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ST. LOUIS AMERICAN • FEB. 27 - MAR. 5, 2014 A12 © 2013 McDonald’s From left: Leanna Archer, Beverly Johnson, Roland Parrish, Gladys Knight, Dr. Steve Perry, Kenny Williams, and Charles Orgbon III. We applaud the few that inspire the many. For this year’s 365Black ® Award recipients, each day is exceptional. They stand for greatness and bow with selessness. Through their dedication and service, they inspire a world of change. We’re proud to honor them all for staying Deeply Rooted in the Community, ® 365 days a year. To learn more about this year’s honorees, go to 365Black.com. and she was not pleased at all. I had promised her after I lost the aldermanic seat in 1985 that I would not run for office again. She reacted by accusing me of making up this story as a ruse for getting back into politics. Needless to say, this was a long weekend. This was only the second time I had met with Berra since he was reelected in 1985. Although we had never discussed it, I had always felt that one of the reasons I lost my aldermanic reelection to Jimmie Matthews was because of my endorsement of Schoemehl and Berra. In 1985, both Freeman Bosley Sr. and Alphonso Jackson had filed to run for mayor against Schoemehl. This meant that two black candidates were running for mayor against a well- funded and well-organized Schoemehl machine. The late state Representative Fred Williams, a close ally of Schoemehl, was also running as what most people believed to be a stalking horse candidate. Right before the close of filing, Bosley and Jackson made a deal whereby Jackson would redraw from the mayor’s race and run for comptroller. At about the same time, I was in the midst of my campaign for reelection. I had two opponents, Jimmie Matthews and the former Democratic committeewoman who I had helped to defeat. I was running for reelection in the aftermath of one of the most exciting and confusing years of my political career. I had started the year by filing for sheriff against the incumbent Gordon Schweitzer. This was also the year of Jesse Jackson’s first campaign for president. This was an ideal chance for me to steal a citywide office. I joined the Jackson campaign and became the St. Louis city/county coordinator for the Jackson for President Committee. I theorized that my campaign for sheriff could piggyback on the enthusiasm created by Jackson’s campaign. I even used the local Jackson headquarters as my headquarters. Unfortunately, I discovered the hard way what almost every senior politician, including Congressman Bill Clay, told me: very few people really knew or cared who the sheriff was. I lost the Democratic primary election to Schweitzer by more than 15,000 votes. It took me several years to really understand just how traumatized I was from losing. I had invested a lot of time and my own personal money into the campaign. I took out a second mortgage on my house and used credit cards to finance purchases. I had convinced myself that I was going to win and did not consider the alternative of losing. I took out my frustration at losing by joining with a colleague, 20th Ward Alderman Steven Roberts, to cross party lines and endorse then Attorney General John Ashcroft (a Republican) for governor. I reasoned that the Democrats had taken the black vote for granted and the only way to change that was to try and replicate what black voters did in 1932 when they changed an almost 50-year history of supporting Republicans. Unfortunately, the Republicans of the 1980s were not interested in embracing black interests. They saw our endorsements as symbolic and not an opportunity for changing the way black Democrats viewed them. The Democrats saw this as betrayal and proceeded to make an example out of my insolence. They retaliated by supporting Jimmie Matthews against me for alderman and by blocking Ashcroft’s appointment of me to the election board. I walked into the comptroller’s office at exactly 9 a.m. Berra was sitting at his conference table in the rear of his office. After exchanging pleasantries, I told him why I wanted to meet with him. I told him that I had heard rumors that he might not be running again and that, if the rumors were true, I was interested in being a candidate for comptroller. Paul thanked me for telling him of my interests, but he planned to stand for reelection. My initial reaction was surprise, because I had assumed that Schoemehl had already cut a deal with Berra. Berra did leave the door open by saying again that he was appreciative of my coming to him and telling him of my interests to his face, as opposed to some other people who had been talking behind his back. He extended his hand and told me that if he did decide not to run, I would be one of the first to know. As I exited Paul’s office, I was even more confused. Does Schoemehl have a deal with Paul or is he just using me to put pressure on Paul to get him to decide against running? This article is excerpted from Virvus Jones’ forthcoming memoir, “The Swap.” This version of events reflects the author’s personal memories of events in which he was a direct participant. was among the first on staff at Washington University School of Medicine. “He was sort of the tip of the spear for the civil rights era and equality in medicine,” said his son, Frank O. Richards Jr., M.D., of Atlanta. “He had to show he had the right stuff.” After completing his residency in 1952, Dr. Richards received a commission as a captain in the U.S. Air Force Medical Corps. As the base surgeon with the 36th Tactical Reconnaissance Base Hospital in Bitburg, Germany, he treated white patients. His family recalled the story he told about the base commander’s wife, a southerner, who was reluctant to have him perform surgery on her. The commander reportedly said his wife had no choice. “I operated on her and she turned out to be the most grateful person,” his family recalled Dr. Richards saying. And so it was throughout his life. “He did not belabor the hostility he encountered,” Dr. Ross said. He proudly honed his skills at the segregated Homer G. Phillips Hospital, which became the premiere training ground for black doctors from across the world. “Medicine is a very gratifying profession (and) if you’re in it because you want to be a doctor, because you want to help people, I don’t think there is any field that is more gratifying,” Dr. Richards said in the 1999 book, Lift Every Voice and Sing: St. Louis African Americans in the Twentieth Century. In one of the chapters he penned for the book A Century of Black Surgeons: The USA Experience, published in 1987, he chronicled the conditions that ushered in Homer G. Phillips as a replacement for City Hospital No. 2. The public hospital for blacks had become an over-crowded fire hazard. “(A black attorney named David M.) Grant secretly and style as Redmond evolves over the decades. Arkansippi Memwars frames the poet’s spirit in a multitude of forms: lyrics, chants, performance pieces, haiku, kwansabas, essays, reviews. Early works published in the late sixties and seventies deal with experiences in Vietnam, sexuality and relationships. Redmond’s brilliance as a love poet has been acknowledged by Maya Angelou. His lines “Black women have ‘thighs that agonize eyes’” were quoted to him appreciatively by Baraka upon their first meeting, a profoundly validating experience for the young poet. Ancestry and the “African continuum” becomes a prominent theme. The Sunshine drum ensemble’s sound is described as “energy waves of / gele & djembe, shakere & kente, boom-/ barrel & plie goomboppin hey-hey / spiced with calabash, buba, agboda & sashay.” Redmond, in the African griot tradition, is also a master of the praise poem, with appreciations of people important in his own development like Dunham, Dumas, Baraka and Angelou, who upon meeting him in 1970 said, “Eugene, be my brother forever.” He also pays poetic tribute to Nelson Mandela; poets Alvin Aubert and Raymond Patterson; fiction writers Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara; former Chicago Mayor Harold Washington; and Duke Ellington. Major figures who emerged from East St. Louis like Miles Davis and Leon Thomas are celebrated along with many other East St. Louisans. These include scholar-critic Clyde Taylor, another mentor; “piano genius” Eugene Haynes; Peace Corps pioneer Reginald Petty and his wife, the internationally renowned quilt artist, Edna Petty; music and cultural educator Sylvester “Sunshine” Lee; political activist Wyvetter Younge; and actress Barbara Ann Teer. Much of the book, in keeping with Redmond’s life, can be seen as a love song to East St. Louis, aka “East Saint,” “East Boogie,” “East St. Earth” and “East St. Love.” Arkansippi Memwars reveals a poet of great verbal dexterity and a bright, generous spirit. His generosity is evident in the roles he has filled as a poet beyond the page – educator, editor, scholar, cultural activist and photographer. He authored Drumvoices (1976), the first major critical discussion of modern African-American poetry that included poets of the Black Arts Movement, establishing him as a major literary critic. He has founded and edited the respected magazine Drumvoices Revue and served as the inspiration for the Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club, for which he remains a guiding light. Redmond’s contributions to the art of poetry and the city of East St. Louis are incalculable. Despite his focus on the local, he has become a poet of national and international standing – as his second American Book Award, this one for lifetime achievement, attests. In an early poem, “Parapoetics,” Redmond writes, “Poetry is an applied science: / Rewrapped corner rap; / Rootly eloquented cellular, soulular sermons.” Arkansippi Memwars bears witness in unique and memorable language to the life and times of a poet original in every sense of the word. Michael Castro is a poet and translator, co-founder of the literary organization and magazine, River Styx. REDMOND Continued from A11 RICHARDS Continued from A11 VIRVUS Continued from A11 photographed the conditions, and pictures also were taken at the St. Louis Zoo to show that conditions at the hospital were no better,” Richards told the St. Louis Beacon in 2009. The turning point came when a black physician, Dr. Bernice A. Yancey, was electrocuted by a defective X-ray machine. It was clear, he wrote, that City Hospital No. 2 “could no longer accommodate (patients) in a manner befitting the dignity of human beings, nor could it provide for the safety of those who were there to work and to learn.” Dr. Richards worked to ensure that the pioneers of better health care and medical training for African Americans would not be lost to history. Ten years after his book contributions, he worked with Dr. Ross to create the Homer G. Phillips Public Health Lecture Series at Washington University. “‘I’m an old geezer and won’t be around long,’” Dr. Ross said he declared, “‘and we need a way for people to access these stories.’” Later, his became the most prominent voice in A Jewel in History: The Story of Homer G. Phillips Hospital for Coloreds, a documentary produced by Mukulla Godwin, a former psychiatric nurse at San Francisco General Hospital. He sought to preserve the past, while relishing the future. He was acknowledged as a master teacher who delighted in helping prepare coming generations of surgeons, particularly African Americans. “He would beam when he had a student at his side in the OR,” Dr. Ross said. Milk the cow Frank Oliver Richards was born in Asheville, N.C. on November 24, 1923, the younger of George Richards and the former Altona Maywood (Mae) Mitchell’s two children. His mother was a kindergarten teacher; his father owned a grocery store and was a barber in an Asheville hotel. His parents died shortly after he graduated from Stephens-Lee High School. With the help of his aunt and uncle, Mae and Dr. Fred Richards, he entered Talladega College in Ala., where he earned an A.B. 1944. He received his medical degree from Howard University School of Medicine. In 1948, he married Ruth Allen Gordon, a future social worker whom he’d met at Talladega. They moved to St. Louis for Dr. Richards’ internship and surgical residency at Homer G. Phillips. After completing military service in 1954, Dr. Richards and his family, which now included a daughter and a son, returned to St. Louis, where he entered private practice in general surgery. He shared an office with the late John Gladney, M.D., a friend he had once worked with in the Talladega shipyards when both were teenagers. He was affiliated with Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes- Jewish, DePaul, St. Luke’s, St. Louis Children’s and Deaconess hospitals. He was a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and published four peer-reviewed research articles that focused on wound healing and abdominal surgery. Dr. Richards was a member of Sigma Pi Phi (Eta Boulé) and Alpha Phi Alpha fraternities, and All Saints Episcopal Church in St. Louis. He golfed, played tennis and liked scuba diving and camping. His son joked that his legacy includes two phrases that will live on to annoy his grandchildren: “This is really wonderful, but next time, do better,” he’d say to any accomplishment, and “you must milk the cow each and every day,” his way of saying strive daily for success. Dr. Richards was preceded in death by his parents and two half-siblings, Fred Richards, M.D., and Mae Richards. In addition to his wife of 65 years, his son, Frank Jr. (Sherri), Dr. Richards’ survivors include a daughter, Susan Corliss Richards (Gordon Bannister), of Boston; his sister, Miriam Moriniere, of Philadelphia, and two granddaughters, Alexandra and Lauren Richards. Remembrances would be appreciated to the Dr. Frank O. Richards Medical Student Scholarship Prize. Checks should be made payable to “Washington University Frank O. Richards Sr. Prize” and sent to Washington University, Attention: Pamela Morris, 7425 Forsyth Blvd., Campus Box 1247, St. Louis, Mo. 63105. Edited for length and reprinted with permission from news.stlpublicradio.org. Virvus Jones
