"His slide rule has changed the city in fifty years from a rather homey, tree friendly town into the glass-and-chromium battlemented commercial Utopia it is now, any way you look, but especially up. He remembers the Old Jericho, and the first flame-rising, and the form the flames had taken then. These were the forms of city plant and tree, of flowers, of many small decent homes and a few large ones set amongst great lawns which always seemed to bring a sense of twilight to the houses, even at noon. Now he sits halfway up the Second Rebirth, letting us watch him spread the shadow of his hand over the new blueprints, the live dream of the new trade mart, the new hospital threshing the air with bulldozers, machines moving the earth according to plan. Where? Up." ... James Dickey from Jericho Beheld
My 24/7 home for two years, Grady Memorial Hospital is an amazing institution of downtown Atlanta. When I arrived in July of 1958 it was just 3 months in a new home; risen amidst the old "Gradys." Established in 1890, elements of the hospital continued to also occupy buildings of antebellum Atlanta Medical College. Grady's chartered mission was to care for the poor.
Today this home to pain and miracles endures. Overshadowed by post-modern architectural monstrosities that pollute the Atlanta skyline it is a substantial alphabet block structure. The side facing south (left) is the one on which I lived for two years. My room was on the 15th floor just at the junction with the wings of the "H" to the east. I still recover the many moods I felt as I peered out the windows of that room toward the Georgia State Capitol. I observed the progress of the first the gilding of the dome. Coal smoke fuming from Atlantic Steel and the railroad just below fouled the "un-conditioned" air, window sills, books and whites. When I first arrived the east side of Grady was the "colored side." It looks down on the famous downtown "connecta," I–75 & I–85, and then further outward about 3 blocks to the Ebenezer Baptist Church. In the night photo two upper floors are seen to be fully lighted. The higher, the 13th floor, the obstetrical delivery suite and the lower, the 8th floor is the Psychiatric Crisis Intervention Clinic. How often during the small hours of the morning I might glance out an 8th or 9th floor window, the psychiatric CIS clinic or pediatric inpatient units respectively, and wonder just how much more suffering was to come that night.
In the early years we saw such terrible, mostly preventable, illnesses; diphtheria, poliomyelitis, tuberculosis, tetanus, venereal diseases, commonly gonorrhea, shigelloses and other malignant dysenteries ....... even rabies. Almost the entire 9A wing was devoted to boarding infants afflicted with profound congenital anomalies. And so many, children & parents alike, were malnourished, impoverished and uneducated, lacking even a speaking vocabulary.
Work at Grady was never completed. No matter for how many years any of us came and worked we left feeling unnoticed and un-notable amidst the overwhelming needs. It was tempting to emotionally remove the faces from the individuals we served and to become callous. Empathy acquired in intimacy is the fragile barrier to that first step backward toward dehumanization is . It is the conservator of the trust placed on each physician, the institution and ultimately the society.
At Grady racial segregation of staff and facilities was extreme, excepting the well kept secret of the premature nursery. Only the doctors and highest administrative officials ventured into both white and "Negro" territories. As an example of the absurd extremes to which custom went to demean African Americans; only white registered nurses were addressed as Mrs. or Miss. African American nurses, were addressed as "Nurse" so-and-so.
In this current era of everyone addressing others by first names, no matter the position, it is difficult to realize just how demeaning it was for African Americans to be excluded from the civility of title. Just a few years ago the news in Georgia included that of Preston King, a black man returned for his brother's funeral from self imposed exile. The reason for his leaving the country in 1961? His draft board's refusal to address him as "Mr."
Experiences with these social and legal institutions that regulated the interactions between the races in the Deep South were a potent preparation for my search for understanding the psychology of corrupting power, oppression and eventually peacemaking. I understand now that there was pervasive belief in the South that it was necessary to comply absolutely with prevailing "customs": to preserve order and the potency of society. I now know that what I took as ignorance and obsequiousness in many African Americans was compliant mortification. It was in the service of filling this unspoken demand to idealize indeed beatify, the installed white hierarchy. For the black man, lynchings and mutilations were proof enough that not to do so was to risk similar fates. The Leo Frank lynching in 1915 had given similar warnings to the Jews of Atlanta.
If those conditions could not have ended sooner I am grateful for the opportunity to briefly experience what was a pure race based culture untainted by social pressures or federal laws and mandates. Sadly still today, in this land, are too many people in nostalgia clinging to their "southern heritage" while not acknowledging its nature.
Though it was impossible to remain totally aloof from the racial issues in the Atlanta of my first fifteen years, my attention did become focused on the teaching, research and medical care of grievously ill children. It really is only in recent years that I am revisiting some of those experiences. They influence what observations speculations I make as to where we find ourselves today.
Today this home to pain and miracles endures. Overshadowed by post-modern architectural monstrosities that pollute the Atlanta skyline it is a substantial alphabet block structure. The side facing south (left) is the one on which I lived for two years. My room was on the 15th floor just at the junction with the wings of the "H" to the east. I still recover the many moods I felt as I peered out the windows of that room toward the Georgia State Capitol. I observed the progress of the first the gilding of the dome. Coal smoke fuming from Atlantic Steel and the railroad just below fouled the "un-conditioned" air, window sills, books and whites. When I first arrived the east side of Grady was the "colored side." It looks down on the famous downtown "connecta," I–75 & I–85, and then further outward about 3 blocks to the Ebenezer Baptist Church. In the night photo two upper floors are seen to be fully lighted. The higher, the 13th floor, the obstetrical delivery suite and the lower, the 8th floor is the Psychiatric Crisis Intervention Clinic. How often during the small hours of the morning I might glance out an 8th or 9th floor window, the psychiatric CIS clinic or pediatric inpatient units respectively, and wonder just how much more suffering was to come that night. 
Revised October 2008