"Are You a N****r or a Doctor?"

March 6, 2023
This engaging, memorably told memoir from Stallworth, an anesthesiologist now retired after a 45 year medical career, builds up to the provocative question in its title. It’s asked of Stallworth in 1970, by an elderly white patient at Case Western Reserve Hospital in Youngstown, Ohio, where Stallworth, at intern at age 24, was the only Black doctor. Stallworth’s response—he essentially says that he’s both—may surprise readers. In this instance, he notes, he heard neither “hatred or evil intent,” the way he had, growing up in Birmingham, when that slur had been hurled “by policemen and by politicians on TV campaigning for mayor or governor.” Stallworth saw the man as “a male patient, an elderly male born in another century, in the 1890s”—and saw himself as a doctor. So, he got to work.
Stallworth’s memoir abounds in rich, often surprising scenes, some as complex as that one. His lifetime of thinking through these incidents informs every page, starting with his vivid recounting of a 1950s Alabama childhood of ice-cream, marbles, Conkoleen, and questions about the segregated world around him: at a department store, spying an empty lunch counter, he “couldn’t help but wonder how White Only food tasted, and why was it White Only?” Arresting portraits of friends, family, teachers, and others bring the era to life, as young Stallworth and his father deliver Jet and Ebony magazine around the city known as the most segregated in America.
Also arresting are Stallworth’s accounts of horseplay at Howard University, of seeing a host of notable entertainers (countless luminaries at the Howard Theatre; a young Richard Pryor; a Gene Krupa show at New York’s Cafe Metropole attended by Cassius Clay), of his personal connection to those lost in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, of the time he got lost as a Chicago bus driver with furious passengers. The storytelling is conversational, illuminating, and often funny, as this fiercely independent thinker offers a vital contribution to the historical record.
Takeaway: The arresting memoir of a Black doctor’s journey and 1950s Alabama upbringing.
Great for fans of: Charles M. Blow’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, Damon Tweedy’s Black Man in a White Coat.
Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: B
Editing: A
Marketing copy: B+