Compromising on race to meet labor needs at a hospital
Race prejudice might have excluded Slade from working at the Chowan County Hospital, but practical circumstances precluded discrimination: giving Slade a job at the hospital to see black patients without requiring him to work in the emergency room meant more work for white doctors. He was given both jobs.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with James Slade, February 23, 1997. Interview R-0019. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
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Were you able to get admitting rights to the Chowan County Hospital?
- JAMES SLADE:
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Yes, that was no problem. It probably would have been difficult for them
to have done anything. What did happen, the black physician who was
here, who was close to 90 when I arrived, he was on the hospital staff,
but not the emergency room staff. When I applied, the administrator told
me that there was a section of Chowan County that if I was on the
emergency room staff, I might run into a problem. What happened was, the
doctors, who were mostly around my age, didn't like the idea
of me coming on staff and not taking the emergency room call. That just
meant more work for them. So I was put on emergency room staff with no
problem. The interesting thing is, the very section of the county that
he thought would be a problem was the first section I had white
pediatric patients from. I've never had any problem in the
emergency room from patients from any section of the county. He was not
up to par in his thinking.
