Black Doctor In White Town Made Patients Color-Blind

SOUTH PITTSBURG, Tenn. - Hiram Beene Moore still remembers being snubbed on the bus by women whose babies he delivered.

He remembers unnerving late-night drives into whites-only territory to answer a call for help.

In this foundry town on the Tennessee-Alabama line, the grandson of slaves was respected behind closed doors, invited into white lives long enough to heal, then pushed away.

But with every baby delivered, every throat swabbed, every earache cured, Moore chipped away at the racism that divided him from his patients.

Now 85 and semiretired, he finds himself being celebrated by the mainly white community of 3,295. A park and a clock have been named for him. The white mayor of South Pittsburg and the white-majority City Council voted unanimously for the latest honor.

In 1945, Moore was among just 3,400 black physicians, 2 percent of the total nationwide, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. He survived in his profession by being tolerant, even when his patients weren't.

"I've done a lot of unpleasant things, but it would have been more unpleasant if I hadn't done it," Moore said. "I don't have any regrets."

`Is that all you can find?'

He remembers a white woman, in late-night labor, who was surprised to see a black doctor answer her husband's emergency call.

"She looked at me and looked at him and said, `Is that all you can find?' " Moore said, chuckling. "But when those pains got to hitting her just right, she said, `Where is he? Bring him here.' "

The woman had three more babies, and each time she asked Moore to deliver them.

Born in South Pittsburg in 1914, Moore didn't seem destined to be a doctor. When his mother died he had to drop out of fifth grade to join his older brother picking tobacco, corn and cotton, dawn to dusk, for 50 cents a day.

At 13 he joined a traveling two-ring circus. Two years later he was taken in by Nora and Ed Gaines, family friends with a farm in South Pittsburg. They put him to work sowing soybeans and corn.

"I was a grammar-school dropout," Moore said. "I wasn't thinking about school. Then I got sick."

The ruptured appendix turned out to be a lucky break. Moore was sent to a black hospital in Nashville, where his world opened. He was inquisitive, and the young doctors saw his potential. They urged his hometown's black physician, Dr. William James Astrapp, to help him.

Astrapp told him, "If you give up 16 years of your life, cars, girls, everything, you will become a doctor," Moore recalled. "I said, `How?' I didn't have any money. I didn't have a mother or father. He said, `You're above-average intelligent.' "

Moore returned to South Pittsburg determined to enroll in school, but the idea of resuming fifth grade at age 15 discouraged him.

Astrapp stepped in.

"He told me, `You listen. You go up to school and tell the principal that you finished the eighth grade in Kentucky, and you tell him the school burned down," leaving no records.

The principal didn't believe it and grilled the teenager. Moore must have done well; he was enrolled in ninth grade.

"I told Dr. Astrapp I didn't know if I could handle it," Moore said. "But I saw other kids rattling it off and I said to myself, `They don't have any more sense than me.' "

The studies came easily, but fitting in didn't.

He would walk three miles to school, arriving in muddy overalls, and endured the contempt of wealthier students and even some teachers.

"I was poor," he said, and got "no favors."

Still, in 1933 he graduated second in his high-school class and enrolled in Tennessee State University, a predominantly black school in Nashville. To earn his $20-per-month board and tuition, he scrubbed pans and floors in the school cafeteria.

"I was going to school with water squeaking out of my shoes and grease on my pants," he said. "I went to college like I went to high school: dirty and raggedy. Nobody wanted to know me."

Moore enrolled in Meharry Medical College, also in Nashville, and at the time the only medical school for blacks except Howard University in Washington, D.C. The Army, desperate for doctors to treat World War II troops, paid Moore's way, but in the end didn't need him.

He married Stella, whom he had met in college, and returned with her to South Pittsburg in 1945 to open a practice, as he had promised Astrapp.

He would drive along mountain roads in his 1940 Ford coupe or cross the Tennessee River by ferry to deliver babies by kerosene lamplight.

"House calls then were three bucks. He made 10 or 15 a day, from one end of the valley into Alabama," treating more whites than blacks, said Dr. J.B. Havron, 79, who is white and who practiced with Moore.

Moore won some patients by default. The area's four white doctors were older and made fewer house calls. There was no hospital.

Where blacks were not welcome, a white hospital official sometimes would accompany Moore, but more often, he traveled alone. He said most people welcomed him.

His wife didn't believe him, so he brought her on one trip to show her. On that hot summer day, Mrs. Moore was so nervous she kept their car windows rolled up.

"When Moore came out, we had a carload of vegetables and three new friends," said Mrs. Moore, who calls her husband by his last name. "I found out after that first experience that anywhere my husband went, I was always welcome."

Breaking into the culture

Soon, he was treating up to 90 patients a day. During a 1940s flu epidemic, he saw 104 patients and delivered two babies in 24 hours.

He ascribes his success at bridging the racial divide in part to the regional culture.

"They're mountain people, clannish. If one is for you, all are for you. If one is against you, all are against you," he said. "I had something they wanted. People can get real humble if you've got something they want."

Still, there were those who kept their relationship with Moore secret.

"I think the whites used to use the back door" to Moore's office, said welder James May, 47 and white. "People were ashamed to be there." Today May, his mother, siblings and children, are Moore's patients.

During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, politics intruded. Activists approached Moore about joining protests. He declined. A white patient gave him a list of suspected Ku Klux Klansmen to give to the FBI, but Moore would not get involved.

"The trouble with a lot of doctors is they get their moral, political and social things mixed up," he said. "My mission is to treat people."

He explained this to his daughter who was upset to see her father treating supporters of George Wallace, then the arch-segregationist governor of Alabama.

"I told her, `Those people are putting shoes on your feet. They're putting clothes on your back. I'll treat any of them,' " he said.

As time passed, a hospital was built, the house calls became less frequent, and race relations improved.

Despite a heart attack in 1970, Moore is in good health, though thin with gray hair barely covering his head. He works at his office three days a week, goes bowling every Thursday, dotes on his grandson and his daughter, Claire, a Nashville teacher.

And he is proud that in a society once deformed by racism, he kept his humanity. Tucked in a desk drawer is a handwritten note dated March 15, 1977, listing the prominent people he treated that day, including wives of lawyers, bankers and judges.

"All those are white," he said.

"Sometimes I felt bad about things. Sometimes they made me feel bad. But if I hadn't helped, they would have been in trouble. That would have been on my conscience."