In Black America; Dr. Alvin Poussaint; Part 1

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is In Black America. When I was born, my mother has a charity patient from East Harlem, delivered me at Cornell University Medical College. And she died when I was in high school, a junior in high school from cancer, and to pay homage to her, and to in some way, almost like I was a memorial to her life, I decided that I wanted to go to the medical school, Germany go to the medical school where she gave birth to me. So when I got into Cornell Medical School, that was it. That's where I was going, unless someone else was going to offer me a bigger scholarship.

And Cornell not only like I get accepted, but they offered me close to full support for the entire four years that I attended. Which was very good because I did not have any savings. And my dad didn't have the money to pay any medical school tuition. Dr. Avon F. Poussant, MD, Professor of Psychiatry at Judd Baker's Children's Center, and Harvard Medical School in Boston, and co-author with Bill Cosby of Come On People. Dr. Boussant grew up in a family of eight children in East Harlem, New York. He is a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, serving from 1965 to 1967 as the Southern Field Director of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in Jackson, Mississippi. He is the former chair of the Board of Directors of Push for Excellence. Dr. Boussant has acted in consulting to the media on a wide range of social issues. He is concerned with media images and issues regarding the needs of children and the changing family. Also, he was the script consultant for NBC's The Cosby Show and a Different World and continued to consult to the media as an advocate for more responsible programming.

I'm John L. Hansen, Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week's program, Dr. Avon F. Poussant, MD, In Black America. It was right after the three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi. My other job was to get health facilities and hospitals desegregated. The hospitals in Mississippi and all around the South when I arrived there in June of 1965 was segregated. One of the things that made me take the position in the first place that I concluded after I finished my training at UCLA, I mean, it's not a hard thing to conclude was that the biggest mental health problem for African Americans was segregation and racial discrimination. Dr. Boussant is one of the country's top authorities on subjects from stress to interpersonal communication for multiculturalism to founding dynamics. He's an expert on the dynamics of racial and ethnic relations in this country, increasingly multicultural society,

and a strong proponent of non-violent parenting and parenting education. He believes that extreme violent racism suffered from a delusional mental illness. From 1965 to 1967, he was the southern field director of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in Jackson, Mississippi, providing medical care to civil rights workers and aiding in the desegregation of hospitals and health facilities throughout the South. In 1969, he joined Harvard University. From 1975 to 1978, he was the director of student affairs at Harvard Medical School. Perhaps best known as a script consultant, the two of the most popular and groundbreaking television programs that Cosby show in a different world. In 2007, he co-authored Bill Cosby, come on people on the path from victims to victims. Recently, in Black America, spoke with Dr. Allen F. Boussant, MD. Well, life was very busy and there was always a lot of people around. You certainly didn't suffer from loneliness.

I was number seven of the eight children and my parents were around and my grandparents in fact lived downstairs in a tenement house that we lived in. So there was always a lot of activity, but also a lot of independence because there was so many children. I mean, my mother and father couldn't keep up with all of us. So we had a lot of independence from a very early age, walking to kindergarten, six blocks away with my brothers and my sisters and walking, walking home, getting home from school. My mother would say, go out and play. This is New York now and come back when it's time for dinner. And so there was a lot of like, and we had a lot of chores and learned a lot about cleaning and washing dishes and cooking as a matter of fact. We went up my mother's cook because there were so many people to feed and there was not enough room in the house and my two older brothers at one point kind of had to move out and stay with my grandmother and when one went off to college. But even with that, the apartment was very, very small and we were all like three brothers in one bed one time and two sisters in one bed.

And then finally, when I was about 11 or 12, my father dug up some money and brought this like a kind of almost abandoned brownstone for close to nothing. No one was living in it. And he bought it and so we had more room and for the first time I had my own bed. So you learned a lot because your brothers and sisters were always doing different things and bringing home information and a lot of table discussion around dinner time and all day long. So I think if I have to say anything, having so many brothers and sisters was an enriching experience. Did they stress the worth of education? Your parents? My parents are stressed the worth of education, but not a lot. They were not like on you about it, but you certainly got the message that they thought education was important.

And I don't think my mother or my father had a high school diploma. I know my mother, I think, probably finished elementary school. She'd never talked about even going to high school. I don't know about that. My father, I think, went to a vocational school to become a printer. And he was a printer and in fact had his own printing shop. He was an entrepreneur way back then in the 1930s and 40s. And then went to work for newspaper as a printer. So he did pretty well. He valued education a lot. And even though I don't think he had a high school diploma from, you know, an academic high school, he since he worked for newspapers, he read a lot. And he was very smart when I was in junior high school. I mean, he used to come home from work with the Harrel Tribune, New York Harrel Tribune, and the New York Times.

And I think that's when I started reading the New York Times was when I was in junior junior high school. And he was also very up on political things, racial things, and would get you. He was kind of dad who liked to both tease and challenge you, you know, like, why do you think that? And you think so and so. So he was he was up with current events and what was going on in the world, what was going on in East Harlem, where we live, what was going on in Harlem. Because his major community service activity was he he worked and and at one point ran kind of as a board person. The children's programs at the Harlem Y YMCA on 135th Street of Atlantic Avenue. What were your best and favorite subjects? Why are you in school?

My favorite subjects in school that they kind of change, but I would say I like math a lot. I like language. I like Spanish. I took Spanish. I like that a lot. And I liked English. And then after that, I would say I liked I liked science. And then more and more when I got into high school, I began to be attracted much more to science, but also math. And in high school, I did I started doing a lot of writing. They they let me take a special program of creative writing while I was in high school. So I wrote poetry and short stories and things like like that. And found that I had some some talent at it that the teacher said. So so that was an important experience. If I didn't the high school I went to was a little bit of luck and and chance and happenstance because I was there. I was in East Harlem and this was a special exam school for science and math was college prep and you needed you had to take an exam to get in and I didn't even know about these schools.

One of my school, one of my teachers and my music teacher, I played clarinet. One day took me aside for about 30 seconds to a minute and asked me if I plan to take the test for one of these special New York City high schools and I told him I didn't heard of them. So he sent me told me to go on a principal's office and recommended that I take the test and could I he felt I had a chance to get in. And so I didn't I took the written test all day test or something and I got in and I think that getting in that school and the education I got made all the difference in the world. I think that if I just had gone to a regular high school I probably wouldn't have maybe gone on to college. What was the name of the school? The name of school was stifers in high school in Manhattan. It still exists. It's still an exam school. You have to take a written exam. New York City kids to get in. So it's very competitive because you have so many students in New York.

You can take an exam and they have two or three others and well they have at least two others and maybe some more now in New York that students can attend if they pass the entrance entrance examination. Other than Columbia being in the city, why did you select Columbia for your university experience? I selected Columbia because Columbia had an excellent reputation. It was nearby my house. That is it was a short maybe 15 to 20 minute bus ride. I had won a New York State region scholarship. You only could use it if you went to a New York school in New York State. That was important because my dad didn't have the money to put up and so I got into other schools, other Ivy League schools and I finally decided not just because Columbia was great but also I wanted to be in New York.

When I visited other schools I just wondered how people could live in these places because New York was so exciting and I had all my friends in New York and back during those days and I'm talking about the 1950s. You were one, two, three, four, five African American students in a class at these schools and you were dealing with a lot of racism and bigotry and isolation and loneliness and I felt that I would probably be happier staying right there in Columbia where my family was, my friends were there and I had New York City. I think that I absolutely made the right choice for me because they had a very strong liberal arts program that forced you to, maybe I shouldn't use that word, to read, do a lot of reading, to read all of the great books, everything about contemporary civilization, music, art and I think I wouldn't have this interesting music and art I have today. If it wasn't for these courses I took, I was made to take as part of the requirements at Columbia. What was your major? My major in college, I call it then concentration, my concentration was French.

I liked language and I switched from, I took Spanish again and I schooled it very well and then I wanted to take French because I liked languages and the whole four years I was always taking French courses and I could speak pretty well and I could understand pretty well by the time I graduated from college but after that where could I use it unless you continue to use a language you lose it. From there to Cornell, to attend medical school, what gave you an impetus to pursue a Korean medicine? When I was nine years old I got very sick with rheumatic fever which gives you joint pains and it affects your heart and I was in the hospital for about maybe three months and then in a convalescent home for two months and getting all that exposure to doctors and nurses in the hospitals. I think by the time I got home at age ten from the convalescent home I wanted to be a doctor and that's where it came from so there's all kinds of routes and all the doctors that took care, none of them were black of course, they were all white but I was very grateful kind of feeling that they had saved my life and I was service oriented and in fact the other thing I thought about being for a while was a priest which my mother wanted me to do.

But I really wasn't going to, I think, do that. It was just too far into me and so I decided on medicine and I had my eye set on Cornell. Now, why was that? Because when I was born my mother as a charity patient, Amis Talham, delivered me at Cornell University Medical College and she died when I was in high school, a junior in high school from cancer and to pay homage to her and to in some way almost all the time. It was like a memorial to her life. I decided that I wanted to go to the medical school, determined to go to the medical school where she gave birth to me.

So when I got into Cornell Medical School that was it. That's where I was going unless someone else was going to offer me a bigger scholarship. I mean Cornell not only did I get accepted but they offered me close to full support for the entire four years that I attended which was very good because I did not have any savings and my dad didn't have the money to pay any medical school tuition. What brought forth that interest in psychiatry? Psychiatry came about, well let me step back a little bit. I've always had a lot of interest in interacting with people and when I was a teenager, all the teenager, I was a counseling camps, working with young children, teenagers and so on. I liked it a lot. I got a lot of pleasure at helping people and a lot of people, other counselors, social workers who worked at the camp, told me I was good at it.

So when I was going to medical school, I would say you should become a psychiatrist because you like to do this. Well I didn't want to become a psychiatrist and I want to become a pediatrician at first. I changed from that because being a pediatrician to kids isn't the same as being a counselor to kids. They're sick and they're dying. I found that I didn't enjoy that. I didn't relish children being afraid of me because I was a doctor and screaming when you came in the room. I think I also had a lot of trouble emotionally seeing children die. So I switched out of pediatrics and I thought about internal medicine. I thought about neurology and right down to the end it was between neurology and psychiatry. I finally picked psychiatry because I felt it would give me an end into the social world as well as an end into the medical world. I could have a foot in both places so that I could still be a social commentary and deal with other issues that had social psychological implications.

And I felt I would be less bored. I liked neurology. I felt I was good at it but there's something very routine about it and repetitious about it over and over and over and over again. Whereas I think in psychiatry each patient was a new challenge clearly and different from the one you had before. You could make any hard and fast rules about how it was going to go. It depended a lot on skill but also on art. It's an art. It's in precise. It's not like taking out a diseased gall bladder or brain tumor or giving medicine for high blood pressure. It's very different. You have some medicines but they're not all targeted totally in the way you would want them to be to cure or even ameliorate some of the problems psychiatric problems people have. Being an East Coast young man growing up in New York then you take your post graduate work in UCLA in Los Angeles. Cultural shock or just part of the program.

Some cultural shock doing that but it was very intended as I described going in Columbia and Cornell you know probably the issue too was I wanted to stay in New York and the idea of not being in New York like made me almost anxious. And I felt other places didn't seem to interest me and by the time I was graduating from medical school I said listen you have to break away from New York city is not the only place in the world and I wanted to find some some place that was as different as I could imagine from New York. And when I visited LA to visit UCLA I said this is really different and so I decided to go there for my medical my postgraduate medical training and my psychiatric training and I'm glad I did that I enjoyed living in LA and found a whole different kind of lifestyle. I was disappointed that there was so much bigotry out there surrounding the university and getting a getting an apartment people's attitude was very disappointing.

And I didn't have the same kind of escape that I had in New York see because I didn't have any any any group of friends. But I thought the training was very good they encouraged me and got me interested in doing doing research there. What type of research? I did research mostly with psychopharmacology I did a lot of research in bed wetting believe it children trying to cure them a bed wetting. I did research on working with patients in new ways like work therapy giving them responsibilities to help and improve their chances of returning successfully to the community. And I began to write articles for journals and in fact I had such a strong interest in neurology that the first paper I published in a medical journal was in a neurology journal not a psychiatric journal.

So it was a good experience but there was some disappointments but I felt I had gotten from it what I needed to and had done well when I finished they asked me to stay on to be chief resident for an additional year which I did which was also a very important experience because I had a lot of responsibility. I was in charge of overseeing all the other trainees the residents and there were over 30 some odd more you know making this schedule. So I got a lot of administrative experience being chief resident UCLA. Tell us about that experience as the southern field director for the medical committee for human rights. You are dealing with medical centers and the disparities and the health delivery systems?

Well when I finished at UCLA I was recruited to be the southern field director of a group called the medical committee for human rights was which a group of health professionals that organized to support the civil rights movement. So I left to go to Mississippi I went to Jackson Mississippi in 65 and my main task was to help organize and provide medical care and psychiatric care if necessary to civil rights workers who were under a lot of stress emotional stress as you can imagine it was right after the three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi. And my other job was to get health facilities and hospitals desegregated the hospitals in Mississippi and all around the south when I arrived there in June of 65 was segregated and one of the things that made me take the position in the first place that I concluded after I finished my training at UCLA. And it's not a hard thing to conclude was that the biggest mental health problem for African Americans was segregation and racial discrimination.

And so if you want to unless you want to sit in your office one by one helping one person at a time which wasn't going to get you too far. People were being crushed mentally by segregation and racial discrimination that you can have an enormous positive effect on the mental health of African Americans if you help rid the system of segregation and racial discrimination socially and psychologically educationally that you would make a major significant impact on the positive mental health. And I decided at that point that that was going to be my professional and social mission in my career. Do Americans particularly young Americans understand the sacrifices that were made by those individuals to get where we are today in 2009? Well I think it's important for young people to understand our history and to understand our passage and to understand the difficulties in the pain and the psychic trauma that their grandparents and their parents were under.

Because they need to understand and appreciate many of those things in order to look to the future and know that some of the things that they have today that seem like well yeah they're there. That there was a fight and a struggle to obtain these these things for the next generation and I think if they appreciated that that they would take the opportunities that are available to them more seriously than they do. For instance one would be education if they knew how difficult it was even for young blacks getting any kind of decent education frequently with segregation and racial discrimination and schools being segregated and supreme court fights and civil rights bills and so on.

And the fact that we couldn't vote I mean in 1965 we got the voting rights bill as a result of the civil rights movement and a lot of civil rights workers including Martin Luther King. If we didn't get the voting rights bill Obama would not be president on Tuesday right that definitely is correct. What was it about Harvard in 1969 that made you decide to go there? Well I first went to Boston to be on the faculty of Tufts Medical School which is in Boston and I was I didn't like Boston very much frankly and I was planning on going back to New York. And I was being offered positions in New York at some of the medical schools and one of the psychiatry chair chairman at Harvard.

I heard that I was thinking of moving and he in a black professor over there and in the basic science department called and asked me if I would be interested in coming on the faculty at Harvard. Dr. Avenue Fuson MD we will conclude our conversation on next week's program. If you have questions comments or suggestions asked your future in black America programs write us also let us know what radio station you heard us over. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin. You can hear previous programs online at kut.org until you have the opportunity again for a technical producer at David Alvarez. I'm John L Hansen Jr. Thank you for joining us today. Please join us again next week.

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