Anderson, Russell Lloyd, 1978

Containers:

Box 1, Folder 01

Scope and content:

Russell Lloyd Anderson, Sr., a physician, was born in Pittsburgh, PA. He taught biology, embryology, histology, mammalia, anatomy, and physiology at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, NC, a predominantly African-American institution. While he was teaching he also obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1933. He was admitted to Howard University Medical School and in 1947, was offered a job in Tallahassee, FL teaching biology, histology, embryology, physiology at FAMU. At the same time he began his medical practice in Tallahassee. In his 1978 interview with Jackson Ice, Anderson noted that he experienced racial prejudice all of his life, from the time he worked as a young man in a steel mill operated by the United States Steel Corporation in Homestead, PA until his unsuccessful campaign against a white candidate for the Leon County (FL) School Board in the early 1960s. He felt that race was definitely a factor in African-Americans getting admitted to medical schools. When serving on the Tallahassee Council of Human Relations in 1957-58, Anderson became aware that the caliber of physicians and medical facilities in the predominantly African-American Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) Hospital did not keep pace with those in the largely white Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. He felt that in the late 1970s, many white people believed African-Americans were judged on the basis of whether they were either a highly athletic race or an inferior one, with no middle ground. He also observed that there were more extreme conservative movements at this time among the white community than at the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, which fostered continuing racial prejudice. Some of the bold initiatives Anderson took in the Civil Rights Movement included allowing former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to stay in his home in the late 1950s, since no faculty member on the FAMU campus would house Marshall. In addition to Marshall, who was in Tallahassee to defend a young African-American man accused of rape, Anderson allowed several members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund, also involved in this case, to stay at his home. According to Anderson, the fear of losing his possessions - his home, office, farm, acreage and cattle - probably deterred him from more active participation in the Civil Rights Movement. Anderson considered himself an "independent African-American" because he had his own medical practice. Educated African-Americans in Tallahassee, who worked either for the city, the county, or the state, could easily be fired. African-American faculty on the FAMU campus were in danger of losing their jobs if they took part in the 1957 bus boycott movement. Only the African-American ministers, such as the Reverend C.K. Steele, were independent like him, because they didn't depend on government agencies for their income.

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