Viewing page 97 of 100

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

BLACK PHYSICIAN                                       GOODLETT
hospitals and other corrective institutions, while at the same time we broaden and deepen the social morass which feeds them. The time is already here when to be only a practicing physician is a discredit. Not only has the medical profession to furnish its full quota to the army of social science, but in many aspects it must point the way. The pathology of society is as much the function of the medical man as the pathology of human disease.

  We live in a world where men have real needs-for food, for clothing, for shelter, for the education of their young. These basic needs must be redefined, not as needs but as rights. The housing needs of black people will not be fulfilled until America learns that scarcity of housing for an increasingly overwhelming demand is a social crime, and that housing for every family in the land is a matter of right. Job discrimination in America will end, not by pecking away at job opportunities for blacks in a job market more and more restricted by cybernation, but by committing ourselves to the fact that every American citizen has a right to a job, whether in the private or in the public sector of our economy-or, notwithstanding Richard M. Nixon, to a guaranteed annual income, or an established floor below which no American citizen, by matter of birth, shall be allowed to fall. Decent education will only be attained by instituting a national program which guarantees the right, not the privilege, of every child, irrespective of race, color and creed, to be educated to the fullest extent of his capacity. The brutalization of blacks by the paramilitary police establishment will not be suppressed until we demand, and obtain, a national policy defining the police as an instrument to protect the rights of each individual, a servant of the people rather than a provocateur and instrument of violence.
  These goals seem unattainable, the obstacles insurmountable. Why do I even suggest that physicians, and particularly black physicians, should become involved on a treadmill of community action, risking their physical and economic well-being, in an apparently insoluble controversy? To that, my response is: We are physicians, and not morticians. Our very calling makes of us perennial optimists who believe that as long as there is a pulse of the faintest respiration there is hope that life can be restored.
  What special tasks have you assumed in the continuing struggle for justice, jobs, housing, education and first-class citizenship for all? My guess is that collectively the answer is "not much."

383

Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 20:55:22 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 21:06:01