The corporeal and ocular veil: Dr. Matilda A. Evans (1872-1935) and the complexity of southern history

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,--a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) IN THIS ESSAY I EXPLORE THE CONNECTION BETWEEN A SINGULAR BLACK woman medical professional, Matilda A. Evans (1872-1935) of Columbia, South Carolina, and the rise of health-care activism in the decades prior to the modern civil rights movement. The interests of the professional class and the needs of black people conjoined at critical historical moments. This case study of Dr. Evans's life and career deepens the understanding required to assess historian Carter G. Woodson's positive appraisal of the relationship between black professionals and the struggles of African Americans first for survival and then for equality of opportunity. The two-ness concept embedded in historian W. E. B. Du Bois's veil metaphor captures the complexity of living and surviving in a society that refused either to see black people's humanity or to accord them full citizenship rights as members of the body politic. (1) After receiving her medical degree in 1897 from the Woman's Medical College in Philadelphia, Dr. Evans practiced medicine in Columbia for over three decades. She specialized in the fields of surgery, obstetrics, gynecology, pediatrics, and hygienics and developed an interracial clientele. But her paramount concern was for the health and educational welfare of black children, who, in her opinion, represented the soul and hope for a better future for "suffering humanity." An indefatigable institution-builder and a master of the art of professional self-promotion, Dr. Evans established two hospitals and a nursing training school at the dawn of the twentieth century. In 1916 Evans began ardently advocating better health-care delivery and criticizing capitalist exploitation of black laborers. This transitional moment in her career is marked by, among other things, publication of her biography of Martha Schofield, a white Quaker educator and the founder of the Normal and Industrial School at Aiken. In this year Evans also created the Negro Health Association of South Carolina (a public-health visiting nurses operation) and edited its official organ, the Negro Health Journal. As the health status of black Columbians steadily deteriorated, Evans became even more convinced that health care was a citizenship right every bit as important a responsibility of the state as was public school education. In 1930 a reporter for the Columbia Palmetto Leader wrote of Evans, "She has ever claimed, and now contends, that free clinics ought to be as much a public concern and provision as are public schools." (2) Thus, at the outset of the Great Depression, Evans launched a free-clinic movement and inspired the black community in Columbia to demand health-care citizenship rights even as the state became less inclined to adopt any progressive reforms that improved the material conditions of black lives. In the opinion of Jane Van De Vrede, division director for the Red Cross, "the great number of negroes [sic] forming a dependent population which must be carried outright in any welfare undertaking" was a powerful disincentive for white South Carolinians to adopt any progressive health-care programs. (3) A close reading of Evans's biography of Martha Schofield provides a glimpse into Evans's inner life that helps us to understand the ideological underpinnings of her activism for social change. …