Here we trace the arc of Maltheus Avery’s short life, revealing the promise of the American Dream for the Avery family and its collision with the realities of Jim Crow America. We share how his death transformed the lives of his two brothers—both of whom dedicated themselves to become health professionals who challenged the system that had failed Maltheus.
Includes interview clips from Col. Waddell Avery, recorded by Spencie Love (9 July 1988), Davis Library, UNC. The voices of Dr. Parnell Avery and Hazel Avery (featured in One Blood) are read by actors.
UNHEALED: A Story of Race, Memory, and a Teaching Hospital
Episode 3: A Family’s Story
Transcript
Dr. Jeff Baker: That is the voice of Waddell Avery talking to historian Spencie Love in 1989 about his older brother. We met Maltheus Avery in our last episode, where we talked about two car accidents that happened in Central North Carolina in 1950, one that's been widely remembered that caused the death of the famous surgeon, Dr. Charles Drew, and the other not widely remembered at all, that caused the death of Maltheus Avery. And it's the Avery story that's important for us to know and remember because it's our story. It's Duke's story.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: This is episode three of our podcast UNHEALED, where we're looking at how the medical racism of the past impacts our present-- and how understanding those lessons can help us chart a better future. In this episode today, we're really going to dig into the backstory of Maltheus Avery, his life and his tragic death. We're going to introduce you to his family and you'll get to understand the pain that they experienced and how that impacted them for the rest of their lives in ways that are both very sad, but also in ways that are inspiring.
Dr. Jeff Baker: But before we dive into all of that, let me remind you who we are. I'm Jeff Baker. I'm a pediatrician and historian at Duke School of Medicine and director of the Ethics Center.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: And I'm Damon Tweedy. I'm a psychiatry professor here at Duke, and I'm the author of the book Black Man in a White Coat. So as we talk about a specific family today, the Avery family, we're going to talk about big concepts like the American Dream and patriotism and what it meant for those ideals to crash against the harsh realities of segregation. It's a lot to cover, but it's a very powerful story. And as we said earlier, it's one that all of us at Duke should know. So Jeff, get us started.
Dr. Jeff Baker: It is a very interesting story. So Maltheus Avery was the oldest of three boys. Two younger boys were named Waddell and Parnell. We're going to hear more about them. He had a sister named Evelyn. They were a really remarkable family, a hardworking family who grew up in this small house in downtown Henderson, North Carolina, which is about an hour north of us, just a block away from the white part of town, incidentally. Now, Maltheus' mother was a force of nature. Her name was Hazel. She believed deeply that education was the way to deal with racial discrimination. In fact, she wanted her boys to become doctors. And indeed, in the end, both Waddell and Parnell would become health professionals. But Maltheus had different ideas. I think we might call him kind of a free spirit. Here's how his brother Waddell described him.
Archival audio, Waddell Avery: He was smart and he was strong. He didn't like boundaries. He was a free-spirited guy. He liked to be free, but he was very, um, astute and he was very mechanical minded. He was Mr. Fixit.
Waddell Avery: We were prominent family in Henderson. We didn't have any wealth, but ah, we were pretty well known. We were achievers in Henderson and we had to work and study and go to church and play the piano. Shine shoes. And ah, we worked real hard. And, my mother made us different. She made us different. She believed that work would keep you out of trouble, and it did.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: So that sounds like the kind of stories my grandparents told my parents when they were small, hard work, hard work. Nobody's going to give you nothing if you don't work hard in this life. So Hazel Avery was definitely living that life that she preached. She worked two jobs. During the day she worked in the tobacco factory and at night she did laundry for the local mill workers. Here's how Waddell remembers the time he spent with his older brother, whom the family called Sonny.
Waddell Avery: Cotton millers were the whites who lived near the cotton mill. And in addition to my mother working at the factory, she was doing washing, taking in washing. And so we'd have to go over to the Cotton Mill early Monday morning about six o'clock and pick up a basket load of clothes. Sonny and I.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: Man, that's really some hard work. But Hazel wanted more for her kids and believed that education was the way to get it.
Waddell Avery: She wanted something for her children. The main thing that was in the minds of Blacks in the twenties was breaking that damn yoke around their neck, getting out from under the yoke of the damn whites in the segregated south. And they were determined that it would be done and the next generation, now I've heard it all my life, you're not going to be in these white folks' kitchen like I am or in that tobacco factory like I am. You are going to be different whether you like it or not. And the way for you to be different is to get something in your head. That's one thing they can't take away from you.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: So this sounds like the American dream we hear about so much. We usually attach that story though to white Americans and immigrants from across the globe. But a lot of Black people during their time fought for their own slice of that prize.
Waddell Avery: Ever since we were kids, my mother and father drummed it in. You got to be twice as good, twice as good, twice as good. That's why Daddy was so hard on Sonny. Perfection. Perfection. Dadgummit, you got to break out of this cycle. You got to be twice as good so that you don't have to be under the heel and thumb of the white man.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: Hazel was all about getting her kids book smarts. After all, she wanted them to become doctors. But by the time Maltheus was a teenager in 1940s America, many young men were chasing their own version of that American dream.
Archival newsreel audio: Lieutenant General Buckner and Vice Admiral Turner observed the fifth fleet's terrific bombardment of Okinawa...
Dr. Jeff Baker: So in 1944, Maltheus signed up for service in the Second World War. Now, this of course was a war where servicemen were looked up to and honored. But Maltheus was assigned to the Pacific Theater and he was just shocked by the sheer brutality of the fighting. He was seriously traumatized by his experiences during the invasion of Okinawa where he literally confronted Japanese soldiers with bayonets facing him and his companions down. When he finally came home, Maltheus was a changed man. He tried to start over. He finished high school. He married his high school sweetheart, Nannie Jackson, and enrolled in the nearby Hampton Institute. He started to build a new life after the horror of war. But like so many veterans, he went through a lot of turmoil and he ended up dropping out of college. He and Nannie moved back home to Henderson and he moved back in with matriarch Hazel, into the same house that he'd grown up in.
He was, though, a resilient young man, and after a year or two he managed to get himself back on his feet and he decided to give college one more try. So inspired by his two younger brothers who'd both gone to college at Virginia State, he enrolled at NC A&T, a historically Black college in Greensboro. And he decided to major in auto mechanics, a subject he knew well and that he really excelled at. So things were finally going really well for Maltheus. He was settling down after the war. He was happy to be at A&T. And many weekends he'd drive back home to Henderson to see his pregnant wife and baby daughter.
It was on one of those trips home, on December 1st, 1950, that Maltheus had the accident that killed him.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: So, for those who didn't hear the last episode, here's a quick recap. Matthew Avery was driving on a rural North Carolina road when the car he was driving was sideswiped by an oncoming truck. He was seriously injured and an ambulance took him to Alamance General Hospital, but they didn't have the resources then to treat someone with a brain injury. So he was sent to Duke Hospital, where after a brief examination, he was turned away because there were no beds available on the Black ward, even though there were beds available on the white ward. The doctor sent him down the road to Lincoln Hospital, the city's Black hospital, where he died shortly after he arrived. Several hours later, highway patrol arrived at the front door of the Avery family in Henderson with terrible news. Maltheus’s distraught parents and his sister drove in a hearse to Lincoln Hospital to
retrieve his body. It was then that they found out that Duke Hospital had refused to treat him. They were devastated and they were furious. They were enraged at a system that could deny someone care simply because of their race.
Waddell Avery: We wanted to sue Duke. That was just like suing J. Paul Getty or, um, or Malcolm Forbes or somebody.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: The family consulted a lawyer in Henderson who said there was nothing that they could do.
Waddell Avery: Duke was intimidating to everybody because Duke was North Carolina. Duke was the tobacco and power and light company, and Duke was money. And how could you go up against money? And also, it was an injustice and there was not the racial awakening as yet. Racial consciousness and the battle for equality was just beginning.
Dr. Jeff Baker: Yeah, that's right. Remember, this was 1950, before the Civil Rights movement. Really more than 10 years before Duke would even admit its first Black students or hire its first Black doctors. So the Avery family was left to mourn their loss and their brother's life cut so short, and the entire family blamed Duke. Hazel, Maltheus's mother, paid visits to both Duke and Lincoln Hospitals trying to get answers about her son's care. She didn't get any. Her husband, Napoleon, was overcome by grief. He was railing against anyone associated with the accident-- the truck driver, the doctors, anybody connected with Duke, anybody connected with the incident of December 1st, 1950. The very day after the funeral, Waddell had to return to the military base where he was stationed. It was left up to the youngest son, Parnell, to stay and support his parents, where he witnessed firsthand their anger and their despair. We don't have Parnell on tape, but here are some of his words, read by an actor.
Voice-over, Dr. Parnell Avery: It almost disintegrated our family structure and our relations with most people. We were in an underclass area. Mother was trying to get us out from being the scum of the earth. It almost made them lose that touch...
Dr. Jeff Baker: Like his parents, Parnell's first reaction to the tragedy was rage. He had hero worshiped his oldest brother. He was just devastated by his death. In fact, he was so upset he tried to call the president of the United States, though I doubt he got through.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: The death of Maltheus changed the trajectory of Parnell's life. Although his mom had wanted him to become a doctor, Parnell came of age as an aspiring musician. He was quite talented and played in several Harlem nightclubs. He thought his future was in show business.
Voice-over, Parnell Avery: I never thought I'd go into medicine because our family was so poor. Money was as scarce as hens’s teeth. But after Sonny died, I knew there had to be more to do with my life so no person, whatever color or background, would be turned away from a hospital.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: So instead of auditioning for music gigs, Parnell applied to college, did undergrad, and then eventually was accepted into medical school.
Voice-over, Parnell Avery: That was the beginning of the culmination of what I wanted to do after Sonny got killed.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: While Parnell was a medical student, he participated in civil rights marches. And later, when he was a highly respected surgeon, he traveled across the country speaking out against racism in American medicine. So even though Parnell achieved that American dream we talked about, and that his mom imagined for him, he never got over what happened to his brother Maltheus.
Voice-over, Parnell Avery: I'm still mad about this thing. It's not the point that he died, but no one gave him any attention at one of our greatest southeastern medical institutions.
Dr. Jeff Baker: So Waddell, whose voice you've been hearing throughout this episode, never truly got over his anger either. And without the recourse of the law or any kind of justice, he channeled his emotions into his career. During the Korean War, he served as a battlefield surgeon and he participated in missions all over the world, but he always remained haunted by his brother's death. He later said that every soldier who died in the battlefield, every soldier who was injured, reminded him of what had happened to Maltheus. And eventually he found a path in the medical world where he could try to right some of the wrongs that his family had experienced. In fact, Waddell took an influential job with the Department of Health and Human Services, where he ran a program establishing healthcare centers all across the country.
Waddell Avery: I pursued hospital administration and it turned out to be a good thing because, ah, then I said if I can ever get to run hospitals, I'm going to see to it that they're run right and nobody will ever be denied care if I can help it.
Dr. Jeff Baker: Waddell Avery helped extend healthcare to many who'd been denied it. And in that way, he was honoring the memory of his brother, Maltheus.
Waddell Avery: Urban health, rural health, migrant health and community health centers, thousands of 'em.
Dr. Jeff Baker: So both brothers’ lives were completely changed by Maltheus's death and both chose career paths that were a direct response to what had happened to Maltheus at Duke Hospital.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: Our listeners might be wondering what happened to Nannie, Maltheus’s wife. The last we heard, she was pregnant and eagerly awaiting his arrival home from college.
Dr. Jeff Baker: This may be one of the hardest parts of this whole story, Damon, because Nannie gave birth just a few days later to a second daughter, who she named Malthaus after her father. And we're going to meet Malthaus later on in this podcast. But for right now, I just want to share briefly the story of what happened to them. So just imagine Nannie and her toddler daughter and this new newborn in Henderson. Just, just hard to imagine the devastation they felt. They were, I think they just had to feel overwhelmed. So what happened is that Nannie's own mother from Charlottesville came down to Henderson and drove them up to Charlottesville, and that's where they all grew up. Nannie and both daughters would grow up in Charlottesville, with that grandmother. Nannie was always described as a lovely person, kind of a quiet person. But she had lost her high school sweetheart; she was never the same person again. And she ended up dying young in 1967.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: So what's very clear is that the entire family-- his widow, his children, his parents, his siblings-- they were all deeply affected. And we can all see now that Maltheus was a real person with a very real story. He was not just a guy who was confused with the famous Dr. Charles Drew. And for the Avery family, Maltheus’s death and the events that surrounded it became an enduring wound. So before we say anything else, I think it's important that we just stop and just try and let that story sink in, to feel some of the emotion from his brother Waddell.
Waddell Avery: That was the culture that would allow a man to bleed to death. That was the culture that would send a guy from one hospital to another. And that was the culture that I wanted to blow all to hell.
Dr. Jeff Baker: He was beyond furious.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: As they all were. Maltheus had served our country. He had fought in the most consequential war of the 20th century, only to return home to the same place where his life was just like second class. He was not valued the same as his white comrades who had served in our great war. And I think if we think back on it, some of the Avery family’s belief in that American dream that we talked about earlier, kind of died that night with Matheus.
Dr. Jeff Baker: And that anger never went away.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: And if you think about the pain this family experienced, it really raises a big question: should we be telling this story, you know, rehashing this terrible thing that happened over 70 years ago? Honestly, I suspect some Black listeners might be feeling they don't need to hear more stories like this. Another story about slavery or segregation, oppression. Enough!
Dr. Jeff Baker: Okay, so Damon, I think you're hitting on one of the core questions behind this whole podcast. You know, this story affected me really deeply, and I can come up with many reasons why I think that listeners who look like me really ought to learn this story. But maybe on another level, this is all just kind of a way that makes me feel that I'm doing something about racism. Maybe this podcast is less about healing and, to some people it feels more like just opening an old wound.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: Man. I really hope not. That does not feel good at all. You know, we've both actually lost sleep just thinking about that.
Dr. Jeff Baker: And we've had a lot of talks about it, right? This is really hard to express. But, but I wonder if the question is not just of whether or not to open the wound, but how do you open it? What I really mean by that, is how do you tell this story?
Dr. Damon Tweedy: You know, that's what really kind of drew me to this story, if I'm going to be honest. I mean, there's again lots of stories that cast Black people as victims throughout all of American history. Terrible things, you know, happened to my ancestors. There's no question about it. But I think we lose a lot when we just sort of strip down the Black experience to that. Black American history is so much more than just injury. Let's just look at this story again, what drew me to this, and look at Maltheus’s two brothers. As you mentioned, Waddell, this battlefield surgeon, Korean War, Vietnam War. Later he developed community health centers, places where black people were able to get healthcare, right? Where they wouldn't otherwise have gotten it. So he took the bad of what had happened to his brother, and he worked tirelessly throughout his adult life to help others, to make sure
that his brother did not die in vain. And so he was able to sort of take that forward.
Dr. Jeff Baker: Yeah, that's absolutely right. And it was the same with Parnell. As we heard, he gave up a career in music and became a renowned surgeon, giving talks all over the world, and won all kinds of honors and awards. He yet, throughout it all, he never forgot his humble beginnings or the fact that his brother had been denied care. Maybe that's why throughout his life, he continued to make house calls and see patients without charge in underserved communities.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: House calls. That's, that’s something. I mean, that's real commitment and dedication.
Dr. Jeff Baker: It is.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: Yeah, we could use a lot more of that in our modern medical world. But just going back to the brothers though, as we listened to their stories, we can just see how they really came a long way from where they started. The parents' lives were in rock quarries, tobacco factories, and doing white people's laundry and look where they came.
Dr. Jeff Baker: Yeah, these are pretty amazing stories and you're so right. It is so important we tell stories of agency.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: Absolutely. I think this aspect of Black history gets overlooked way too much. So the way I see this story with the Avery family, we're not just trying to open an old wound for its own sake. We want to tell this amazing family story that highlights incredible inner strength and perseverance.
Dr. Jeff Baker: Yeah, it is such an amazing story and I just can't help but think of how we would not have known this story had we not come across Spencie Love's book on Charles Drew. We wouldn't have known about it. And that might be a tie-in to one last act in this story with the brothers. Spencie herself was so moved by the story that in 1990, while she was teaching history at Duke, she invited both brothers, Waddell and Parnell, to Duke to give a talk to her class. We know now that they were privately hoping for some sort of apology or at least acknowledgement of Duke's role in Maltheus's death, but that never came. Waddell died in 1993. Parnell died in 2014. Both of these men had spent their lives working to change the system they believed had killed their brother, and they made sure that the story of Maltheus's death would never be forgotten.
Dr. Damon Tweedy: On the next episode of UNHEALED, we'll hear how newspapers, Black and white, covered the story of Maltheus Avery's death and how it spurred an early civil rights campaign to expose the human costs of racial segregation. I'm Damon Tweedy.
Dr. Jeff Baker: And I'm Jeff Baker. Thanks for listening.
UNHEALED was produced by the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine at Duke School of Medicine. Our producer is Beverley Abel. Keith Weston is mix engineer. Our project manager is Nikki Vangsnes. Marjorie Miller provided project assistance. Music by Blue Dot Sessions in Pond Five. Funding has been provided by the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, and Duke Institutional History Project. Our website is unhealed.duke.edu.