My American Life: From Rage to Entitlement - Hardcover

Cobbs M.D., Price

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9780743496193: My American Life: From Rage to Entitlement

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743496191 ISBN 13: 9780743496193

Publisher: Atria Books, 2005

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Price M. Cobbs, M.D., coauthor, with William H. Grier, of Black Rage -- one of the twentieth century's most profound examinations of black life in America -- has been a witness to some of the most important events in American history.
Now, thirty years later, for the first time he reconsiders his extraordinary life and career, offering a moving account of his journey -- as one of the nation's foremost authorities in the field of psychiatry -- from rage to entitlement.
An African American pioneer in the field of psychiatry, Dr. Cobbs in his lifetime has grown up during the Great Depression, felt the dramatic effects of World War II, and witnessed the dismantling of Jim Crow laws and the impact of Brown vs. Board of Education. He watched the rise of Martin Luther King Jr. and the heroism of Rosa Parks in the civil rights movement. He followed the life of Malcolm X and "searched avidly for what animated the ideas beneath his fiery rhetoric." Every experience of his early life and education led to an auspicious partnership with a colleague, William H. Grier, who shared his convictions and the work involved in producing what the New York Times would call "one of the most important books on [blacks]."
Written at the height of the black power movement, Black Rage has sold over one million copies and remains a relevant study of race relations. Dr. Cobbs has lived through decades of profound social, political, and cultural transformation in America. A second-generation doctor, Cobbs has at once written a classic portrait of an amazing family and the making of a healer and community and business leader. As a psychiatrist, he has pioneered methods for studying the psychology of race and gender. So, while My American Life is a heartfelt memoir of a loving father and husband, it is also a chronicle of the black experience in America.

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About the Author:

Price Cobbs, MD, is one of the nation’s foremost authorities in the field of psychiatry, specializing in African American issues. Cobbs is also a corporate management consultant who owns and runs his own consulting firm. He is a highly sought lecturer on issues of psychiatry and corporate management. Cobbs received his BA from UC Berkeley and his MD from MeHarry Medical College. He is a member of the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the NAACP, and the Urban League. Cobbs is the author of five books and numerous articles.

Chapter One

Doctor Boswell's first words to my mother, Rosa, after she delivered me, her third child, were "that boy looks just like a bishop." I was born at home, 1531 East Forty-ninth Street in Los Angeles, California, on November 2, 1928. And as I took what no doubt was a noisy first breath, Dr. Boswell's humorous, well-intended depiction of me resonated deeply in some part of my mother's soul. She herself had long-term standing as a leader of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, of which the good doctor was also a member. Indeed, back in Birmingham, my mother's father and two brothers had been prominent members of the church and later her brother ran for bishop, which, in the CME Church, is an elected position. My uncle lost that election. But that did not interfere with my mother's certainty that I indeed had the appearance of intelligence, probity, and righteousness that could help me on the path to great expectations. My looking like a bishop was good news to her and fitting as well.

My father, Peter Price Cobbs, would have been pleased too. He wasn't as devoted to the church as my mother, but he attended regularly and appreciated the social and political aspects of being a member of the church community. A thoughtful man of action, he was in 1928 one of the very first black physicians to practice in Los Angeles. He knew that if his newborn son Price truly fit such a description, he was already exhibiting qualities that would serve him well in a world that even my father, "PP" as a few close friends called him, could only imagine was coming. So as I was laid in my mother's arms for the first time that day, I was welcomed with joy to the family of Doctor and Mrs. Peter Price Cobbs, my brother, Prince, and my sister, Marcelyn.

I don't remember the ride, of course, but a few days after my birth, my mother and father drove me in their late-model Reo from our little house on Forty-ninth Street between Hooper and Central Avenue for a ride down Central Avenue. He later only drove either a Dodge or a Chrysler.

In 1928 there were about twenty thousand black people in Los Angeles, and most of them could be found in the neighborhood of Central Avenue, in a corridor several blocks wide and thirty blocks long, just south of downtown. This was, of course, a segregated Los Angeles in which black people were severely restricted in where they could live. Real estate land covenants forbidding the sale of property to black people in most sections of L.A. were part and parcel of the law itself and had been legitimized by a California Supreme Court ruling in 1919. That judgment, which legalized segregation in housing, stood until well after the end of World War II.

The covenants did not stop people from coming, though. There was money in Los Angeles, lots of it, and many black immigrants from the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas felt that some portion of it could be theirs. Especially in comparison to wages in the South, those in L.A. were high, even for menial jobs. A black janitor in L.A., for example, could make three times what he'd earn working a farm in Georgia, Alabama, or Mississippi. Also, despite the restrictive covenants, there was the important and wonderful possibility of even having a home of your own, although its location may be restricted to a certain section of the city. In 1930, one-third of the black people in L.A. owned their homes, a much higher percentage than in any other city in the United States.

Most of the blacks immigrating to Los Angeles in those days were upwardly mobile people seeking education and good jobs who had the intention of improving their lot financially and every other way. There was also a steady trickle of black professionals like my parents. My father had a thriving practice he had built over the years in Montgomery, Alabama, so the move to Los Angeles was thoughtfully considered.

Something important was apparently missing in Montgomery, and he was looking for a place where he could improve his position. One day when I was in junior high school and riding with my father to his office he mentioned he found Montgomery "too confining." He never explained and I didn't ask whether this meant he wanted to build a larger medical practice or to participate more fully in the political life of a city. He considered Tallahassee, Florida, where he had applied for a position as the infirmary physician at Florida A and M. While he was visiting there though he was treated with all of the rough, backward truculence that the white South reserved for blacks, no matter their talents. Refusals of service. Insults. Degrading indifference or outright hostility. Nothing even in Montgomery had prepared him for this. Life for blacks in Tallahassee was not good.

My father came away from the experience shaken by the way he was treated except, of course, among the students and staff of the college. After living in both Tuskegee Institute and Montgomery, Alabama, the racial hostility of the Deep South was certainly not a new experience for him. Maybe being a part of the medical community in those places cushioned some of the blows. Whatever it was, the sheer intensity of Tallahassee was undoubtedly different. The few days he spent there in 1924 remained symbolic to him for the rest of his life of what the South intended for people like him, my mother, and their family to come. Indeed his description of this visit was one of the few occasions when my father actually uttered the word racist, a word that we seldom used in those days. We talked more about "prejudice" when I was a child. But my father said that Tallahassee was one of the most racist places he had ever visited, and I think that experience is what pushed him to go far away, way out west, to the new promised land of California and Los Angeles.

Leaving the South and migrating west was a common theme with a great many of the kids that I grew up with -- whether their parents had brought them to L.A. in the 1920s and 1930s or had arrived there before the kids themselves were born. The idea was to move to a safer place with a better social and racial climate -- but in reality conditions weren't all that great in L.A. You were, after all, still black, still in America, and change was still a long way off....There was in L.A. a certain "cautiousness" that you had to maintain, a wariness, a constant vigilance. There was the sense that something dangerous was always out there lurking somewhere. It was not the more rigid, precisely defined South where everyone, especially black folks, knew their place. There was capriciousness. This was L.A. where racism was often insidious, not nearly as blatant and outright as it was in the South.

In Los Angeles, you never knew when something might occur that made folks generate their own unique brand of regional prejudice and western-style discrimination. For example, other than one or two downtown cafeterias, most restaurants were reserved for. While there were no Whites Only signs posted in the window, a father or mother knew the family wouldn't be served, so why go in and have the children humiliated. At an early age you discovered which neighborhood places to avoid, be they the five-and-dime around the corner, a nearby cleaners, or even a small candy store. If you forgot and wandered in, you were either ignored, stared at, or told, sometimes even politely, that the establishment didn't cater to "colored people." Many public places were off-limits. As a neighborhood turned increasingly black, a swimming pool and park would become available for use. Yet several blocks away in a white area the same black people trying to use similar facilities were chased away. But it was worse elsewhere. Often much worse. So these people came to L.A. because they could not tolerate the raw, naked racism of the South. Or -- and justifiably -- it frightened them.

Boldness, though, accompanied the fear and caution that came west with these southern blacks. These people were pioneers. They had the courage to pull up their roots and travel far from their families and everything that had been familiar to them. They didn't let the obstacles of continued legal and unyielding segregation stop them from taking what freedom and opportunity there was to make a better place for themselves and their families. With no guarantees of employment, no special prospects in sight, and in most cases very little or no money, these courageous immigrants set forth to make a new life in a New World.

***

So as they looked at their baby bishop in his home on a November afternoon in 1928, each of my parents had a view of me tempered by their own experiences as black Americans in a society that still bore a heavy burden of racial inequity and enmity. My father no less than my mother.

Peter Price Cobbs was born in Barboursville, Virginia. He was the oldest child, and it's interesting to consider how cultured, well educated, and politically developed a man my father became, coming from a place like Barboursville that was not even a town, barely a village. Once he could, he left. His brothers and sisters left too. They moved to New York; North Carolina; Washington, D.C.

He attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., both as an undergraduate and through medical school, graduating in 1919. Through hard work, intelligence, and determination, he had become a physician, a middle-class profession that was one of the few available for blacks at that time. There was the ministry, of course. Dentistry. Teaching. But medicine was one of the most important professions, and my father was indeed an important man, highly regarded and respected in the community, by virtue of his work and his personality.

My father did not project self-importance. Underneath his self-confident bearing, humility, and lack of pretension, though, my father had an edge, a subtle undercurrent of anger leaking out. Rage bubbling dangerously just beneath the surface. It was this edge that became for me, later, the most important part of his personality. It found much of its expression, when I was...

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