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.Civil rights workers would come there for treatment.I wouldtreat them, give them their medicine, and give them their physical exams.We worked closely with local black physicians who supported themovement.The medical staff had to be present on all demonstrations, both to treatpeople who were injured and also to be a deterrent to police brutality.When the police saw Red Cross vans or knew a health worker was aroundwho could document injuries, it tended to deter them from attackingpeople.From our Jackson office we tried to staff every demonstration.Iwas dealing with volunteers coming through from all over the country.We would give them assignments as they came through nurses, doctors,social workers, and psychologists.We also systematically went around todocument all the hospitals that were still segregated.Then we would writecomplaint letters to Washington, D.C.Washington would send down in-vestigators after the complaints and go to the hospitals and tell them theywere in violation of the law, and their money was going to be withdrawnif they didn t desegregate.We didn t just stick to Mississippi.Sometimeswe went to Louisiana to participate in a march.We used to cover a lot ofthe South.One of the culminating points was the Meredith March through Mis-sissippi.We started in Hernando, Mississippi, near Memphis, and we wentall the way down to Jackson.That march was led by Martin Luther King,Jr., and by Stokely Carmichael.Then, in 67, I felt my term was up and I moved to Boston.I was givenan offer of a faculty position at Tufts Medical School, but I really camebecause they wanted me to work in a neighborhood health center.By thattime I was very interested in the community.That neighborhood healthcenter was out at Columbia Point, a low-income housing project.It wasthe first one in the country that was actually created by some of the doc- Interview with Alvin F.Poussaint, M.D.233tors who were my colleagues in the Medical Committee for Human Rights.They were on the faculty at Tufts so I came up to Boston to work there.Q: Did you regard your experience in Mississippi as continuous with yourearlier camp experience?Dr.Alvin F.Poussaint: I felt that the camp experience gave me the un-derpinnings for my commitment, my idealism, my sense of wanting tofight for justice.I think that had something to do with it, certainly.I don tthink I would have been of the mind-set or quite understood it all if Ihadn t had those earlier experiences.Q: Did Nat Turner ever come up as a figure during your years in the civilrights movement?Dr.Alvin F.Poussaint: There were various times that Nat Turner cameup.Frequently, we would get into discussions about why there weren tmore slave rebellions.Some people would say there were actuallythousands of them, but we just don t know about them because they werenot recorded.Always in that context, Nat Turner would come up.Den-mark Vesey would come up and we would also talk about him.Then,occasionally, some other relatively unknown name would come up some-one who had been hanged or lynched because they had participated inslave rebellions.But Nat Turner was the one who seemed to cause thegreatest fear among slaveholders.He also inspired black people.It seemedas if it was a real beginning of a revolutionary movement that wassquelched.In our mind, Nat Turner was a hero, a hero of the antislaveryforces among black people.Also, there was the image of black people being passive in slavery.Allof the propaganda from the South portrayed slavery as benign and thatslaves actually liked to be in slavery.They had that same kind of talk aboutsegregation that blacks really didn t mind it.In fact, some actually saidit was protective of blacks.They said blacks didn t commit suicide if theywere segregated.They believed all kinds of nonsense.So Nat Turner stoodout as a different image, in opposition to the docile black slave, singingon a plantation and picking cotton.He picked up arms and fought andgave his life.Another thing we noticed was that Nat Turner was young.He diedwhen he was 31.He was a young man, just like the young people in thecivil rights movement young men in their twenties like Bob Moses,Stokely Carmichael, John Lewis, and Martin Luther King, Jr.Also,many of the foot soldiers were young people.When I had to drive to areasof the Delta where it might be dangerous, the person assigned to meby the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was a 16-year-old 234 memoryMississippi high-school student who was totally involved with the civilrights movement.She took me around and made sure that I was safe.Thewhole black consciousness movement was put into motion by youngpeople.Q: Did you experience violence or the threat of violence during youryears in the civil rights movement?Dr.Alvin F.Poussaint: Yes, a number of times.During the teargassing byMississippi state troopers in Canton, Mississippi, in June 1966, a lot of themedical workers were injured.Sometimes I felt that they were after themedical workers.Also, there was one occasion when some white menchased me and my nurse down the highway after we had left a demon-stration near Greenville.We had to make a U-turn and tear out to getaway.There were many occasions when police were tailing me, right onmy bumper in Alabama and Mississippi and other places.I was also fright-ened every time something tragic happened.For a month after an NAACPofficial died in a car bomb attack in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, I couldn tget in and start my car without opening up the hood and looking aroundfor bombs.I would do this and I would feel a little bit crazy that I wasdoing it, but it would relieve my sense of fear.Q: Do you have a memory of the moment when Stokely Carmichael firstbegan to use the phrase black power ?Dr.Alvin F.Poussaint: The incident with Stokely Carmichael and theblack-power movement occurred in June 1966, during the MeredithMarch.There had been a debate going on among young people in dif-ferent civil rights organizations about black consciousness versus integra-tion and in what direction they should move in order to keep themovement going and to keep liberating black folks.In 1966 Stokely Car-michael was the head of SNCC.On the Meredith March, after police ona school ground teargassed all the marchers and kicked people and hitpeople with rifles and put people in the hospital, Stokely Carmichael andhis friend Willy Ricks were enraged.Everybody was enraged
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