man in
(13:13):
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, d c.
This dissertation also surveyed methods for documenting, processing, and preserving
(13:34):
these types of collections. 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
(13:56):
the first meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropology
just that Cob 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
(14:18):
Western and at the Smiths Odion, He 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 developed over
the course of a person's life. One of his discoveries
in this research related to the closure of the craniofacial sutures.
(14:41):
At the time, one method that 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 the sutures closed. At Howard, Cobb spent the next
(15:03):
few years both teaching anatomy and establishing the university's Laboratory
of Anatomy and Physical Anthropology. His work involved preserving the
skeletons that had been part of anatomy students cadaver labs,
as well as keeping meticulous records involving their medical history
and demographic data. Cobb continued preserving skeletons for this collection
(15:24):
until nineteen sixty five, for a total 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
(15:44):
this collection, and in terms of skeletal collections, 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
back university, and it's also unique in terms of the
skeletons themselves. They represent the skeletal remains of people who
(16:07):
donated their bodies to the university or that 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,
(16:31):
d C. Over more than three decades. In nineteen forty two,
Cobb became a full professor at Howard, and in nineteen
forty nine he was named chair of the anatomy department.
That's 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,
(16:54):
and he played the violin while students worked on their dissections.
He also thought basic skills and 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
(17:14):
the remaining anatomical features layer by layer. So this 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
(17:37):
as the chair of the Department of Anatomy. Students 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
(17:59):
of to this, fifty eight members of the 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
(18:22):
who had protested against him in nineteen sixty nine, 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
(18:44):
the most high profile person in the medical school, and
so it 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
frustrate sations of the students at the time. After his retirement, though,
(19:05):
Cobb held the title of Distinguished Professor Emeritus, and he
continued working at twelve other colleges and universities. By doing
guest professorships. By Cobb's own count, 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
(19:25):
anatomy classroom after we first paused for a sponsor break.
Before the break, 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
(19:47):
drawing racist conclusions in their work. Thomas Wingate Todd, who
was Cobbs doctoral advisor, was one of the people pushing
back against this scientific racism. Another was Julian her Man Lewis.
Lewis pointed out that a lot of anatomical research that
existed at the time focused only on white subjects, but
(20:08):
did not actually say so. So the subjects of the
particular piece of research would be described with something like
quote normal, healthy, mails, but they were really only white people.
Louis two book, The Biology of the Negro picked apart
the idea that black Americans were somehow biologically inferior, but
(20:28):
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 to study and also sell. But he also really
stressed that human beings were fundamentally biologically equal, with the
(20:54):
differences among them being due to historical, environmental, and developmental factors.
And of course there was also w. Montague Comb himself.
Throughout his career, in every area he worked in, he
was deeply focused on dispelling racist ideas and trying to
ensure racial equality, especially for Black Americans. He didn't try
(21:16):
to dispel the idea of race in general, but he
did emphasize humanity's diversity and 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
most high profile work to debunk racism through anthropology followed
(21:37):
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. Uh. Sometimes people
interpret Owen's exceptional performance as undermining Adolf Hitler's vision of
Aryan supremacy, but really there was a lot of discussion
(22:01):
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 this was not just a belief that was circulating
(22:21):
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
and Runners, which began with an overview of recent performance
(22:43):
by black runners before detailing other shifting demographic trends that
had played out over the history of the sport. He
analyzed runners physical characteristics in 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
runners that would have, according to that widely circulated theory
(23:07):
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
always vary, though not necessarily in the same direction. He
(23:28):
went on to say, quote, the physiques of champion Negro
and white sprinters in general, and of Jesse Owens in particular,
revealed nothing to indicate that Negroid physical characters are anatomically
concerned with the present dominance of Negro athletes in national
competition in the short dashes and the broad jump. There
(23:49):
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
or for the course of the next decade and more,
including ones that were published in popular magazines. For example,
in Negro Digest in seven, he wrote, quote science has
(24:12):
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 at
black Americans from an anthropological perspective. He wrote, quote in
(24:35):
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
type in the world, from West African to Nordic. He
(24:55):
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
decades since he wrote that paper. Day, we have a
(25:17):
two part episode on Loving versus Virginia, which is the
Supreme Court decision that's struck down antimissagination 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 like mainstream
(25:39):
magazines and high school anatomy and physiology textbooks. Um, I
feel like we have read from such textbooks and previous
episodes of the show that repeat these same basic ideas.
But cops work also focused on things that you might
describe as more immediately practical, like integrating the American medical system.
(26:01):
Cobb felt that the country segregated medical system was harming
people of every race, and much of his work. Cob
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 was slowing
(26:23):
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, Maherry
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 and a handful of
(26:46):
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 parties by advocating for black doctors to
be accepted on staff at white hospitals and to be
(27:06):
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 four black
doctors because of this exclusion. That included the Medico Surgical
Society of the District of Columbia that had been established
(27:28):
for black physicians in eighteen eighty four, and the National
Medical Association, which was established in eighteen 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,
(27:50):
but then we're denied the dignity of the title nurse
because of their race. He traced that history through to
nursing schools and professional associations ex gluting black people. In
nineteen fifty seven, Cobb helped organized the first im HOTEP
National Conference on Hospital Integration, which was focused on integration
all through the hospital system, the patients, the staff, the administration,
(28:14):
the residents and interns at teaching hospitals, 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
(28:36):
the n double A CPS National Health Committee, and by
the Medico Trurgical 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
(28:58):
United States, shell on 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
Cobbs supported made that title apply to hospitals all over
(29:19):
the country. That was 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 age
sixty five and older, and Medicaid provided medical assistance for
people with low incomes. So the passage of Medicare and
(29:40):
Medicaid meant that essentially 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 a pos is the Medicare bill.
(30:01):
In fact, the only member 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 signed the legislation, Cobb was invited
to witness the signing. And this was not the first
time that Cobb had so publicly opposed the A M A.
(30:26):
Back in 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 double a CP before Congress, and he described the
bill as having the potential quote to close the gap
between advances and medical technology on the one hand, and
(30:47):
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 satisfy factory,
with quote the plight of the negro worse than that
of the white. The a m A opposed this legislation
(31:08):
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 nine, the
American Association for the Advancement of Science held its conference
in Atlanta, Georgia. Cobb vigorously opposed this choice of venue
(31:31):
because Atlanti's hotels were segregated. The a a S 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 Atlanta University. Cobb boycotted
the meeting, and the next year the a a S
implemented anti segregation policies for its conference locations. Like a
(31:55):
lot of the compromises we've talked about on the show
it's not really compromise. 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, Alabama, to
support the physicians who had volunteered to offer aid during
(32:15):
the Selma to Montgomery March. These are really just some
of the biggest highlights of W. Montague COB's career. He
served as president of the Medico Tururgical Society of the
District of Columbia from nineteen forty five to ninety seven,
and then again from nineteen fifty one to nineteen fifty four.
He served as editor of the Journal of the National
(32:35):
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 enemy 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
for two years. In nineteen sixty five, he served on
(32:58):
the executive committee of the White House confer It's on Health.
He was the executive president of the Double A CP
from ninety six to Night three, and he was on
the Double A CP board for thirty one years. Over
the course of his career, he wrote more than one thousand,
one hundred papers in his field, as well as a
series of two hundred biographies of black doctors, and for
(33:20):
most of that time he also taught anatomy and chaired
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, Cobb played the role of W. E. B.
Du Boys in a production called Without a Doubt at
(33:42):
the Kennedy Center. This production was something his daughter, Amelia
Cobb Gray, had compiled and directed, and this was his
stage debut. In Night Cob was awarded the Henry Gray
Award from the American Association of Anatomists, which is its
highest award. Cobb continued his advocacy into his very last
year's in the y m c A planned to close
(34:05):
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 y m c A had
established for black members. Cobb argued vocally against this closure,
both because of the branches historical significance and because the
neighborhood itself was desperately in need of recreation and other services.
(34:26):
The y m c A ultimately agreed not to close
the branch, but it did move it into a different facility,
citing the original buildings disrepair. In w Montague, Cobb was
awarded the American Medical Association Distinguished Service Award. He died
on November twenty of that same year at the age
of eighty six, and his own words quote, when I
(34:48):
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. Do you also have
listener mail for us? I do. I have listener mail
that's not about this episode, but it's Germaine to this episode,
(35:11):
and it is from Samantha, and Samantha says Hi, Holly
and Tracy. First of all, I want to preface this
email by saying what a big fan I am at
the show. I love how y'all highlight underrepresented voices and
stories from the past. That being said, I think that
something y'all said, or more specifically, didn't say in a
recent episode bears attention. In the episode John Dalton's Anomalous
(35:33):
Color Vision, y'all mentioned a study that demonstrated the differences
in rates of color deficient vision between the sexes. I
appreciated that y'all noted the difference between gender and sex,
saying that gender does not always correspond to once assigned
sex at birth, and neither does science. Sex at birth
always correspond to one's chromosomal sex, which is the actual
determining factor in this particular situation. Unfortunately, y'all did not
(35:56):
extend the same nuance to the studies treatment of race.
Race is just as socially constructed as gender is, and
in my opinion, y'all only talking about one but not
the other, created the implication that race is biological. This
false notion that race is biological is something that many
scholars and advocates have been pushing against for a long time.
As I'm sure you both know, the category is that
(36:19):
humans constructs races are largely arbitrary and have little to
do with biology. For example, a person labeled black in
that study could have had a majority of their ancestors
be European, while a person labeled as Hispanic or Latino
could have a wide range of African, European, and Native
American ancestry. Therefore, saying a trait is more or less
common and different racial groups says little about whether that
(36:41):
difference is actually meaningful or associated with any differences in
ancestral populations. In my opinion, it's dangerous to present studies
such as these without the context of the social construction
of race, as doing so can create the false impression
that dividing humans into racial groups is somehow natural. Again,
huge fan of the show. I just wanted to raise
this issue so y'all can keep this in mind for
(37:02):
any future episodes touching on genetics or any other issues
involving scientific uses of race. On a related note, I
think that an episode on Franz Bois would be a
great way to explore this. The complexity surrounding his dedication
to fighting scientific racism while simultaneously being pretty inconsiderate of
how his methods impacted Native Americans is something worth discussing. Sincerely, Samantha,
(37:24):
thank you for this email. Samantha usually not a hundred
percent of the time. You and I picked listener mail
based on like who researched the episode, and this was
one that you researched, but I was the one that
made the comment. Uh So I picked it out for
that reason because, um that I raised the point about
the study being about sex and not gender, just because
(37:46):
I wanted it to be clear what we were talking about, right,
And we had talked about how that would have potentially
shifted head that that study, which is some years old,
been done today with a more nuanced understanding of those yeah. Yeah.
And as far as the reporting of race and ethnicity
of the study, that was based on the self reporting
(38:06):
of the parents. So yes, this email is correct. Race
is socially constructed. There's no biological or genetic support to
the idea of human beings divided up into the racial
categories that we talked about a lot. Like when the
Human Genome Project was completed in two thousand and three,
one of the findings that was really interesting was that
(38:26):
there was more genetic diversity within people who would be
described as part of the same race then there was
within members of like between people of two different races.
I actually feel like this is something we've talked about
on this show before, although I cannot recall what episode,
we've definitely talked about UM shifting definitions of different racial
(38:51):
categories and how people have intentionally influenced those. I remember
that coming up in the Bacon's Rebellion episodes and when
we act about Macario Garcia. UM. So, yes, race is
socially constructed. It also is something that has a real
effect on people's lives all the time. And there are
(39:12):
a lot of diseases and conditions and other health related
issues and traits that fall along demographic lines, UM, which
is something that's really important for UH doctors and patients
to I'll be aware of also when we start talking
about things that are social constructs, if you think about
it for a while, you can just work yourself into
a whole existential dilemma because like crime socially constructed, money
(39:37):
socially constructed, the economy socially constructed. These are all things
that are made up that we collectively believe in M
word assigned h identification of any object in the entire world, art,
art that socially constructed anyway, UM yeah, member, one day
(40:00):
just beaking like really, it's everything, everything is socially constructed.
So anyway, thank you again, Samantha Um for sending that
email giving us an opportunity to like explicitly say that
that race is socially constructed. If we have not explicitly
said that on the show before, in spite of having
talked around it previously. Uh, if you'd like to send
(40:21):
us an email, We're at History Podcast at iHeart radio
dot com. We're also all over social media app mist
in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook and Twitter
and Pinterest and Instagram. You can subscribe to our show
on the iHeart radio app and Apple podcasts and anywhere
else that you get podcasts. Stuff you missed in History
(40:44):
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I have
a weekly virtual lunch with a friend of mine and
sometimes one of us basically briefs the other one on
(00:23):
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 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
(00:44):
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 whole generation of black doctors and dentists.
And at that point my friend said, wait, how can
one person do that much? Uh? And that's correct, that
is a lot, and that on top of that that
(01:06):
three completely different things. W Montague Cob put out a
sheerly enormous volume of work. He was also the first
black person in the United States 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
(01:30):
on and on. So he's who we're talking about today.
And William Montague Cob was born in Washington, d C.
On October twelfth, nineteen o four. He was known to
his friends and family as Monty. His mother was Alexean
Montague Cob, and she was born in Washington, d C.
But her parents were from Massachusetts. Several sources note that
(01:50):
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, but beyond that,
there really wasn't clear detail that Tracy was able to
dig up on alex Sean's family history and her her
provenance in that regard. So Monty's father, William Elmer Cobb,
(02:15):
was originally from Selma, Alabama, and he had moved to
the Washington, d C. Area at the end of the
nineteenth century. To work at the government printing office. Eventually
he 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,
(02:36):
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, 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,
(02:58):
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, we have often talked about huge disparities
in funding, resources, and instructional quality, with schools for white
(03:20):
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 of an exception to this pattern. Yeah,
Dunbar had been established in eighteen seventy. It was the
(03:42):
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 the faculty had advanced degrees, although this was
(04:02):
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,
d c. Public schools, but not necessarily that of people
with the same degree who were working in another area.
(04:24):
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 to Amherst College in Massachusetts. After
(04:45):
Cobb graduated from Dunbar in nine 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. He ran cross country and he boxed.
That was actually something he had taught himself out of
(05:07):
a book as a teenager for the sake of self defense.
He won intramural championships in both cross country and boxing
before graduating from Amerston. Thanks to his strong academic performance
in biology, Cobb earned amersts Harvey Blodget Scholarship, which allowed
him to continue his studies at woods Hole Marine Biology
(05:29):
Laboratory on Cape cod. At woods Hole, Cobb worked under
Dr Ernest Everett just Just, was an experimental embryologist who
was also on the faculty at Howard University. Cobb's research
work at woods Hole included observing fertilization and embryonic development
of marine animals under a microscope and taking detailed notes
(05:51):
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 his summers
working as a waiter on a Great Lake steamship, as
(06:12):
well as harvesting grain and Saskatchewan. At Howard, he joined
the Omega sci Fi fraternity in six he helped establish
the 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 of medical school, he was
invited to teach a course in embryology. Based on his
(06:35):
academic performance and his earlier work at Woods Hole, Cobb
earned his m d from Howard In that same year
he married Hilda B. Smith. They would go on to
have two daughters, Caroline and Hilda Emilia, who would be
known as Amelia. Cobb completed his internship at Howard University Hospital,
(06:55):
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 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 become a teacher, teaching other people to become doctors, dentists,
(07:18):
and surgeons. This goal aligned very well with Howard's goals
as a black university. Although most of the medical students
that 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
would be better served if there were more full time
(07:39):
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.
Numa P. G. Adams was dean at the Medical schoo
(08:00):
wool 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 anatomy was an easy playtime, but instead
(08:21):
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,
(08:47):
and today the field of physical anthropology is largely focused
on human evolution, including genetic research into humans and are
hominid 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
(09:08):
human development and 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
(09:32):
that all of 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
(09:54):
led him to 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
(10:18):
rank those categories 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. Check
anthropologist A. Less Herd Litchka, who worked primarily in the
United States, is regarded as one of the founders of
the field of physical anthropology in the US, and he
(10:42):
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 in anatomy and physical anthropology
(11:03):
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 demographic lines were due
to social and environmental conditions, not to innate race related
traits that conferred some kind of superiority. He was deeply
(11:28):
critical of her Lichas 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 Hammand Museum of
Comparative Anatomy and Anthropology, and he embarked on a massive
(11:49):
survey of the skeletal collections that were available for anthropological research.
This included the Hammond Todd collection at Western Reserve and
collections that were held the U. S. National Museum which
is now the Smithsonian. The curator of the collection at
the National Museum was lesh her Lita. As a side note,
(12:11):
in his later years, Cobbs speculated on why Todd, who
as we said, was his thesis adviser, had sent him
to work under her lit on this project in spite
of knowing about that man's racist views. One reason was
just physical proximity, since the National Museum's collection was in Washington,
d c. Where Cobb lived and had lived for almost
(12:33):
all of his life. But Cobb also concluded that another
reason was that Todd just wanted to see how her
Litchka would square Cobb's intelligence and academic excellence with his
views of people with African ancestry as inferior. Although Cobb
describes her Lisa as generally treating him with outward respect,
(12:53):
he also describes him as quote inventing a reason why
he was different from other black people that, in her
Lichka's word, Cobb's quote vigor stemmed from his multi racial ancestry.
Cobb finished his PhD in Anatomy and Physical Anthropology in
n two that made him the first black man in
(13:13):
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, d c.
This dissertation also surveyed methods for documenting, processing, and preserving
(13:34):
these types of collections. 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
(13:56):
the first meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropology
just that Cob 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
(14:18):
Western and at the Smiths Odion, He 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 developed over
the course of a person's life. One of his discoveries
in this research related to the closure of the craniofacial sutures.
(14:41):
At the time, one method that 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 the sutures closed. At Howard, Cobb spent the next
(15:03):
few years both teaching anatomy and establishing the university's Laboratory
of Anatomy and Physical Anthropology. His work involved preserving the
skeletons that had been part of anatomy students cadaver labs,
as well as keeping meticulous records involving their medical history
and demographic data. Cobb continued preserving skeletons for this collection
(15:24):
until nineteen sixty five, for a total 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
(15:44):
this collection, and in terms of skeletal collections, 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
back university, and it's also unique in terms of the
skeletons themselves. They represent the skeletal remains of people who
(16:07):
donated their bodies to the university or that 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,
(16:31):
d C. Over more than three decades. In nineteen forty two,
Cobb became a full professor at Howard, and in nineteen
forty nine he was named chair of the anatomy department.
That's 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,
(16:54):
and he played the violin while students worked on their dissections.
He also thought basic skills and 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
(17:14):
the remaining anatomical features layer by layer. So this 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
(17:37):
as the chair of the Department of Anatomy. Students 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
(17:59):
of to this, fifty eight members of the 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
(18:22):
who had protested against him in nineteen sixty nine, 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
(18:44):
the most high profile person in the medical school, and
so it 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
frustrate sations of the students at the time. After his retirement, though,
(19:05):
Cobb held the title of Distinguished Professor Emeritus, and he
continued working at twelve other colleges and universities. By doing
guest professorships. By Cobb's own count, 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
(19:25):
anatomy classroom after we first paused for a sponsor break.
Before the break, 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
(19:47):
drawing racist conclusions in their work. Thomas Wingate Todd, who
was Cobbs doctoral advisor, was one of the people pushing
back against this scientific racism. Another was Julian her Man Lewis.
Lewis pointed out that a lot of anatomical research that
existed at the time focused only on white subjects, but
(20:08):
did not actually say so. So the subjects of the
particular piece of research would be described with something like
quote normal, healthy, mails, but they were really only white people.
Louis two book, The Biology of the Negro picked apart
the idea that black Americans were somehow biologically inferior, but
(20:28):
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 to study and also sell. But he also really
stressed that human beings were fundamentally biologically equal, with the
(20:54):
differences among them being due to historical, environmental, and developmental factors.
And of course there was also w. Montague Comb himself.
Throughout his career, in every area he worked in, he
was deeply focused on dispelling racist ideas and trying to
ensure racial equality, especially for Black Americans. He didn't try
(21:16):
to dispel the idea of race in general, but he
did emphasize humanity's diversity and 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
most high profile work to debunk racism through anthropology followed
(21:37):
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. Uh. Sometimes people
interpret Owen's exceptional performance as undermining Adolf Hitler's vision of
Aryan supremacy, but really there was a lot of discussion
(22:01):
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 this was not just a belief that was circulating
(22:21):
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
and Runners, which began with an overview of recent performance
(22:43):
by black runners before detailing other shifting demographic trends that
had played out over the history of the sport. He
analyzed runners physical characteristics in 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
runners that would have, according to that widely circulated theory
(23:07):
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
always vary, though not necessarily in the same direction. He
(23:28):
went on to say, quote, the physiques of champion Negro
and white sprinters in general, and of Jesse Owens in particular,
revealed nothing to indicate that Negroid physical characters are anatomically
concerned with the present dominance of Negro athletes in national
competition in the short dashes and the broad jump. There
(23:49):
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
or for the course of the next decade and more,
including ones that were published in popular magazines. For example,
in Negro Digest in seven, he wrote, quote science has
(24:12):
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 at
black Americans from an anthropological perspective. He wrote, quote in
(24:35):
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
type in the world, from West African to Nordic. He
(24:55):
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
decades since he wrote that paper. Day, we have a
(25:17):
two part episode on Loving versus Virginia, which is the
Supreme Court decision that's struck down antimissagination 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 like mainstream
(25:39):
magazines and high school anatomy and physiology textbooks. Um, I
feel like we have read from such textbooks and previous
episodes of the show that repeat these same basic ideas.
But cops work also focused on things that you might
describe as more immediately practical, like integrating the American medical system.
(26:01):
Cobb felt that the country segregated medical system was harming
people of every race, and much of his work. Cob
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 was slowing
(26:23):
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, Maherry
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 and a handful of
(26:46):
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 parties by advocating for black doctors to
be accepted on staff at white hospitals and to be
(27:06):
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 four black
doctors because of this exclusion. That included the Medico Surgical
Society of the District of Columbia that had been established
(27:28):
for black physicians in eighteen eighty four, and the National
Medical Association, which was established in eighteen 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,
(27:50):
but then we're denied the dignity of the title nurse
because of their race. He traced that history through to
nursing schools and professional associations ex gluting black people. In
nineteen fifty seven, Cobb helped organized the first im HOTEP
National Conference on Hospital Integration, which was focused on integration
all through the hospital system, the patients, the staff, the administration,
(28:14):
the residents and interns at teaching hospitals, 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
(28:36):
the n double A CPS National Health Committee, and by
the Medico Trurgical 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
(28:58):
United States, shell on 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
Cobbs supported made that title apply to hospitals all over
(29:19):
the country. That was 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 age
sixty five and older, and Medicaid provided medical assistance for
people with low incomes. So the passage of Medicare and
(29:40):
Medicaid meant that essentially 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 a pos is the Medicare bill.
(30:01):
In fact, the only member 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 signed the legislation, Cobb was invited
to witness the signing. And this was not the first
time that Cobb had so publicly opposed the A M A.
(30:26):
Back in 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 double a CP before Congress, and he described the
bill as having the potential quote to close the gap
between advances and medical technology on the one hand, and
(30:47):
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 satisfy factory,
with quote the plight of the negro worse than that
of the white. The a m A opposed this legislation
(31:08):
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 nine, the
American Association for the Advancement of Science held its conference
in Atlanta, Georgia. Cobb vigorously opposed this choice of venue
(31:31):
because Atlanti's hotels were segregated. The a a S 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 Atlanta University. Cobb boycotted
the meeting, and the next year the a a S
implemented anti segregation policies for its conference locations. Like a
(31:55):
lot of the compromises we've talked about on the show
it's not really compromise. 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, Alabama, to
support the physicians who had volunteered to offer aid during
(32:15):
the Selma to Montgomery March. These are really just some
of the biggest highlights of W. Montague COB's career. He
served as president of the Medico Tururgical Society of the
District of Columbia from nineteen forty five to ninety seven,
and then again from nineteen fifty one to nineteen fifty four.
He served as editor of the Journal of the National
(32:35):
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 enemy 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
for two years. In nineteen sixty five, he served on
(32:58):
the executive committee of the White House confer It's on Health.
He was the executive president of the Double A CP
from ninety six to Night three, and he was on
the Double A CP board for thirty one years. Over
the course of his career, he wrote more than one thousand,
one hundred papers in his field, as well as a
series of two hundred biographies of black doctors, and for
(33:20):
most of that time he also taught anatomy and chaired
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, Cobb played the role of W. E. B.
Du Boys in a production called Without a Doubt at
(33:42):
the Kennedy Center. This production was something his daughter, Amelia
Cobb Gray, had compiled and directed, and this was his
stage debut. In Night Cob was awarded the Henry Gray
Award from the American Association of Anatomists, which is its
highest award. Cobb continued his advocacy into his very last
year's in the y m c A planned to close
(34:05):
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 y m c A had
established for black members. Cobb argued vocally against this closure,
both because of the branches historical significance and because the
neighborhood itself was desperately in need of recreation and other services.
(34:26):
The y m c A ultimately agreed not to close
the branch, but it did move it into a different facility,
citing the original buildings disrepair. In w Montague, Cobb was
awarded the American Medical Association Distinguished Service Award. He died
on November twenty of that same year at the age
of eighty six, and his own words quote, when I
(34:48):
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. Do you also have
listener mail for us? I do. I have listener mail
that's not about this episode, but it's Germaine to this episode,
(35:11):
and it is from Samantha, and Samantha says Hi, Holly
and Tracy. First of all, I want to preface this
email by saying what a big fan I am at
the show. I love how y'all highlight underrepresented voices and
stories from the past. That being said, I think that
something y'all said, or more specifically, didn't say in a
recent episode bears attention. In the episode John Dalton's Anomalous
(35:33):
Color Vision, y'all mentioned a study that demonstrated the differences
in rates of color deficient vision between the sexes. I
appreciated that y'all noted the difference between gender and sex,
saying that gender does not always correspond to once assigned
sex at birth, and neither does science. Sex at birth
always correspond to one's chromosomal sex, which is the actual
determining factor in this particular situation. Unfortunately, y'all did not
(35:56):
extend the same nuance to the studies treatment of race.
Race is just as socially constructed as gender is, and
in my opinion, y'all only talking about one but not
the other, created the implication that race is biological. This
false notion that race is biological is something that many
scholars and advocates have been pushing against for a long time.
As I'm sure you both know, the category is that
(36:19):
humans constructs races are largely arbitrary and have little to
do with biology. For example, a person labeled black in
that study could have had a majority of their ancestors
be European, while a person labeled as Hispanic or Latino
could have a wide range of African, European, and Native
American ancestry. Therefore, saying a trait is more or less
common and different racial groups says little about whether that
(36:41):
difference is actually meaningful or associated with any differences in
ancestral populations. In my opinion, it's dangerous to present studies
such as these without the context of the social construction
of race, as doing so can create the false impression
that dividing humans into racial groups is somehow natural. Again,
huge fan of the show. I just wanted to raise
this issue so y'all can keep this in mind for
(37:02):
any future episodes touching on genetics or any other issues
involving scientific uses of race. On a related note, I
think that an episode on Franz Bois would be a
great way to explore this. The complexity surrounding his dedication
to fighting scientific racism while simultaneously being pretty inconsiderate of
how his methods impacted Native Americans is something worth discussing. Sincerely, Samantha,
(37:24):
thank you for this email. Samantha usually not a hundred
percent of the time. You and I picked listener mail
based on like who researched the episode, and this was
one that you researched, but I was the one that
made the comment. Uh So I picked it out for
that reason because, um that I raised the point about
the study being about sex and not gender, just because
(37:46):
I wanted it to be clear what we were talking about, right,
And we had talked about how that would have potentially
shifted head that that study, which is some years old,
been done today with a more nuanced understanding of those yeah. Yeah.
And as far as the reporting of race and ethnicity
of the study, that was based on the self reporting
(38:06):
of the parents. So yes, this email is correct. Race
is socially constructed. There's no biological or genetic support to
the idea of human beings divided up into the racial
categories that we talked about a lot. Like when the
Human Genome Project was completed in two thousand and three,
one of the findings that was really interesting was that
(38:26):
there was more genetic diversity within people who would be
described as part of the same race then there was
within members of like between people of two different races.
I actually feel like this is something we've talked about
on this show before, although I cannot recall what episode,
we've definitely talked about UM shifting definitions of different racial
(38:51):
categories and how people have intentionally influenced those. I remember
that coming up in the Bacon's Rebellion episodes and when
we act about Macario Garcia. UM. So, yes, race is
socially constructed. It also is something that has a real
effect on people's lives all the time. And there are
(39:12):
a lot of diseases and conditions and other health related
issues and traits that fall along demographic lines, UM, which
is something that's really important for UH doctors and patients
to I'll be aware of also when we start talking
about things that are social constructs, if you think about
it for a while, you can just work yourself into
a whole existential dilemma because like crime socially constructed, money
(39:37):
socially constructed, the economy socially constructed. These are all things
that are made up that we collectively believe in M
word assigned h identification of any object in the entire world, art,
art that socially constructed anyway, UM yeah, member, one day
(40:00):
just beaking like really, it's everything, everything is socially constructed.
So anyway, thank you again, Samantha Um for sending that
email giving us an opportunity to like explicitly say that
that race is socially constructed. If we have not explicitly
said that on the show before, in spite of having
talked around it previously. Uh, if you'd like to send
(40:21):
us an email, We're at History Podcast at iHeart radio
dot com. We're also all over social media app mist
in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook and Twitter
and Pinterest and Instagram. You can subscribe to our show
on the iHeart radio app and Apple podcasts and anywhere
else that you get podcasts. Stuff you missed in History
(40:44):
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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