Dr Catharine D. Lealtad (1895-1989): An Outspoken Life of Humanitarian Action

Image credit

Unknown photographer, CC PDM 1.0

When Catharine Deaver Lealtad died at the age of 93, an obituary for her in the New York Times led a listing of many accomplishments with this one: “a pediatrician who supervised medical services for displaced children in Germany at the end of World War II.”

She had accepted a commission in the US Public Health Services Corps in 1945, and her commitment to those children didn’t stop when her term there ended. Characteristically, she continued to protest and call attention to the injustices she had witnessed. Later, when Lealtad was back in the US, she wrote in newspapers about the dire situation of the Polish and Jewish children she had cared for.

When her year-long posting in Germany was completed, Lealtad was sent to China. There, she cared for the child victims of the Civil War, and helped fight against a cholera epidemic. Much of Lealtad’s time was behind communist lines, which added to the struggles she faced. Years later, she would write to a colleague, “I believe in fighting when it is justified. I think you know how I fought for supplies for Shantung Province to the point where high UNRRA officials tried to have me fired on three different occasions…”

Lealtad went public with her concerns at the time, too. In 1946, she published part of one her official reports to UNRRA—the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association— as a letter to the editor of The Nation, calling out the terrible consequences of humanitarian funding being channeled away from suffering children in communist-held territory:

“In Shanghai the Red Cross Hospital and the Children’s Hospital were nightmares: patients in dirty clothes lying on filthy mattresses or straw pallets—no sheets, but dirty, ragged quilts brought from home.” There was “indescribable poverty and misery,” she wrote, but within UNRRA, too many Americans and Englishmen “who don’t give a damn about the Chinese.”

When she left the Corps in September 1947, Lealtad had attained the rank of Surgeon Reserve—the equivalent of a Major in the US Army. Back in the US, she would continue fundraising and advocating for medical care for China for years. She was a member of the Board of Directors of the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy—an organization that fell apart in the early 1950s after becoming a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Attorney General’s Subversive Activities Control Board. Lealtad had resigned in protest before that, though. She was also a member of the board of the China Aid Council, which worked to provide medical care to victims of the war and refugees.

Medicine was her passion, but it had taken her years to find it. Lealtad grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the eldest child of a teacher mother, and a prominent clergyman father. She was the only African-American in her class at the Mechanic Arts High Class—and she was in the first cohort of girls admitted to the school. Lealtad graduated at the top of her class, and there was no reported public controversy about her being the class valedictorian. It made several newspapers, though, with one reporting: “It was a matter of brains, not color.” The ratio of white to black students overall at the school then was 50 to 1.

Being the class valedictorian entitled Lealtad to admission to Saint Paul’s Macalester College, along with one year’s tuition. In 1915, she graduated with honors, majoring in chemistry and history. Each year, she was awarded further scholarships because of her high grades. She was the first African-American graduate of that university.

Her trail-blazing aunt, Verina Morton Jones, was one of her role models. Jones lived in New York. She had been the first African-American woman to practice medicine in Mississippi, and had been a physician and activist in New York after she married in 1890, including being active in the YWCA and a board member of the NAACP. After some brief stints in various roles in Ohio, Lealtad moved to New York, too, taking on the role of organizing Black students nationally for the YWCA in 1918.

At the YWCA, Lealtad took racism in the organization head on—and there was a concerted effort to replace her with a white woman. She reported that the Executive argued that “a southern white woman who was really sincere and just in her attitude toward colored people would be an asset.” Lealtad refused to step aside, and countered that “a white woman could not do for colored girls what one of their own could do.” She was able to hold her position as news of the situation she was in spread.

Lealtad left her position in protest in 1920, after the organization refused to support their Black staff who were refused accommodation in a hotel with their colleagues during the 1919 YWCA conference in Iowa. She wrote about this episode in The Crisis: “”I think that such a policy of compromise and a policy which caters to the whims and prejudices of southern whites, is anything but Christian and that the public at large should know of the attitudes and policy of this organization.”

From there, Lealtad went on to short stints in civil rights organizations, first the New York Urban League, and then the NAACP. She became interested in a career in medical science, however, and trained as a lab technician. Although she worked in a lab for three years, she ultimately found it monotonous. She was interested in a career in research, but was advised that the racial barriers might be too high.

So Lealtad enrolled in medicine at Cornell, with the encouragement and financial support of a French doctor, Phoebe Du Bois. Lealtad left after a year, discouraged by racism. Du Bois advised she would find less of that in France. She went there, spending a year learning the language, then studying and working in Lyon, Berlin, and Paris—and contending with gender discrimination.

In 1933, Lealtad graduated from the University of Paris with a medical degree, completing a dissertation on a multi-system disorder called Hand-Schüller-Christian disease at the time. (It’s now called chronic multifocal Langerhans cell histiocytosis.) She was 38, and she returned to the US to complete her internship at Provident Hospital in Chicago.

There, Lealtad developed a friendship with another trail-blazing activist African-American female intern, Helen Octavia Dickens, and it would be lifelong. Dickens would later be the first African-American woman admitted to the American College of Surgeons. She and Lealtad bonded, not only because of their mutual interests, but because of the adversity they faced as African-American women. For example, they were not allowed to live in the interns’ quarters (Shakir 2010):

“[T]hey were instead asked to live with the nurses. They resented this arrangement not because they had some hierarchical issue with living with nurses but rather that they were excluded from living in the interns’ quarters with their cohorts. The nurses’ quarters required the women to walk through a local park on 50 and 51 street at night when they were on call…

[T]heir activities were constantly monitored by dorm officials and included weekly room searches. This was done by a female and male administrator who worked for Provident Hospital. This constant violation of one’s physical space led to a resentment of authority for both Dickens and Lealtad.”

She remained committed, though, to practicing medicine, doing so years beyond her retirement. There’s a sprinkling of signs online of her life of activism, too—A letter in 1949, discusses her fundraising to support medical care in China; her letter to Du Bois mentions seeing him at a dinner for the Russian Institute and at a Peace Conference; an ad in the New York Times lists her as a sponsor of a Rally for Justice in Mississippi in 1956. That year, the government in Mississippi had unleashed a wave of legislation and action against the NAACP, and to shore up the “Jim Crow” system.

I created a Wikipedia page about Lealtad for this Black History Month—astonishing, isn’t it?, that there hadn’t already been one. I had intended to do a quick starter piece. But seeing flashes of her outspokenness drew me in, and kept me digging to find out more about this remarkable woman—especially this part of her letter to Du Bois decades ago:

“Unfortunately, as I have recently discovered, not all the dishonest people, not all the liars and not all the people who have personal axes to grind belong to the Republican Party. The Progressive movement being made up of human beings has a few also…I can tell you very frankly that is the most unscrupulous group of damnable lying “so and so’s” I have encountered in a long time and you are at liberty to tell anyone exactly what I have said.”

By the time she wrote that letter, Lealtad had found a place where she would serve people for decades. It was Sydenham Hospital in Harlem, believed to be the first hospital in the US to desegregate. And after she retired in 1968, she returned to international humanitarian work, spending years providing medical care in Puerto Rico and Mexico.

Lealtad left Macalester College an endowment for a scholarship in her name, for African-American, Latino, or Native American students with strong high school records, and the annual award is a powerful ongoing legacy. The College, uniquely, awarded her two honorary degrees over the years. There’s a prize at the College in her name as well, for alumni of color with outstanding records of community service. A center for social justice at the College is partly named in her honor, too, which is also particularly fitting for this formidable woman:

“I have spent my life fighting for decency and democracy and fair play.”

(C.D. Lealtad to W.E.B. Du Bois, 1949)

All my Black History Month posts at Absolutely Maybe are here.

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Disclosure: I created the Wikipedia page for Catharine Deaver Lealtad. Unless there is a direct link included in this post, you can find the sources for other information on the Wikipedia page. Additional sources used for this post that aren’t on Wikipedia are are:

• Story in the African-American Ledger, 1912.

• Details of the struggle within the YWCA: Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906-46 by Nancy Marie Robertson, 2007. (Based on Robertson’s dissertation, “Deeper Even Than Race.”)

• Quotes from her letter to W.E.B. Du Bois, 1949.

Photographic portrait of Lealtad is from The Crisis, April 1920. It is in the public domain (CC PDM 1.0).