A Noble Life, A Dismissive Death. In the fall of 2001, my paternal…
By: André Lovelle
Tags: Healthcare, Migration, The Great Migration, BlackLivesMatter

Chicago circa 1941. Photograph by Edwin Rosskam

In the fall of 2001, my paternal grandfather died in a Southside Chicago hospital room. Towards the end of his life he battled many illnesses but he officially succumbed to a myocardial infarction — a standard heart attack. He was 96 years old. Despite his unusually long life, his death has become a sensitive subject for his children because it is believed by some of them to have been expedited by quietly racist healthcare treatment.

My grandfather was born in Alabama in 1906. He was their first child and would, eventually, become the oldest of nine. At the time of his birth, The Civil War had only ended 41 years earlier and Southern Reconstruction attempts had been abandoned or violently dismantled a mere 29 years beforehand. Life in the South for African-Americans at that time was almost unendurable. Of the many racist atrocities that my grandfather suffered and witnessed, one of the stories he told was particularly upsetting. When he was about seventeen years old, he was walking on a road with his friend when a group of whites drove by in a car. Although my grandfather and his companion stepped aside to allow them to pass, the driver of the car yelled out a racist obscenity and intentionally attempted to run the boys over. My grandfather managed to avoid the car but his friend was not so fortunate. The car struck and killed him. No charges were filed and the family of the child who was murdered received no justice or compensation. Strikingly, my grandfather recalled this incident without anger or sadness. This, according to him, was simply the brutal reality of black Southerners at that time.

My grandfather rarely discussed his parents or background (I later learned that this reluctance to reveal any information about one’s family was not unique to him. Many African-Americans of his generation avoided needless self-disclosure. For them, the less strangers knew, the less trouble it could lead to) so not much is known about them. What is common knowledge is that — for reasons unknown — when he was still in school, his family packed up and moved North to the Chicago area around the time of the first World War. They, like many newly transplanted African-Americans, settled on Chicago’s South Side. Prior to moving to Chicago, his father worked as a carpenter and passed that skill along to him. My grandfather was proud of his carpentry ability and, according to my dad, was disappointed when none of his children chose to pick up the profession. He firmly believed trade skills were infinitely more valuable than factory or corporate work—and far less subject to be based on the mercurial whims of hostile management or an unseen market. It can be surmised that my great-grandfather was an ideological student of Booker T. Washington, who promoted the idea that the road to black self-betterment was through the acquisition of vocational skills.

In fact, my grandfather was a man who was rich in skills. He was worked as a barber and an auto mechanic. As an adult, he moved to Gary, Indiana and built his own house, a house that was inhabitable until the early 2000s. He wired it with electricity, installed the plumbing system, built a screened-in porch and planted a prosperous garden. Yet, as sociologist Kai T. Erikson explains, my grandfather was “uncomfortable in those corners of the universe where words and symbols have replaced everyday experience as the coin of intelligence.” As a result, in later years when his hands betrayed him and manual dexterity left, he found that he lacked the transferable skills to keep himself and his own family afloat. For the last roughly twenty-five years of his life, my grandfather, always a proud, independent man, was forced to rely upon several of his children to make ends meet.

I was not present for the death of my grandfather. I was told that he was at peace and was “ready to leave.” Yet, my father and a few of my uncles are convinced that my grandfather received a different class of care. They argue that more assertive medical treatment and an emphasis on preventative care could have prolonged his life. According to them, it was as if my grandfather’s healthcare providers had determined that 90 years on this Earth was enough for a black man and let his health deteriorate. They believe that if my grandfather had been white, he would have lived even longer. Obviously, my family will never be able to ascertain whether this is rooted in truth or the product of wishful thinking. But the fact that my grandfather’s physicians were all white, and that white physicians are generally more likely to administer thorough examinations to whites than they are to blacks, makes my father and his brothers skeptical that he received optimal healthcare.

I have always found it amazing that my grandfather lived such a long life given all that he’d experienced. It has only recently occurred to me that perhaps the reason my grandfather lived so long is because he never seemed bitter. He never seemed to internalize any of the destructive, racist barbs that society aimed at him and everyone he knew and loved. I asked my father why this was so and he said that it would simply have been suicidal to my grandfather and his family for him to fixate on racial issues. In a very real sense he had to rely on whites for his survival. He intrinsically recognized that it would be unhealthy for him to harbor animosity towards them. As a result, he regarded whites with suspicion but never resentment. Further, although he did prepare his children to face a world in which many would be acrimonious to them because of the color of their skin, he did not teach them to hate or fear. It is, therefore, both tragic and ironic that the circumstances surrounding his death have left his children feeling anger and bitterness.