Dr George Simkins Jr.

Dr. George Simkins Jr.


Greensboro dentist George Simkins attended Meharry Dental College in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1944 to 1948, when only two dental schools accepted black students. He assumed that segregation would continue, but soon set about trying to undo it: he fought segregation at a local golf course but again lost the case before the Supreme Court, this time on a technicality; he sought to desegregate a swimming pool; and in what may have been his most significant civil rights achievement, he built a case against segregation in two Greensboro hospitals. The Supreme Court decided Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Community Hospital in the plaintiffs' favor, ending the legal segregation of medical care. In this interview, he describes his various civil rights efforts and the responses of his white opponents, who resisted desegregation by fighting it in court as well as with harassment and threats. While Simkins won a major civil rights victory in the early 1960s, he sees a return of segregation in public schools, and a lack of sympathy for civil rights among political and judicial leaders. This interview will provide researchers with insights into a motivated individual's efforts to undo segregation and the hostile response of the white community, a response that continues to resonate today.


Longtime civil rights activist and Greensboro dentist, he was president of the local NAACP chapter from 1959 until 1984. In 1955, he and several other black men were arrested for trespassing after they played nine holes at the all-white, municipal Gillespie Park Golf Course. He and the others appealed their convictions all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against them by a 5 to 4 vote. Gov. Luther Hodges commuted their sentences. Rather than integrate Gillespie, the city closed the course. It reopened seven years later, but in the meantime nine of the original 18 holes were gone.

Simkins also was involved in court actions to desegregate Wesley Long Community and Moses Cone hospitals, the public libraries, and the municipal tennis and golf facilities. He also was among those whose lawsuit resulted in a federal judge ordering the Greensboro city schools in 1971 to use busing to bring about total integration of the schools. Simkins died in November 2001.

GEORGE SIMKINS, interviewee
KAREN KRUSE THOMAS, interviewer

[TAPE 1, SIDE A]
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[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
Dr. Simkins, maybe you could give some of your background—your education, and when you started practicing in Greensboro?

GEORGE SIMKINS:
I was born here in Greensboro, in fact I was born here in this house I live in. I attended the elementary schools here in Greensboro, and Dudley High School. I went to Herzel Junior College in Chicago for two years, 1941 and '42, and went to Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama in '43 and '44, and to Meharry Dental College in Nashville, Tennessee, '44 to '48. I interned at Jersey City Medical Center from '48 to '49, and I've been back here in Greensboro ever since. I worked at the Health Department for about five years in public health dentistry. We had a trailer, and we would go from school to school, doing fillings, profies and extractions. That was '49 to '54. I started private practice in '55, and have been practicing general dentistry ever since. I'm still practicing.

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
When you entered dentistry in 1949, what was your sense of the opportunities that were available for African-American health professionals? Did it seem like there were more opportunities opening up than there had been before?

GEORGE SIMKINS:
At that time, there were two dental schools that accepted blacks, Meharry and Howard, in Washington, DC. Some of the Northern schools would accept blacks, but no dental school in the South. There weren't many opportunities at that time.

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
Were you aware of any attempts to encourage Southern schools to admit black students at that time, or was it accepted that those two schools would be the main places?

GEORGE SIMKINS:
At that time, everything was "separate but equal." I had no idea that these schools would later be integrated, because I thought it was going to stay the same.

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
By the time the [Simkins v. Cone] case arose in 1962, why do you think you and the other plaintiffs chose that route to try to open access for blacks to better health care. Were there other options that you thought about at the time, or was a lawsuit agreed on as the best way to go about it?

GEORGE SIMKINS:
We first wrote letters to Moses Cone and Wesley Long Hospitals, asking them to admit black physicians and dentists on their staff. We just got the run-around on that. We wrote several letters, and they just denied us. After so many denials, it started like this. A patient came in my office, I think his name was Donald Lines, he was a student at A & T. He had a temperature of 103, and his jaw was swollen. I knew right then that this boy needed to be in the hospital, where he could get some attention. I called the black hospital, which was L. Richardson, and they told me they could not admit
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him because they had a waiting period of two and three weeks, and that they just didn't have any beds available. You would go over there, and there would be beds in the hallways. You'd have to walk down a narrow path through the hallways without running into the beds, because it was so crowded. Later that same day, I called up Cone and Wesley Long hospitals, and they had beds available, but they would not accept him because of his race.

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
So they didn't even have separate wards, they were both completely white hospitals?

GEORGE SIMKINS:
Wesley Long wouldn't accept you at all. Cone had a policy where if it was something that L. Richardson did not have, they would accept the patient, but he would lose his doctor—he would have to get a white doctor who was on the staff there to work on him. This case was nothing that L. Richardson couldn't handle, if they had room. The boy needed to be on antibiotics and hospitalized, but Cone would not accept him. So at that point, I called Jack Greenberg, who was the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund out of New York. I told Jack, "We really need to do something about these hospitals. They will not accept any black patient, and if Cone accepts them, they lose their doctor." He said, "George, if you can organize the black physicians, I will see what I can do." At this point, I knew that some of the younger fellows wanted to open up these hospitals, and some of the older fellows didn't. One of the reasons some of the older fellows didn't want to was because everybody was operating at L. Richardson. Whether you were qualified or not, you could operate over there. These fellows didn't want to lose their income from operating, and they knew if they had been admitting to Cone and Wesley Long, they would have to be board certified to do any operations, so they weren't too much for it. They also figured that if you opened up Cone and Wesley Long, it would hurt L. Richardson. Patients would stop going to L. Richardson. I went around with a petition, and got guys that I knew who would sign up—I put their names on there first. Then I would approach the older fellows, and those that were reluctant, when they saw all the younger fellows down there, some of them signed, and some of them wouldn't sign. So I got about 11 plaintiffs in all, some patients, the majority of dentists. Then Jack asked me to see if either of these hospitals had been built with federal Hill-Burton funds, because that was the way we had to go in court. If they had not been built with Hill-Burton funds, there was nothing we could do to open them up, because they were strictly private hospitals. I was elated to find that both hospitals had been built with Hill-Burton funds, and we preceded to attack them at that point, on the grounds that they had been built with Hill-Burton funds. I went around and got 50 dollars from each [plaintiff], so they could pay for the expense of the suit. I sent that to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and we hired a local lawyer. He never would file suit after we had done all the work, so I called Jack, and said, "Jack, I think we've got a scared lawyer on our hands. We need to get this thing filed." Because it was months and months, and it never was filed. He understood, and said he'd take care of it. So he called Conrad Pearson, who
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was an NAACP attorney in Durham, and Conrad came over the next day and filed the case. So that's how we got started. Of course, we lost it in Middle District Court, Judge Stanley ruled that the hospitals were private, and they had a right to discriminate if they wanted to. Then we appealed it to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and we won a 3-2 decision. Then the hospitals appealed it to the United States Supreme Court, and they were denied. Bobby Kennedy was the Attorney General at the time, and he wrote a brief on our behalf to the Court to try to get the Court to open up these hospitals to everybody. That was about it.

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
That's interesting that the first lawyer was so intimidated. I wonder why he accepted the case at all?

GEORGE SIMKINS:
I did too. But I guess the more he thought about it, he just didn't want to take any chance. At that particular time, it was hard to get any black lawyers to do anything in civil rights.

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
Was there fear of violence, or professional problems?

GEORGE SIMKINS:
They feared that the courts would not look favorably upon them, and they just didn't want to risk their profession on cases that were not popular.

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
It sounds like you had known Jack Greenberg previous to when you filed the suit. What was your relationship with him? Were you active in the NAACP?

GEORGE SIMKINS:
I had gotten involved in civil rights on December 7, 1955. The city had two golf courses. One was Gillespie, and the other was Nocho Park. We tried to get them to fix up Nocho, and they never would do it, yet they were slipping out and fixing up Gillespie. Of course, Gillespie was for whites, and Nocho was for blacks. The city leased Gillespie for a dollar to a white group, one of whom was chairman of the Greensboro Parks and Recreation Department, to keep blacks off of it. He set up rules that you had to be a member, or the invited guest of a member, to play out there.

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
So he turned it into a private club, basically.

GEORGE SIMKINS:
Basically, but it really wasn't, because any white person could go out there, pay their money and play. But they told us that it was a private club.

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
I'm surprised there was a public golf course for blacks at all.

GEORGE SIMKINS:
There was. We had a little nine-hole course out there. Six of us one Wednesday afternoon when I was off, we went out there to play. They arrested us for trespassing. We put our money down. They had the black policeman to come by that night and take us to jail. My father, who was a dentist, went our bail. We were found guilty in city court, and we appealed it to the next level. In the meantime, we went into federal court and got a declaratory judgment, and the federal judge was Johnson J. Hayes. He said that anybody who pays taxes and has to go out and fight for this country ought to be able to enjoy the recreational facilities provided by the city, and said as far as he was
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concerned, the city was still in the saddle, although they had leased this course. He said this course was to be integrated in three weeks. In about two weeks time, the clubhouse mysteriously burns down, the fire marshals come out and condemn the whole course, because the clubhouse was burned down. We had two lawyers, a man and wife team, and they had gone into federal court and got the declaratory judgment for us, where the federal judge gave us a strong declaratory judgment. But on the trespassing case, they forgot and left the declaratory judgment out of the record when we appealed it to the state Supreme Court. The state Supreme Court found us guilty, because the lawyers had made a mistake. I went up to Thurgood [Marshall, chief legal counsel of the NAACP], that's how I met Thurgood Marshall and Jack Greenberg. I went up to New York and asked Thurgood, "We need you, because I can't fight these lawyers, and the city and everybody by myself. I need the NAACP to help us." He looked at the record, and told me, "Your lawyers ought to be the ones to go to jail." At that time, we'd been given an active jail sentence. "They have screwed this case up. I'm not going to mess my record up by taking a case like this, because you cannot win. You're going to lose it by one vote, Tom Clark is going to vote against you in the Supreme Court. But I will pay for your printing costs." We went all the way to the [U.S.] Supreme Court, and sure enough, we lost by a 5-4 decision. Earl Warren was the Chief Justice, and he said, "I cannot understand how something so important could be left off the record. If this was on the record, there would be no question about whether you all are guilty or not." Because our lawyers messed up, we lost it by one vote.

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
So this case went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States?

GEORGE SIMKINS:
Yes, this was our golf case. Warren gave such a strong dissenting opinion that Luther Hodges, who was governor at the time, commuted our sentences. We had to pay a fine, and didn't go to jail. But that's how I had contact with Thurgood Marshall and Jack Greenberg and the lawyers at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
I didn't know golfing could be so dangerous!

GEORGE SIMKINS:
Everything was dangerous back then. Anything you tried to integrate was.

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
After the golf case, did you participate in any other civil rights activity before the hospital case?

GEORGE SIMKINS:
We went to the swimming pool, and said, if you're not going to let us play golf, maybe you'll let us swim. So they had a swimming pool that was two years old, and we sent somebody out. They immediately closed it and made it for members only. They got mad and shut down the black pool at Nocho. The city said they were getting out of the recreational business, and they tried to sell Nocho Park swimming pool. They had just paid 250 thousand dollars for the white swimming pool, and they let it go for about 60. The man who bidded on it was from Mount Airy, and he was the wrong person, because they wanted somebody in the city to have it. They told him if he got it, they weren't going to zone it right for him, and he wouldn't be allowed to make
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any money at all from concessions. So he said, "Why would I want it, then?" So they had another bid, and the people from the city that they wanted to get it, got it. They kept it for a few years, and finally decided they couldn't make any money, and it was a bad investment. The city later took it back over on an integrated basis.

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
Why didn't the city want the first guy to buy it?

GEORGE SIMKINS:
Because he wasn't the right person to own it. They wanted somebody from within the city of Greensboro.

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
So he was an outsider.

GEORGE SIMKINS:
That's right.

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
You said that some of the older black doctors were reluctant to try to integrate facilities. I've heard in some places that as there were new, increasingly high-tech facilities being built, do you think that a hospital like Richardson would have continued operating even if the other two hospitals hadn't been integrated?

GEORGE SIMKINS:
Yeah, definitely. Because the demand was there.

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
It was kind of a sure thing for them?

GEORGE SIMKINS:
Blacks didn't have noplace to go but L. Richardson. There was a great demand for L. Richardson. No other hospital had a waiting list like that around here. With the large population in Greensboro, they were set. You knew it was an inferior facility, but at that point, there was nothing you could do.


http://www.sitins.com/georgesimkins.shtml
- bio info
http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/R-0018/R-0018.html
-interview