Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class SYMHC Classics: William Montague Cobb About this episode This 2021 episode covers William Montague Cobb, who was the first Black person in the U. S. to earn a PhD in physical anthropology. He was also an activist and an anatomy professor at Howard University.
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2:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Happy Saturday. After our Friday behind the scenes discussion of William Montague Cobb, we are rerunning our episode on him. Just for the sake of clarity, there is a reference in this episode to an upcoming Saturday classic about the 1936 Olympic Games. That Saturday classic already ran back in 2021 when the original episode came out. We are not rerunning that Saturday classic a second time on a subsequent Saturday after this one.
2:47 Holly Frey? This episode originally came out on February 17th, 2021. Enjoy.
2:55 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
3:05 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
3:09 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
3:10 Tracy V. Wilson? I have a weekly virtual lunch with a friend of mine and sometimes one of us basically briefs the other one on whatever project we are working on right now. And when we were talking about this week's episode, I started out saying something like, he was a physical anthropologist who did a lot of work to debunk the racist theories of other anthropologists. And then later on in this conversation, I said something like, on top of being an anthropologist, he was an activist and did all kinds of work to desegregate hospitals and advocate for the passage of the Medicare bill. And then later on, it was like, oh, and he was also an anatomy professor at Howard. So he was teaching anatomy to a whole generation of Black doctors and dentists. And at that
3:52 Tracy V. Wilson? point, my friend said, wait, how can one person do that much? And that's correct. That is a lot. And then on top of that, that three completely different things, W. Montague Cobb 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 on and on. So he's who we're talking about today.
4:27 Holly Frey? And William Montague Cobb was born in Washington DC on October 12th, 1904. He was known to his friends and family as Monty. His mother was Alexine Montague Cobb, and she was born in Washington DC, but her parents were from Massachusetts. Several sources note that she had indigenous ancestry. In our episode on Paul Cuffy, we talked about how marriages between African and indigenous people were common in Massachusetts in the 18th century. But beyond that, there really wasn't clear detail that Tracy was able to dig up on Alexine's family history and her provenance in that regard. So Monty's
5:07 Holly Frey? father, William Elmer Cobb, was originally from Selma, Alabama, and he had moved to the Washington DC area at the end of the 19th century to work at the government printing office. Eventually, he started his own business as a printer.
5:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Before the young Monty started school, his mother, who had been a schoolteacher, taught him the basics of reading, writing, and math. And the family also attended 15th 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, as he described them, quote, "with equal dignity."
5:56 Holly Frey? Cobb attended segregated public schools in Washington DC. 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 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.
6:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, Dunbar had been established in 1870. It was the first public high school for black students in the United States. And by the time Cobb attended, it had a reputation as a truly elite school. It was the best high school for black students in the US. It was one of the best public high schools in the country overall. Many of the faculty had advanced degrees, although this was often because they were kept out of university positions because of their race. Some of the faculty at Dunbar were actually alumni who had gone on to graduate school and then had come back to Dunbar to teach. The teacher's pay was also equivalent to that of white teachers in Washington DC public schools, but not necessarily that of people with the same degree who were
7:16 Tracy V. Wilson? working in another area besides being schoolteachers.
7:20 Holly Frey? 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 Cobb graduated from Dunbar in 1921, he went on to get a bachelor's degree at Amherst. He was one of four black students in his class there.
7:48 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 a book as a teenager for the sake of self-defense. He won intramural championships in both cross-country and boxing before graduating from Amherst in 1925.
8:13 Holly Frey? Thanks to his strong academic performance in biology, Cobb earned Amherst's Harvey Blodgett Scholarship, which allowed him to continue his studies at Woods Hole Marine Biology 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 and sketching what he had observed.
8:47 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 Lakes steamship, as well as harvesting grain in Saskatchewan.
9:09 Holly Frey? At Howard, he joined the Omega Psi Phi fraternity. And in 1926, 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 academic performance and his earlier work at Woods Hole.
9:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Cobb earned his M.D. from Howard in 1929. That same year, he married Hilda B. Smith. They would go on to have two daughters, Carolyn and Hilda Amelia, who would be known as Amelia. Cobb completed his internship at Howard University Hospital, which at the time was known as the Freedman's Hospital. He passed his board exams, and he got a license to practice medicine and surgery in 1930.
9:57 Holly Frey? 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, and surgeons.
10:13 Tracy V. Wilson? This goal aligned very well with Howard's goals as a Black university. Although most of the medical students at Howard were Black, most of the faculty were white, and they were working part-time. Mordecai Johnson, who was Howard University's first Black president, thought that its student body would be better served if there were more full-time Black professors. But this really presented a challenge. The university was training Black doctors, but there really were not many Black people who were qualified to fill these teaching roles. So the university decided to invest in its own graduates and to prepare them to teach at the medical school.
10:51 Holly Frey? Numa P. G. Adams was dean at the medical school at Howard. Like Mordecai Johnson, he was the first Black person to fill that role.
11:00 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 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.
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11:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
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14:13 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jessa have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends
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15:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Anthropology is the study of humanity. And today, the field of physical anthropology is largely focused on human evolution, including genetic research into humans and our 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 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.
15:51 Holly Frey? One of the earliest figures in this research was German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who is sometimes called the father of physical anthropology. His study of human anatomy, particularly the cranium, led him to propose that all of 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 1830. This work led him to build a huge collection of skulls, measuring them and drawing conclusions based on those measurements.
16:35 Tracy V. Wilson? A lot of this work was explicitly racist. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many, but certainly not all, physical anthropologists used measurements of the human body, not just to try to sort people into categories by race, but also to rank those categories according to their superiority or their worth. Morton, for example, used his cranial measurements to try to prove that white people were superior to all other races. Czech anthropologist Aleš Hrdlitska, 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 also supported the idea that white people, specifically white men, were superior,
17:20 Tracy V. Wilson? and that physical anthropology as a field could prove that superiority.
17:25 Holly Frey? 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 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 critical of Hurd-Lichka's conclusions about the supremacy of white men.
18:05 Tracy V. Wilson? Thomas Wingate Todd was also William Montague Cobb's mentor at Western Reserve University and his PhD thesis advisor. While at Western Reserve, Cobb worked at the Hammond Museum of Comparative Anatomy and Anthropology, and he embarked on a massive survey of the skeletal collections that were available for anthropological research. This included the Hammond Todd collection at Western Reserve and collections that were held at the US National Museum, which is now the Smithsonian. The curator of the collection at the National Museum was Alesh Hurd-Lichka.
18:43 Holly Frey? As a side note, in his later years, Cobb speculated on why Todd, who, as we said, was his thesis advisor, had sent him to work under Hurd-Lichka 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 DC, where Cobb lived and had lived for almost all of his life. But Cobb also concluded that another reason was that Todd just wanted to see how Hurd-Lichka would square Cobb's intelligence and academic excellence with his views of people with African ancestry as inferior. Although Cobb describes Hurd-Lichka as generally treating him with outward respect, he also
19:26 Holly Frey? describes him as, quote, "inventing a reason why he was different from other black people." That, in Hurd-Lichka's word, Cobb's, quote, "vigor stemmed from his multiracial ancestry."
19:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Cobb finished his PhD. PhD in anatomy and physical anthropology in 1932. That made him the first black man in the United States to earn a PhD in the field of anthropology. His dissertation was published the following year under the title "Human Archives." And in addition to it detailing the research collections in Cleveland and in Washington DC, this dissertation also surveyed methods for documenting, processing, and preserving these types of collections. 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.
20:23 Holly Frey? As we said earlier, the field of physical anthropology was brand new at this point. It was so new that the first meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists that Cobb attended was only the second one ever to have been held. And Cobb was really the only black voice in the field until the 1950s.
20:43 Tracy V. Wilson? After completing his PhD, Cobb returned to Howard as planned. Although he often spent summers working with the collections at Case Western and at the Smithsonian, he also did extensive research into the human cranium and connections between the bones of the cranium and the bones of the face. He drew conclusions about how these bones grew and develop over the course of a person's life. One of his discoveries in this research related to the closure of the craniofacial sutures. At the time, one method that researchers used to determine age when they were analyzing a person's remains was to analyze the closure of the sutures of the cranium.
21:26 Tracy V. Wilson? And Cobb concluded that this just wasn't a reliable method because a range of biological factors could affect the way a person's sutures closed.
21:34 Holly Frey? At Howard, Cobb spent the next 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 until 1965, for a total of 987 sets of skeletal remains. He also took x-rays, medical records, and demographic data from more than 900 living persons to add to the collection.
22:12 Tracy V. Wilson? The W. Montague Cobb Research Laboratory still exists at Howard today, as does 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 black university. And it's also unique in terms of the skeletons themselves. They represent the skeletal remains of people who donated their bodies to the university, or that the university purchased. So overwhelmingly, they represent black residents of Washington DC who died between 1931 and 1965. So in addition to what they represent in terms of the study of human anatomy,
22:57 Tracy V. Wilson? physiology, and anthropology, they also represent a source of information specifically about the black population of Washington DC over more than three decades.
23:07 Holly Frey? In 1942, Cobb became a full professor at Howard. And in 1949, he was named Chair of the Anatomy Department. That's a role that he held until 1969. As a professor, he became known for taking an interdisciplinary approach to the subject. He recited poetry to illustrate concepts, and he played the violin while students worked on their dissections. He also thought basic skills in drawing were critical to studying anatomy, that understanding proportions and representations would give students a fuller understanding of the human body. Students would draw a human figure and its skeletal structure, then fill in the remaining anatomical features, layer by layer.
23:50 Tracy V. Wilson? So this method of anatomical study through drawing was popular in anatomy classrooms at the start of Cobb's career. But by the 1960s, it had really fallen out of favor. And in 1969, first-year medical students at Howard launched a protest against Cobb, both as an anatomy professor and as the Chair of the Department of Anatomy. Students 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.
24:22 Holly Frey? Whereas to me, I'm like, you get to learn art with your science? That's amazing. Clearly different priorities. Although Cobb was removed from his position as department chair after this, 58 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 1973, when he reached the school's mandatory retirement age of 70. A dinner held in his honor that year was attended by many of the same people who had protested against him in 1969, 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
25:06 Holly Frey? the medical school, by this point, many of the students felt that they hadn't been entirely fair to Cobb in their earlier protest.
25:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, there was also some discussion that he was sort of the most, the most high-profile person in the medical school, and so it made him an easy target for students. He sort of felt the whole medical school system was too paternalistic and became like an emblem of all of the frustrations of the, the students at the time. After his retirement, though, Cobb held the title of distinguished professor emeritus, and he continued working at 12 other colleges and universities by doing guest professorships. By Cobb's own count, he taught anatomy to as many as 6,000 medical and dental students, most of whom were black, over the course of his career.
25:56 Holly Frey? And we're going to talk about his work outside the anatomy classroom after we first pause for a sponsor break.
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26:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jessa have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
27:21 Tracy V. Wilson? only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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29:22 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 drawing racist conclusions in their work. Thomas "Wangate" Todd, who was Cobb's doctoral advisor, was one of the people pushing back against this scientific racism. Another was Julian Herman Lewis. Lewis pointed out that a lot of anatomical research that existed at the time focused only on white subjects, but did not actually say so. So, the subjects of a particular piece of research would be described with something like, quote, "normal,
30:02 Tracy V. Wilson? healthy males," but they were really only white people. Lewis's 1942 book, "The Biology of the Negro," picked apart the idea that Black Americans were somehow biologically inferior, but that book didn't really get widespread recognition. There was also Franz Boas, who is sometimes called "the father of American anthropology," and, to be clear, his work was not without fault. He robbed indigenous peoples' 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 differences among them being due to historical,
30:42 Tracy V. Wilson? environmental, and developmental factors. And of course, there was also W. Montague Cobb himself.
30:50 Holly Frey? 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 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.
31:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Cobb's most high-profile work to debunk racism through anthropology followed the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin, Germany. That's the Olympic Games at which Jesse Owens earned four gold medals. We actually are going to replay that episode as a Saturday classic coming up soon. Sometimes people interpret Owens' exceptional performance as undermining Adolf Hitler's vision of Aryan supremacy, but really, there was a lot of discussion about Owens' 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
32:00 Tracy V. Wilson? came at the expense of their intellectual abilities. And this was not just a belief that was circulating within the world of physical anthropology. It quickly made its way into mainstream writing about athletics and race.
32:15 Holly Frey? Cobb worked to debunk this assertion, examining and taking extrays of runners, including Owens himself. In 1936, he published Race and Runners, which began with an overview of recent performance by Black runners before detailing other shifting demographic trends that had played out over the history of the sport. He analyzed runners' physical characteristics and their performance. He noted that Owens had several physical traits that were purportedly more common in white runners, not the traits supposedly unique to Black runners that would have, according to that widely circulated theory, given him an advantage.
32:54 Tracy V. Wilson? 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."
33:14 Tracy V. Wilson? He went on to say, quote, "The physiques of champion Negro and white sprinters in general, and of Jesse Owens in particular, reveal 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 is not a single physical characteristic which all the Negro stars in question have in common, which would definitely identify them as Negroes." Cobb wrote other articles on this subject over the course of the next decade and more, including ones that were published in popular magazines. For example, in Negro Digest in 1947, he wrote, quote, "Science has not
33:57 Tracy V. Wilson? revealed a single trait particular to the Negro alone to which his athletic achievements could be attributed."
34:05 Holly Frey? In 1939, 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 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 also concluded that this diversity was temporary, because in most of the US, intermarriages
34:47 Holly Frey? 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.
35:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, we have a two-part episode on Loving vs. Virginia, which is the Supreme Court decision that struck down anti-masogeneration 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 magazines and high school anatomy and physiology textbooks.
35:29 Tracy V. Wilson? I feel like we have read from such textbooks in previous episodes of the show that repeat these same basic ideas. But Cobb's work also focused on things that you might describe as more immediately practical, like integrating the American medical system.
35:46 Holly Frey? Cobb felt that the country's segregated medical system was harming people of every race. In much of his work, Cobb noted that indigenous, Asian, and Hispanic and Latino patients were often treated similarly to Black patients. But overall, his work was more focused on the needs of Black people than on these other groups. In Cobb's view, discrimination was slowing 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 1910 Flexner Report, Mahary and Howard, which we've talked about before, were the only Black medical schools.
36:26 Holly Frey? And up until the 1940s, Black doctors could only do their residencies at a handful of Black hospitals. Afterward, they could only work in those same hospitals or in private practice. And this was holding back the entire medical field.
36:41 Tracy V. Wilson? So Cobb started this integration work in the 1940s by advocating for Black doctors to be accepted on staff at white hospitals and to be allowed admission into whites-only professional societies. This included the Medical Society of the District of Columbia and the American Medical Association. There had been other organizations established for Black doctors because of this exclusion. That included the Medico-Terurgical Society of the District of Columbia, that had been established for Black physicians in 1884, and the National Medical Association, which was established in 1895.
37:21 Holly Frey? 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, but then were denied the dignity of the title nurse because of their race. He traced that history through to nursing schools and professional associations excluding Black people.
37:47 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1957, Cobb helped organize the first Imhotep National Conference on Hospital Integration, which was focused on integration all through the hospital system: the patients, the staff, the administration, the residents and interns at teaching hospitals, all of it. This conference was named for Imhotep, who was advisor to the Third Dynasty Pharaoh Joser, who we've talked about on the show before, and later was worshipped as an Egyptian god of medicine. This conference was sponsored by the National Medical Association's Council on Medical Education in Hospitals, by the NAACP's National Health Committee, and by the Medico-Terurgical Society of the District of Columbia. It was held annually until 1963.
38:32 Holly Frey? The conference became less necessary after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which Cobb had aggressively supported. Title VI of the Act reads, quote, "No person in the United States shall, 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 Cobb supported made that title apply to hospitals all over the country. That was the Social Security Act Amendments, also called the Medicare and Medicaid Act of 1965.
39:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Basically, Medicare provided hospital insurance and medical insurance to people aged 65 and older, and Medicaid provided medical assistance for people with low incomes. So, the passage of Medicare and 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.
39:41 Holly Frey? This was one of the reasons the American Medical Association had opposed the Medicare bill. In fact, the only member of a professional medical society who had openly supported Medicare was W. Montague Cobb.
39:56 Holly Frey? 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.
40:06 Tracy V. Wilson? And this was not the first time that Cobb had so publicly opposed the AMA. Back in 1946, he had testified before Congress in favor of the National Health Act, which would have created a national health insurance plan. Cobb endorsed the bill on behalf of the NAACP before Congress, and he described the bill as having the potential, quote, "to close the gap between advances in medical technology on the one hand and the social and economic arrangements by which medical services are made available on the other." In his testimony, he described health conditions in the US as, quote, "far from satisfactory," with, quote, "the plight of the Negro worse than that of the white."
40:51 Tracy V. Wilson? The AMA opposed this legislation and inaccurately branded it "socialized medicine." It ultimately failed.
40:59 Holly Frey? Cobb's advocacy for black doctors and other black professionals also extended beyond their day-to-day working environments. In 1955, the American Association for the Advancement of Science held its conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Cobb vigorously opposed this choice of venue because Atlanta's hotels were segregated. The AAAS worked out a compromise, which was for black attendees to be allowed into the host hotels for meetings, but not as overnight guests. Instead, they would stay at Atlanta University. Cobb boycotted the meeting, and the next year, the AAAS implemented anti-segregation policies for its conference locations.
41:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, like a lot of the compromises we've talked about on the show, this is not really a compromise. And the people it was offered to were like, "Are you kidding me?" Cobb advocated for the same change at the American Association of Anatomists two years later. In 1965, he traveled to Selma, Alabama, to support the physicians who had volunteered to offer aid during the Selma to Montgomery March.
42:03 Holly Frey? These are really just some of the biggest highlights of W. Montague Cobb's career. He served as president of the Medical Trurgical Society of the District of Columbia from 1945 to 1947, and then again, from 1951 to 1954. He served as editor of the Journal of the National Medical Association for 28 years, starting in 1949. And during that time, he helped expand it from a temporary publication of the NMA to a respected medical journal. In 1957, he was named president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. He served in that role for two years. In 1965, he served on the Executive Committee
42:44 Holly Frey? of the White House Conference on Health. He was the executive president of the NAACP from 1976 to 1983, and he was on the NAACP Board for 31 years. Over the course of his career, he wrote more than 1,100 papers in his field, as well as a series of 200 biographies of Black doctors. And for most of that time, he also taught anatomy and chaired the anatomy department at Howard University. I am exhausted just reading that list.
43:14 Tracy V. Wilson? So much. Cobb's wife, Hilda, died in 1976. They had been married for 47 years. A year later, Cobb played the role of W. E. B. Du Bois in a production called "Without a Doubt" at the Kennedy Center. This production was something his daughter, Amelia Cobb Gray, had compiled and directed, and this was his stage debut. In 1980, Cobb was awarded the Henry Gray Award from the American Association of Anatomists, which is its highest award.
43:43 Holly Frey? Cobb continued his advocacy into his very last years. In 1982, the YMCA planned to close its Anthony Bowden branch in Washington, DC. And this was in Cobb's childhood neighborhood, and it had also been the first branch that the YMCA had established for Black members.
44:01 Tracy V. Wilson? Cobb argued vocally against this closure, both because of the branch's historical significance and because the neighborhood itself was desperately in need of recreation and other services. The YMCA ultimately agreed not to close the branch, but it did move it into a different facility, citing the original building's disrepair. In 1990, W. Montague Cobb was awarded the American Medical Association Distinguished Service Award. He died on November 20th of that same year at the age of 86. In his own words, quote, "When I go down, I hope I'll go down still pushing for something in the forward direction." That is mind blowing levels of achievement. I feel so lazy.
44:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected] . And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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46:20 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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