Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power.

• Author: Norrell, Robert J.
• Position: Book review

Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power

By David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Pp. xv, 304. $35.00 cloth.

One of the great gifts of biography is to provide examples that confound the stereotypes that inevitably creep into our historical memory as we inevitably reduce the past to a few manageable images. David T. Beito, professor of history at the University of Alabama, and Linda Royster Beito, professor of social sciences at Stillman College, have confounded such a stereotype in their lucid and economical recounting of the life of Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard (1908-76), a black civil rights leader who bore few similarities, at least upon superficial examination, with the pious African American ministers who leap to mind when we think of the personalities who led blacks in the overthrow of segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to being the leading black activist against segregation in its most dangerous haven, Mississippi, in the early 1950s, Howard was also a wealthy entrepreneur who provided both medical care and banking and recreational services to needy black Mississippians; a physician who created successful hospitals for indigent blacks and performed many abortions long before Roe v. Wade; a bon vivant who hunted big game in Africa, roared around in the latest-model Cadillac, and fathered virtually a yard full of illegitimate children yet stayed married to one woman for forty years; and an independent thinker who always carried a gun and incurred the wrath of both J. Edgar Hoover and Thurgood Marshall. No writer of fiction would dare create a character so varied or contradictory.

Born in the Black Patch tobacco region of western Kentucky to a line of poor black farmers, Howard gained attention early for his intelligence, acquired a generous white sponsor for his development, and demonstrated an oratorical skill that would win him attention throughout his life. After college in Alabama and Nebraska, he attended a Seventh-Day Adventist medical school in California. Along with his medical degree, he acquired a taste for politics and a flair for writing. He became a newspaper columnist and then a political activist, supporting the California gubernatorial campaigns of the Prohibitionist evangelist Robert Shuler and the socialist writer Upton Sinclair. Neither won, but Howard thus demonstrated that he was a fellow who followed his own lights in...