A Black Physician's Struggle for Civil Rights: Edward C. Mazique, M.D.

A Black Physician's Struggle for Civil Rights: Edward C. Mazique, M.D. By Florence Ridlon. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Pp. xxiv, 391. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8263-3339-9.)

Drawing primarily on oral interviews, Florence Ridlon's biography of Edward C. Mazique takes the reader through the extraordinary life of this prominent black physician. Mazique's story spans the twentieth century. Born in rural Mississippi to a relatively wealthy family of mixed racial heritage, he studied at Morehouse College and Howard University, taking a degree in medicine and establishing his practice in Washington, D.C. As a well-respected physician in the nation's capital, Mazique faced a double bind: the strict legal apartheid of Jim Crow Washington and the equally entrenched segregation of the medical profession. Shut out from the all-white American Medical Association, Mazique rose to the leadership of the black National Medical Association, where he campaigned for improved medical treatment and greater professional access for African Americans. From his position within the capital's black elite, Mazique was witness to the central civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, maintaining friendships with movement luminaries like Charles Hamilton Houston, a professor at Howard Law School. Students of recent African American life will find this a useful window onto the personal and professional struggles of the black middle class.

Unfortunately, the book also has its share of problems. While the usefulness of oral history has been well proven by scholars too numerous to name, Ridlon's over-reliance on it creates two problems here. Long block quotations lifted from the interviews dominate most chapters, seriously interrupting the narrative flow. Given the choice between summary and quotation, Ridlon goes for the latter every time. The result is a book that reads in many places like an oral history transcript. To be sure, Mazique's recollections are often poignant and moving, but Ridlon generally offers them up without proper context. Specialists will know the names Charles Houston and Walter E. Fauntroy, but others may pass them by without fully comprehending their importance to the movement. When Ridlon does take up the narrator's pen, her tone is often troubling. In what is, one hopes, an inadvertent slight to African Americans, Ridlon describes Mazique's appearance this way: "there was intelligence in the light brown face, which gave more than a hint of his Indian heritage" (p. xix). Surely Ridlon does not believe that African heritage cannot show forth intelligence in the face of her subject.

This book purports to be an addition to the growing literature on the civil rights movement. But while the field has seen a shift away from the traditional narrative of great achievement by great individuals toward an understanding of movement that focuses on the contributions of local people (especially women) and indigenous organizers, Ridlon does not delve into these issues. Indeed, her bibliography betrays a rather light reading of the existing literature. As dependent as it is upon excerpts from the interviews, this biography is unnecessarily narrow and personalized. The result is the story of one man's struggles against injustice--a moving one at that--but one that leaves the reader to look elsewhere for new insights about the movement.

CLEVELAND SELLERS

University of South Carolina