Extra Chapter 6
A Life Devoted to Helping Others
Charlotte Phillips
Charlotte Phillips, a doctor who has devoted her life to political activism, was born in New Florence Township, Pennsylvania, in 1942. Her parents met as students at Cornell University. Her father, a graduate of the Cornell School of Agriculture, managed farmland just outside of Pittsburgh. When World War II broke out, he and his family moved to Rochester, New York, where he worked for Kodak. When the war ended, he went back to running a farm, but then got a masters degree in psychology from Temple University and a Ph.D. from NYU.
Charlotte’s mom’s mother had worked as a domestic in Bayside, Queens, after immigrating from Germany in 1926 when her mother was eight years old. Charlotte’s mother went to Hunter College High School, but after her family moved to upstate New York. She finished high school there and then enrolled in Cornell University.
Even though her mom was a brilliant student in the sciences, she didn’t graduate from college. She became pregnant, and the Cornell rule at the time was that pregnant students could not attend. She was forced to pass up what would have been her senior year. Her first child, Charlotte’s sister, was born in 1940. Charlotte was born in 1942, and another sister was born in 1945. Their mom suffered from manic-depression and was institutionalized in the New Jersey State Mental Hospital. She was given electro-shock therapy and after nine months released. During this time Charlotte’s father was going to night school at Temple.
While their mother was incapacitated, Charlotte and her two sisters lived with an aunt in Dobbs Ferry, and then they stayed with their father’s mom in Rochester, New York. Charlotte’s father was hired as a clinical psychologist by the Bordentown State Reformatory, and when their mother came out of the hospital, they bought a home in Roosevelt, New Jersey. When Charlotte was a junior in high school, her mom returned to Cornell and finished her senior year. She got a job teaching biology to high school students, but the kids were too difficult for her to handle, and she lasted only a year. She got a masters degree in vocational rehabilitation and began working for the state of New Jersey.
Charlotte entered Swarthmore College in the fall of 1959 with the intention of studying physics. She chose physics because she felt is was the most challenging of the sciences and because it was a science dominated by males. She took a lot of science courses that first year, but in 1960 she had what she called a “political epiphany.” A group of black students held a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. The event would rock Charlotte Phillips’ world.
Charlotte Phillips: “My family was not political in any way. They had their own problems and didn’t have time to deal with politics. Roosevelt, New Jersey, my home town, had started in 1936 as a WPA cooperative. Originally it was called New Jersey Homestead. Benjamin Brown was its founder, and the idea was to resettle families mostly from Manhattan’s Lower East Side who were garment workers and to open a factory and a cooperative farm. It was going to be a socialist island in a sea of capitalism. In addition to the garment workers living there were left-wing intellectuals, authors, writers, artists.
“Ben Shahn is the most well-known. His family lived a few houses down from me. His younger daughter Abby was my older sister’s age.
“His studio was in the back of his house. As children, we didn’t realize what a famous artist he was. One of hismurals was, and still is, in the lobby of the elementary school. We knew it was important. His wife Bernarda Bryson also was a well-known artist.
“At Swarthmore there was a group of us who came from left-wing families. Maybe I gravitated to them because I identified with the underprivileged. I wasn’t exactly underprivileged, but relatively speaking I felt that I was. For whatever reason, I fell into this group of politically oriented kids in my class, and when the sit-in happened, it was a very powerful experience.
“In those days there was still overt segregation. I hadn’t been aware that segregation existed in the United States, even though it actually existed in Heightstown, New Jersey, where I went to high school. The white kids in high school were on an academic track, and the African-American kids were for the most part put on a vocational track. I was kind of aware of that, but not really tuned into it. At Swarthmore, I had a part-time job working in the college dining room, and there I met a few Afro-American kids my age from Chester, a small city near Swarthmore. They were working there fulltime. I could see that their futures were going to be a lot different than mine.
“In April of 1960 one of our group was invited to the founding conference of SNCC, and then a larger group went to Atlanta in October of 1960 for the second meeting. At that meeting SNCC decided to separate from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. There was a big debate about that between Ella Baker and Martin Luther King. The leadership of the SCLC wanted SNCC to remain in the SCLC, but Ella Baker said, `You should have your own organization, and the students should do their own thing.’ And that’s what happened. It was very powerful.
“While at Swarthmore, my friends and I helped to desegregate the roller rink in Chester, the next town over. There was also a national campaign to desegregate the Woolworths lunch counters, and we helped picket at the Woolworths in Chester. Other students from Swarthmore went down to the Maryland shore to take action against segregation, and some of them were arrested. I never went myself. I’m not sure why. I was never arrested, but in any event I got sidetracked from the idea of studying physics, and so my second year at Swarthmore I took mostly liberal arts, history, English.
“Oliver Fein, my future husband who was a year ahead of me, had traveled to Europe during the summer of 1960, and he noticed the reporting in Europe on the Cuban revolution was dramatically different from what we were seeing here. He struck up the idea that we should go to Cuba and see it for ourselves. I said, `Great.’ You could do it because the ban on traveling to Cuba had not yet been imposed.
“A professor lent us his car, and so during our winter vacation as 1960 became 1961 he and five students including Oliver and myself drove to Miami, and we took a plane to Havana. We spent ten days, and it was wonderful. Cuba was filled with young people, many not much older than ourselves, who were in charge of entire departments and programs. They were very happy to have America students come, because they wanted us to see what was happening there.
“While we were there the travel ban came down, and we were kind of hassled at the airport when we came back, but we all got back in okay, and we went back to Swarthmore.
“We decided we should be as politically active as possible, so that next summer, the summer of ’61, Oliver and I decided to go to California with the American Friends Service Committee. Swarthmore was a Quaker college, and although many of the students weren’t Quakers, a Quaker culture permeated the campus. One of the programs they supported was the American Friends Service Committee, which has great programs for kids. Oliver and I got jobs in separate locations in California. We hitchhiked across the country together, which you could never do nowadays. We got to the Coast and walked across the Golden Gate Bridge. Oliver stayed there, and I went on to the San Joaquin Valley working with farm-labor groups doing door-to-door community organizing.
The farm workers had come to the San Joaquin Valley as migrants during the 1930s, and then had settled into the area doing farm work. They lived in very segregated communities, either all black or all white. The AFCS project was focused on trying to bring them together by engaging them in projects of mutual interest.
People responded positively. They appreciated the fact that we were interested in their lives and wanted to help them improve their conditions.
“That was the summer of the Freedom Rides to Mississippi, as I learned more about the reality of racial segregation in the United States, I felt that I wanted to whatever I could to change it. I decided that I would go on the Freedom Rides. I left the American Friends Service Committee and went to Los Angeles to join up with CORE, the group organizing the Freedom Rides. But because I was only 19, the American Friends Service Committee was required to notify my parents when I left the project, and when my parents heard this, they got very upset. They began calling CORE and threatened to sue them if I crossed state lines. CORE felt I was more a liability to them than an asset, so they said they felt they couldn’t take me. I was pretty angry, but what could I do? I went back to the AFSC project and spent the rest of the summer working there.
“One of the women on the project was from New Orleans; from talking to her I learned about Tougaloo College in Mississippi. I wrote to Tougaloo, which up to that time had an entirely black student body. I asked, `Can I come as a transfer student?’ They said sure, and that’s what I decided to do.
“Oliver and I hitchhiked home, and when I got home I told my parents I was going. I took my money out of the bank and bought a ticket to Jackson, Mississippi.
“It turned out another young white woman, Joan Trumpower, who was a Southern activist, also transferred to Tougaloo. We arrived simultaneously, and this made a big splash in the newspapers that I had not anticipated. If you look in The New York Times on November 13, 1961, you’ll find it.
“Things settled down quickly. Although we were safe on campus, I knew we couldn’t go off it. It would have been dangerous.
“Although I had intended to graduate from Tougaloo, I stayed for only one semester. Once I made my statement by going there, I felt very socially isolated. I went back to Swarthmore, which accepted my credits, so I graduated with my class. And it was during this time that I made the decision to go to medical school. Along with other students, I felt increasingly that there would be no role for white students in any kind of leadership position in the civil rights movement, but what we could offer was skills. We had access to skills which would be useful over the long run; that combined with my original interest in science led to my decision to go to medical school.
“I got into several med schools, but I chose Case Western Reserve in Cleveland because it had the most progressive curriculum. One part of it was the Family Clinic Program, which included on its faculty Dr. Ben Spock. During the first week in school first-year students were introduced to a pregnant woman; you attended her clinic visits and also visited her family at home. When she went into labor, you were there for the birth, which was very exciting. And after that for the next two and a half years we became student doctor for the baby in the family Clinic. The idea was to give students a sense of what a healthy family was like before you could think about what can go wrong.
“My decision to go into pediatrics was heavily influenced by the fact I was a woman. One woman in our class became an orthopedic surgeon and others went into internal medicine, but the general expectation was as women, we would go into pediatrics. I did feel I was kind of tracked into it, although I don’t regret it. I just assumed that’s what I was going to do.
“Another aspect of the curriculum was that it was organized around topics like the vascular system, rather than traditional courses like chemistry and biology. You would study everything related to that system. There was also free time devoted to research and a thesis required for graduation. Even though I had the bare minimum of pre-medical courses, Case Western accepted me; the dean of admissions was interested in students with a social consciousness.
Oliver also got in. He had never taken a chemistry course in his life. He had attended Yonkers High School, which was not a very good public high school. So he spent the year during which I was a senior in college doing the basic pre-med courses at Columbia. Then we headed out to Cleveland together in the summer of 1963, and I got a job at a blood bank, and he got a job in a chemistry lab. He took organic chemistry. Although he had been accepted provisionally for the following year, the last day before classes were to begin somebody dropped out, so he was offered a place; that’s how we started medical school together, and we graduated together in June of 1967.
“Oliver and I got married in June of 1964, and we have been married ever since. During the summer of 1964 we worked with Students for a Democratic Society as the nucleus of the Cleveland Economic Research and Action Project, which attempted to change society for the better. We was how unequal American society was, how your class and background determined how much equality you were afforded. We felt we could rectify the injustice, and we set up to help people get involved in the decisions that control their lives.
“After graduation we did a mixed medicine-pediatrics internship at Cleveland
Metropolitan General Hospital, and then I continued on in pediatric residency However, in spite of the strong ties we had developed in Cleveland, we moved to New York in January of 1969.
“One reason we came to New York was because Oliver was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. Very few physicians had been granted CO status at the time, because the thinking was as a physician you wouldn’t be in combat anyway, but he did apply for CO status based on objections both to the war and the idea that he would be healing a patient only to send him back to war. His local draft board, which was in Yonkers, classified him as a CO, and that was great until a month later when the state draft board challenged the classification and reclassified him 1-A -- with no new information. They didn’t call for an interview, didn’t give him a chance to appeal. They just re-classified him, which seemed arbitrary, so he challenged it legally.
“He finished his internship in June of 1968, but he couldn’t go on to residency because his 1-A classification made him eligible to be drafted at any time. So he got off the training track, and he spent six months as director of the Cleveland Student Health Project organizing student community-based service programs.
“His draft case was coming up in the Second Circuit Court in New York, and his draft board was in Yonkers, so it seemed important to be near there. He was recruited by the Health Policy Advisory Center, a think tank, to come to New York, and that’s the most important reason why we came to New York. I would have preferred to stay in Cleveland and continue my work with the people we had met there, but Oliver felt he needed to be in New York to prepare for his case, and I said okay.
“His draft case went to the United States Supreme Court, and it ruled against him, 4 to 3. There were only seven justices at the time. He was reclassified 1-A, but that was in 1972 and the war was winding down, and he was never drafted. He worked for three or four years for the Health Policy Advisory Center, which published a number of seminal reports critical of the health care industry. He went on to finish his residency in internal medicine. Although his main work has been administration, teaching, and organizing around issues of access to health care, he still cares for patients. He is chapter chairperson of New York Physicians for National Health Program, a major advocacy group trying to promote “single-payer” national health insurance as an alternative to the current crisis.
“We came to New York in 1969. At first we lived on the Lower East Side for two months while we looked for a place to live. We had come from Cleveland where we rented a whole house for eighty dollars a month, and so to pay two hundred and seventy dollars for a tiny apartment on the Lower East Side seemed incredibly expensive. Somebody said, `Why don’t you try Brooklyn?’
“I came out to Brooklyn on the day of the big blizzard in March of 1969, emerged from the subway, walked half a block down Montague Street, went to a real estate office, and at that moment a rent-controlled apartment on Pierrepont Street, a block and a half from the Promenade, became available. It was a stroke of great, good fortune.”