Atlanta Daily World

Evaluating Communities

A Madison, Florida dateline, breaks the news through this integration potpourri that a Tri-county health consultant, a white woman doctor, is being drawn under fire for daring to eat while she counseled with a colored registered nurse on health matters.

It was this way; a Dr. Deborah Coggins, a woman health officer, while going over health questions with Ethel Kirkland Negro registered nurse and also a health consultant, dared to eat a little or to take a bite or two. For this she was unanimously voted off the payroll by the commission representing the three counties employing her. Her actual firing awaits other procedures.

This incident brought angry reaction from the Madison County Commission. The three counties involved observe rigid segregation customs closely akin to nearby Georgia.

Dr. Coggins stated without much elaboration that "my only error was in evaluating this community." So that is that.

While the doctor declared that she had no soap boxes upon which to speak, was no integrationist, no crusader, insisting that her only error was the evaluation she placed on the community.

She nevertheless raises a point of order.

The big question rises around what that evaluation was.

It would not be necessary to put words into the mouth of one who spoke from a high plane of performing a professional function, not a social one. The doctor probably felt that centuries of Negro-cooking for white people, tasting it before their eyes and nursing their children from their breasts, would justify by this time "my evaluation of this community."

Unmistakably she felt that her duties on health problems would far transcend little petty things, having no value in such an important equation; that the question of health most certainly would be above those excuseless "expedient" maneuvers already over worked in a political agenda where a legal question definitely settled is moot to a political debate.

The doctor raises an important issue in that maybe much of this fury around this integration business arises from the fact that communities must be brought up to that evaluation she expected they should have attained by now.

Maybe that was the late Theodore Roosevelt's only error in inviting Booker Washington to dine with him, and in such illustrious company, might also be included the Supreme Court, and Jesus Himself, who had not brought up the evaluation of those who stood around and derided him and impugned his motive - for eating with sinners! The doctor did not place her error in the race category; she had the proper appraisal with whom she was lunching.

Quote: "My only error was in evaluating this community"

This should be a ringing rebuke to that particular community and one also to those who in these trying times of stress and tension at home and abroad who are engaged in further dividing and disorganizing the nation's defenses.