SYMHC Classics: William Montague Cobb

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. After our Friday behind the scenes discussion of William Montague Cobb, we are rerunning our episode on him just for the sake of clarity. There is a reference in this episode to an upcoming Saturday Classic about the nineteen thirty six Olympic Games. That Saturday Classic already ran back in twenty one when the original episode came out. We were not rerunning that Saturday Classic a second time on a subsequent Saturday after this one. This episode originally came out on February seventeenth, twenty twenty one. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. I have a weekly virtual lunch with a friend of mine and sometimes one of us basically briefs the other one on whatever project we are working on right now, And when we were talking about this week's episode, I started out saying something like he was a physical anthropologist who did a lot of work to debunk the racist theories of other anthropologists, And then later on in this conversation, I said something like, on top of being an anthropologist, he was an activist and did all kinds of work to desegregate hospitals and advocate for the passage of the Medicare bill. And then later on it was like, oh, and he was also an anatomy professor at Howard, so he was teaching anatomy to a whole generation of black doctors and dentists. And at that point, my friend said, wait, how can one person do that much? And that's correct, that is a lot. And then on top of that three completely different things. A. W. Montague Cobb put out a sheerly enormous volume of work. He was also the first black person in the United States to earn a PhD in anthropology. He was the only Black American working at that level in the field for decades. And he wrote prolifically about anthropology and racial equity and medical history and on and on. So he's who we're talking about today. And William Montague Cobb was born in Washington, D C. On October twelfth, nineteen oh four. He was known to his friends and family as Monty. His mother was Alexine Montague Cobb, and she was born in Washington, d c. But her parents were from Massachusetts. Several sources note that she had indigenous ancestry. In our episode on Paul Cuffey, we talked about how marriages between African and indigenous people were common in Massachusetts in the eighteenth century, but beyond that, there really wasn't clear detail that Tracy was able to dig up on Alexine's family history and her providence in that regard. So Monty's father, William Elmer Cobb, was originally from Selma, Alabama, and he had moved to the Washington, DC area at the end of the nineteenth century to work at the government printing office. Eventually he started his own business as a printer. Before the young Monty started school, his mother, who had been a school teacher, taught him the basics of reading, writing, and math, and the family also attended Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church. One of Monty's childhood fascinations was a book that belonged to his grandfather. This book included illustrations of people of different races and ethnicities, and they were shown in traditional forms of dress, and he was really struck by how all these different people from all around the world were drawn, as he described them quote with equal dignity. Cobb attended segregated public schools in Washington, d c. And for high school, he attended Paul Lawrence Dunbar High. When we've talked about school segregation before, we have often talked about huge disparities in funding, resources, and instructional quality, with schools for white children typically having more of everything, more money, better facilities, and white teachers who were also vastly better paid than their black counterparts. And while segregation was still fundamentally discriminatory, Dunbar was something of an exception to this pattern. Yeah, Dunbar had been established in eighteen seventy. It was the first public high school for black students in the United States, and by the time Cobb attended it had a reputation as a truly elite school. It was the best high school for black students in the US. It was one of the best public high schools in the country overall. Many of the faculty had advanced degrees, although this was often because they were kept out of university positions because of their race. Some of the faculty at Dunbar were actually alumni who had gone on to graduate school and then had come back to Dunbar to teach. The teacher's pay was also equivalent to that of white teachers in Washington, DC public schools, but not necessarily that of people with the same degree who were working in another area besides being school teachers. As an academic high school, Dunbar tried to prepare its students to attend college, and recent graduates were often invited back to the school to talk to current students about their colleges and universities. Some of the students who came back to Dunbar while Cobb was there had gone on to Amherst College in Massachusetts. After Cobb graduated from Dunbar in nineteen twenty one, he went on to get a bachelor's degree at Amherst. He was one of four black students in his class there. Cobb had done really well at Dunbar and that continued at Amherst. In addition to excelling at his academic work, he was also a gifted athlete. He ran cross country and he boxed. That was actually something he had taught himself out of a book as a teenager for the sake of self defense. He won intramural championships in both cross country and boxing before graduating from Amherston nineteen twenty five. Thanks to his strong ACA academic performance in biology, Cobb earned Amherst's Harvey Blodgett Scholarship, which allowed him to continue his studies at Woods Whole Marine Biology Laboratory on Cape Cod. At Woods Hole, Cob worked under doctor Ernest Everett just Just, was an experimental embryologist who was also on the faculty at Howard University. Cobb's research work at Woods Hull included observing fertilization and embryonic development of marine animals under a microscope and taking detailed notes and sketching what he had observed. From there, Cobb decided to pursue a degree in medicine at Howard University, and his motivation for this was, in his words, quote, I just felt a doctor was respected and made sick people well. To earn money for his tuition, he spent his summers working as a waiter on a Great Lakes steamship as well as harvesting grain in Saskatchewan. At Howard, he joined the Omega psci Fi fraternity, and in nineteen twenty six he helped establish fraternity's Kappa Psi chapter for students at the university's professional schools, including its medical school. He continued to excel academically, and in his last year of medical school, he was invited to teach a course in embryology. Based on his academic performance and his earlier work at Woods Hole, Cobb earned his MD from Howard in nineteen twenty nine. That same year, he married Hilda B. Smith. They would go on to have two daughters, Carolyn and Hilda Emilia, who would be known as Amelia. Cobb completed his internship at Howard University Hospital, which at the time was known as the Freedman's Hospital. He passed his board exams and he got a license to practice medicine and surgery in nineteen thirty. But Cobb's experience teaching that embryology course had also shifted his focus for his career. He decided that instead of becoming a practicing doctor, he would become a teacher, teaching other people to become doctors, dentists, and surgeons. This goal aligned very well with Howard's goals as a black university. Although most of the medical students at Howard were black, most of the faculty were white, and they were working part time. Mordecai Johnson, who was Howard University's first black president, thought that its student body would be better served if there were more full time black professors, but this really presented a challenge. The university was training black doctors, but there really were not many black people who were qualified to fill these teaching roles. So the university decided to invest in its own graduates and to prepare them to teach at the medical school. Numa PG. Adams was dean at the medical School at Howard. Like Mordecai Johnson, he was the first black person to fill that role. Cobb was one of the medical school alumni Adams selected for this effort. Cobb chose anatomy as his focus for further study because, in his words, quote, anatomy is the kindergarten of medicine. He didn't mean that anatomy was an easy place time, but instead that it was the foundation on which the study of medicine rested. He went on to Western Reserve University that is now case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio to study both anatomy and physical anthropology. We will talk about that after a sponsor break. Anthropology is the study of humanity, and today the field of physical anthropology is largely focused on human evolution, including genetic research into humans and our homined ancestors. But in the early years of the field, when it was very first branching off from the related field of anatomy, physical anthropology was largely focused on researching human development and human diversity through the study of the human body, and a lot of that research tried to categorize humanity into different races. One of the earliest figures in this research was German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who is sometimes called the father of physical anthropology. His study of human anatomy, particularly the cranium, led him to propose that all of humanity could be divided into five races, and he defined those races as Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian, and American. In the US, physician and anthropologist Samuel Morton started collecting skulls meant to represent each of those races, and he started doing that in eighteen thirty. This work led him to build a huge collection of skulls, measuring them and drawing conclusions based on those measurements. A lot of this work was explicitly racist. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many but certainly not all physical anthropologists used measurements of the human body not just to try to sort people into categories by race, but also to rank those categories according to their superiority or their worth. Morton, for example, used his cranial measurements to try to prove that white people were superior to all other races. Czech anthropologist Alesh Hrdlichkea, who worked primarily in the United States, is regarded as one of the founders of the field of physical anthropology in the US, and he also supported the idea that white people, specifically white men, were superior and that physical anthropology as a field could prove that superiority. An outlier in all of this was Thomas Wingate Todd, professor of anatomy at Western Reserve University Medical School. Todd's own work in anatomy and physical anthropology led him to conclude that race did not influence brain development and that the racist conclusions his colleagues had drawn from things like skull measurements were baseless. His research suggested that physiological differences that fell along demographically were due to social and environmental conditions, not to innate race related traits that conferred some kind of superiority. He was deeply critical of Hrdlichke's conclusions about the supremacy of white men. Thomas Wingate Todd was also William Montague Cobb's mentor at Western Reserve University and his pH d thesis advisor. While at Western Reserve, Cobb worked at the Hammon Museum of Comparative Anatomy and Anthropology, and he embarked on a massive survey of the skeletal collections that were available for anthropological research. This included the ham and Todd collection at Western Reserve and collections that were held at the US National Museum, which is now the Smithsonian. The curator of the collection at the National Museum was A. Lesh Hrlichke. As a side note, in his later years, Cobb speculated on why Todd, who as we said was his thesis advisor, had sent him to work under herd Lychka on this project in spite of knowing about that man's racist views. One reason was just physical proximity, since the National Museum's collection was in Washington, d c. Where Cobb lived and had lived for almost all of his life. But Cob also concluded that another reason was that Todd just wanted to see how herd Lychka would square Cobb's intelligence and academic excellence with his views of people with African ancestry as inferior. Although Cobb describes herd Lychka as generally treating him with outward respect, he also describes him as quote inventing a reason why he was different from other black people that, in herd Lychke's word, Cobb's quote vigor stemmed from his multi racial ancestry. Cobb finished his PhD in anatomy in physical anthropology in nineteen thirty two. That made him the first black man in the United States to earn a PhD in the field of anthropology. His dissertation was published the following year under the title Human Archives, and in addition to it detailing the research collections in Cleveland and in Washington, DC, this dissertation also surveyed methods for documenting, processing, and preserving these types of collections. So Cobb's goal with this dissertation was not just to meet the requirements for his PhD. It was also to give him the foundational knowledge that he would need to establish such a research collection at Howard. As we said earlier, the field of physical anthropology was brand new. At this point. It was so new that the first meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists that Cobb attended was only the second one ever to have been held, and Cobb was really the only black voice in the field until the nineteen fifties. After completing his PhD, Cobb returned to Howard as planned. Although he often spent summers working with the collections at Case Western and at the Smithsonian, he also did extensive research into the human cranium and connections between the bones of the cranium and the bones of the face. He drew conclusions about how these bones grew and develop over the course of a person's life. One of his discoveries in this research related to the closure of the craniofacial sutures. At the time, one method that researchers used to determine age when they were analyzing a person's remains was to analyze the closure of the sutures of the cranium, and Cobb concluded that this just wasn't a reliable method because a range of biological factors could affect the way a person's sutures closed. At Howard, Cobb spent the next few years both teaching anatomy and establishing the university's Laboratory of Anatomy and Physical Anthropology. His work involved preserving the skeletons that had been part of anatomy student's cadaver labs, as well as keeping meticulous records involving their medical history and demographic data. Cobb continued preserving skeletons for this collection until nineteen sixty five, for a total of nine hundred eighty seven sets of skeletal remains. He also took X rays, medical records, and demographic data from more than nine hundred living persons to add to the collection. The W. Montague Cobb Research Laboratory still exists at Howard today, as does this collection, and in terms of skeletal collections, it's unique. Along with remains from the New York African Burial Ground that are also at Howard, the Cobb collection is the only such collection of skeletal remains housed at a historically black university, and it's also unique in terms of the skeletons themselves. They represent the skeletal remains of people who donated their bodies to the university or that the university purchased so overwhelmingly they represent black residents of Washington, d C. Who died between nineteen thirty one in nineteen sixty five. So, in addition to what they represent in terms of the study of human anatomy, physiology, and anthropology, they also represent a source of information specifically about the black population of Washington, d C. Over more than three decades. In nineteen forty two, Cobb became a full professor at Howard, and in nineteen forty nine he was named chair of the Anatomy department, as a role that he held until nineteen sixty nine. As a professor, he became known for taking an interdisciplinary approach to the subject. He recited poetry to illustrate concepts, and he played the violin while students worked on their dissections. He also thought basic skills in drawing were critical to studying anatomy, that understanding proportions and representations would give students a fuller understanding of the human body. Students would draw a human figure and its skeletal structure, then fill in the remaining anatomical features layer by layer. Method of anatomical study through drawing was popular in anatomy classrooms at the start of Cobb's career. But by the nineteen sixties it had really fallen out of favor, and in nineteen sixty nine, first year medical students at Howard launched a protest against Cobb, both as an anatomy professor and as the chair of the Department of Anatomy. Students felt that his anatomy classes were too theatrical and too free form, and they were not focused on preparing them to pass their board exams, whereas to me, I'm like, you get to learn art with your science. That's amazing. Clearly different priorities. Although Cobb was removed from his position as department chair after this, fifty eight members of the faculty signed a petition protesting this removal. In the end, Cobb was named Howard's first distinguished Professor. That's a role he held until nineteen seventy three, when he reached the school's mandatory retirement age of seventy A dinner held in his honor that year was attended by many of the same people who had protested against him in nineteen sixty nine, students who were now in their last year of medical school. According to Cobb's colleague Charles H. Epps, who would later be named dean of the medical school. By this point, many of the students felt that they hadn't been entirely fair to Cobb in their earlier protest. Yeah, there was also some discussion that he was sort of the most high profile person in the medical school, and so it made him an easy target for students who sort of felt the whole medical school system was too paternalistic and became like an emblem of all of the frustrations of the students at the time. After his retirement, though, Cobb held the title of Distinguished Professor Emeritus, and he continued working at twelve other colleges and universities by doing guest professorships. By Cobb's own account, he taught anatomy to as many as six thousand medical and dental students, most of whom were black, over the course of his career. And we're going to talk about his work outside the anatomy classroom after we first paused for a sponsor break. Before the break, we talked about how when W. Montague Cobb first entered the field of physical anthropology, a lot of people in that field were promoting racist views and drawing racist conclusions in their work. Thomas Wingate Todd, who was Cobb's doctoral advisor, was one of the people pushing back against this scientific racism. Another was Julian Herman Lewis. Lewis pointed out that a lot of anatomical research that existed at the time focused only on white subjects but did not actually say so. So the subjects of a particular piece of research would be described with something like quote normal, healthy, mails, but they were really only white people. Lewis's nineteen forty two book The Biology of the Negro picked apart the idea that Black Americans were somehow biologically inferior, but that book didn't really get widespread recognition. There was also Franz Boas, who is sometimes called the father of American anthropology, and to be clear, his work was not without fault. He robbed indigenous people's burial sites in order to collect remains to study and also sell. But he also really stressed that human beings were fundamentally biologically equal, with the differences among them being due to historical, environmental, and developmental factors. And of course there was also w. Montague kob himself. Throughout his career, in every area he worked in, he was deeply focused on dispelling racist ideas and trying to ensure racial equality, especially for Black Americans. He didn't try to spell the idea of race in general, but he did emphasize humanity's diversity in the social and historical factors that contributed to that diversity, rather than framing race as biologically determined, with some races inherently superior to others. Cobb's most high profile work to debunk racism through anthropology followed the nineteen thirty six Olympic Games held in Berlin, Germany. That's the Olympic Games at which Jesse Owens earned four gold medals. We actually are going to replay that episode as a Saturday Classic coming up soon. Sometimes people interpret Owen's exceptional performance as undermining Adolf Hitler's vision of Aryan supremacy, but really there was a lot of discussion about Owen's wins at the Olympic Games that was used to back up the racist assertion that his athletic performance was due to his race and that black people's purportedly innate athletic abilities came at the expense of their intellectual abilities. And this was not just a belief that was circulating within the world of physical anthropology. It quickly made its way into mainstream writing about athletics and race. Cobb worked to debunk this assertion, examining and taking X rays of runners, including Owens himself. In nineteen thirty six, he published Race and Runners, which began with an overview of recent performance by black runners, before detailing other shifting demographic trends that had played out over the history of the sport. He analyzed runner's physical characteristics and their performance. He noted that Owens had several physical traits that were purportedly more common in white runners, not the traits supposedly unique to black runners that would have, according to that widely circulated theory, given him an advantage. He concluded, quote, no particular racial or national group has ever exercised a monopoly or supremacy in a particular kind of event. The popularity of different events with different groups of people has and probably will always vary, though not necessarily in the same direction. He went on to say, quote the physiques of champion negro and white sprinters in general, and of Jesse Owen's in particular, revealed nothing to indicate that Negroid physical characters are anatomically concerned with the present dominance of Negro athletes in national competition in the short dashes and the broad jump. There is not a single physical characteristic which all the Negro stars in question have in common which would definitely identify them as Negroes. Cobb wrote other articles on this subject over the course of the next decade and more, including ones that were published in popular magazines. For example, in Negro Digest in nineteen forty seven, he wrote, quote, science has not revealed a single trait particular to the Negro alone to which his athletic achievements could be attributed. In nineteen thirty nine, Cobb published the Negro as a biological element in the American population that was published in the Journal of Negro Education, and this was a broad look at black Americans from an anthropological perspective. He wrote, quote, in the United States today, law and custom decree that any citizen who is known to have African blood, however diluted, is a Negro. Consequently, from American negroes, individuals may be selected who might serve as examples of nearly every physical type in the world, from West African to Nordic. He also concluded that this diversity was temporary because in most of the US, intermarriages between black and white people were either socially taboo or legally banned. He thought over time, the country's black population would become more homogeneous. Of course, those laws and social norms have certainly shifted in the decades since he wrote that paper. Yeah, we have a two part episode on Loving versus Virginia, which is the Supreme Court decision that struck down anti missigination laws for more on that. So so far, this might all sound pretty academic, and there is value in debunking racist ideas, especially considering that these ideas made their way into things like mainstream magazines and high school anatomy and physiology textbooks. I feel like we have read from such textbooks and previous episodes of the show that repeat these same basic ideas. But Cobb's work also focused on things that you might describe as more immediately practical, like integrating the American medical system. Cobb felt that the country segregated medical system was harming people of every race. In much of his work, Cobb noted that Indigenous, Asian, and Hispanic and Latino patients were often treated similarly to black patients, but overall his work was more focused on the needs of black people than on these other groups. In Cobb's view, discrimination with slowing medical progress and lowering the quality of care for everyone, but especially for black patients. It was also restricting opportunities for black doctors. After the nineteen ten Flexner Report, Mahari and Howard, which we've talked about before, were the only black medical schools, and up until the nineteen forties, black doctors could only do their residencies at a handful of black hospitals. Afterward, they could only work in those same hospitals or in private practice, and this was holding back the entire medical field. So Cobbs started this integration work in the nineteen forties by advocating for black doctors to be accepted on staff at white hospitals and to be allowed admission into white's only professional societies. This included the Medical Society of the District of Columbia and the American Medical Association. There had been other organizations established for black doctors because of this exclusion. That included the Medicoturgical Society of the District of Columbia that had been established for black physicians in eighteen eighty four and the National Medical Association, which was established in eighteen ninety five. He also wrote specifically about workplace and social factors that affected black nurses, noting that black people had historically performed critical and often dangerous and unpleasant work during emergencies like wars and disease outbreaks, but then were denied the dignity of the title nurse because of their race. He traced that history through to nursing schools and professional associations excluding black people. In nineteen fifty seven, Cobb helped organize the first m Hotep National Conference on Hospital Integration, which was focused on integration all through the hospital system, the patients, the staff, the administration, the residents and interns at teaching hospitals, all all of it. This conference was named for m Hotep, who was advisor to the Third Dynasty pharaoh Josser, who we've talked about on the show before, and later was worshiped as an Egyptian god of medicine. This conference was sponsored by the National Medical Association's Council on Medical Education and Hospitals, by the NAACP's National Health Committee, and by the Medicoturgical Society of the District of Columbia. It was held annually until nineteen sixty three. The conference became less necessary after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four, which Cobb had aggressively supported. Title six of the Act reads quote, no person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination, under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. Then another law that Cobb's report made that title apply to hospitals all over the country. That was the Social Security Act Amendments, also called the Medicare and Medicaid Act of nineteen sixty five. Basically, Medicare provided hospital insurance and medical insurance to people aged sixty five and older, and Medicaid provided medical assistance for people with low incomes. So the passage of Medicare and Medicaid meant that essentially every hospital in the United States would be accepting federal financial assistance. In other words, together, the Medicaid Bill and the Civil Rights Act essentially made hospital segregation illegal nationwide. This was one of the reasons the American Medical Association had opposed the Medicare Bill. In fact, The only member of a professional medical society who had openly supported medicare was W. Montague Cobb. Cobb endorsed the bill and testified on its behalf before Congress. When President Lyndon Johnson's find the legislation, Cobb was invited to witness the signing. This was not the first time that Cobb had so publicly opposed the AMA. Back in nineteen forty six, he had testified before Congress in favor of the National Health Act, which would have created a National Health Insurance Plan. Cobb endorsed the bill on behalf of the NAACP before Congress, and he described the bill as having the potential quote to close the gap between advances in medical technology on the one hand, and the social and economic arrangements by which medical services are made available on the other. In his testimony, he described health conditions in the US as quote far from satisfactory, with quote the plight of the Negro worse than that of the white. The AMA opposed this legislation and inaccurately branded its socialized medicine. It ultimately failed. Cobb's advocacy for black doctors and other black professionals also extended beyond their day to day working environments. In nineteen fifty five, the American Association for the Advancement of Science held its conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Cobb vigorously opposed this choice of venue because Atlantis hotels were segregated. The AAAS worked out a compromise which was for black attendees to be allowed into the host hotels for meetings, but not as overnight guests. Instead, they would stay at Atlanta University. Cobb boycotted the meeting, and the next year the AAAS implemented anti segregation policies for its conference locations. You like a lot of the compromises we've talked about on the show, it's not really a compromise. And the people it was offered to were like, are you kidding me? Cobb advocated for the same change at the American Association of Anatomists two years later. In nineteen sixty five, he traveled to Selma, Alabama to support the physicians who had volunteered to offer aid during the Selma to MCGA March. These are really just some of the biggest highlights of w. Montagukob's career. He served as president of the Medicoturgical Society of the District of Columbia from nineteen forty five to nineteen forty seven, and then again from nineteen fifty one to nineteen fifty four. He served as editor of the Journal of the National Medical Association for twenty eight years, starting in nineteen forty nine, and during that time he helped expand it from a temporary publication of the NMA to a respected medical journal. In nineteen fifty seven, he was named president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. He served in that role for two years. In nineteen sixty five, he served on the executive committee of the White House Conference on Health. He was the executive president of the NAACP from nineteen seventy six to nineteen eighty three, and he was on the NAACP board for thirty one years. Over the course of his career, he wrote more than one thousy one hundred papers in his field, as well as series of two hundred biographies of black doctors, and for most of that time he also taught anatomy and shared the anatomy department at Howard University. I am exhausted just reading that list so much. Cobb's wife, Hilda, died in nineteen seventy six, they had been married for forty seven years. A year later, Cobb played the role of W. E. B. Du Bois in a production called Without a Doubt at the Kennedy Center. This production was something his daughter, Amelia Cobb Gray, had compiled and directed, and this was his stage debut. In nineteen eighty, Cobb was awarded the Henry Gray Award from the American Association of Anatomists, which is its highest award. Cobb continued his advocacy into his very last years. In nineteen eighty two, the YMCA planned to close it's Anthony Bowen branch in Washington, d c. And this was in Cobb's childhood neighborhood, and it had also been the first branch that the YMCA had established for black members. Cobb argued vocally against this closure, both because of the branch's historical significance and because the neighborhood itself was desperately in need of recreation and other services. The YMCA ultimately agreed not to close the branch, but it did move it into a different facility, citing the original building's disrepair. In nineteen ninety w. Montaguekab was awarded the American Medical Association Distinguished Service Award. He died on November twentieth of that same year at the age of eighty six. In his own words, quote, when I go down, I hope I'll go down still pushing for something in the forward direction that is mind blowing levels of achievement. I feel so lazy. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.