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A memoir by an African American physician in Alabama whose story in many ways typifies the lives and careers of black doctors in the south during the segregationist era Beside the Troubled Waters is a memoir by an African American physician in Alabama whose story in many ways typifies the lives and careers of black doctors in the south during the segregationist era while also illustrating the diversity of the black experience in the medical profession. Based on interviews conducted with Hereford over ten years, the account includes his childhood and youth as the son of a black sharecropper and Primitive Baptist minister in Madison County, Alabama, during the Depression; his education at Huntsville’s all-black CouncillSchool and medical training at MeharryMedicalCollege in Nashville; his medical practice in Huntsville’s black community beginning in 1956; his efforts to overcome the racism he met in the white medical community; his participation in the civil rights movement in Huntsville; and his later problems with the Medicaid program and state medical authorities, which eventually led to the loss of his license. Hereford’s memoir stands out because of its medical and civil rights themes, and also because of its compelling account of the professional ruin Hereford encountered after 37 years of practice, as the end of segregation and the federal role in medical care placed black doctors in competition with white ones for the first time.

It was about 1970 when Medicaid came to Alabama, and when you think about it, it should have been a good thing for me because Medicaid was supposed to help poor people pay for medical care. That should have helped my situation, but that’s not the way it turned out. It was the start of a lot of trouble for me. For one thing, it was hard to keep up with the paperwork. We had some patients with no insurance whatsoever; we had some with Medicaid only and some with Medicare only; and we had others with a combination. We

Two weeks into my first term, I faced the worst crisis I experienced during the whole time I was at Meharry. Not since my early days as a stuttering first-grader at Councill had I felt the way I did now, sure that I’d bitten off more than I could chew. My feelings came not just from the fact that my classmates were all older—some were veterans or had already started their careers—but from their achievements. Two were pharmacists. One guy had been a jet pilot in Korea. Another had been a major in the army. A black major

In the midst of our sit-in campaign, the leaders of the Community Services Committee elected me a committee of one to go and talk to the hospital administrator about integrating the hospital. The administrator’s name was Mr. Larry Rigsby, and I had several meetings with him. At the first one, Mr. Rigsby told me: “Dr. Here ford, I can see it coming. I know we’re gonna have to do something. Let me just think this over for a day or two, and you come back, and we’ll meet again, and I’ll tell you what I’ve decided, and you can tell

I was born on the exact spot where the Dairy Queen stands, out on Max Luther Drive. That’s where my house was, the exact spot. The place was in the country back then, north of the city limits, but you wouldn’t think so now. Across the road, right where the Dollar Store and the flea market sit, was my grandfather Tom’s house, with a barn and a cornfield just beyond it. To the northwest, where red dirt outcroppings dropped off into good bottom land, and where you see a high rise and a cable TV company today, was a cotton

I first heard about the sit-in from an old classmate named James Fields, who called me at my office. He told me that Rev. Ezekiel Bell, the pastor of a new Presbyterian church on Meridian Street who had just moved from Memphis, was inviting everyone to a mass meeting in support of students from Alabama A&M and Councill High. He said the students had just started a sit-in campaign at some of the downtown lunch counters and wanted to know if I would attend the meeting, and I said I would. The meeting was to take place at the [black]

The daybook I kept when I started my practice shows that the very first day I was open for business, I had four patients and made eleven dollars. The second day, I had seven patients and made fifteen dollars. By the end of the month, I was seeing twenty to twenty-five patients a day and bringing in between forty and fifty dollars. By the end of my second year, I was seeing fifty to sixty patients a day, sometimes more.¹ Most mornings, I’d be awakened by the phone at five, five-thirty, or six o’clock—so-and-so is sick, can you come