By Elaine Carlson

"Social justice is for everyone, including people with disabilities." Marlee Matlin, Actress

The 32nd President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1/30/1882 – 4/12/1924 & in office 3/14/33 – 4/12/1945) regularly went from the White House to Warms Springs Georgia for therapy for polio. But all during that time Warm Springs refused to let Blacks and other non-Whites go there for treatment.

FDR contacted polio in 1921 and first went there in 1924. The publicity from those trips inspired people from all over the United States to travel to Warm Springs for help for their polio.

In 1926 he bought the property and started the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation. In 1938 it was renamed the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and its fund-raising efforts were called the March of Dimes.

In the video "Racial Health Disparities Didn't Start With Covid: The Overlooked History of Polio" (March 12, 2021) the President of the March of Dimes Stacey D. Stewart and the Yale historian on medicine Naomi Rogers discuss the history of Warm Springs.

Stewart said, "What President Roosevelt did was really galvanize the whole country. He figured that for something as important as solving the polio crisis, every single American could afford to send a dime to the White House to help advance scientific research. And that's what people did."

Rogers said, "Increasingly there were a number of civil rights activists during the 1930s who began to protest that they were part of the March of Dimes. They were raising money, and they deserve to be able to have some of their children admitted to the top rehab center, especially as its patron was the president of the United States."
Daniel J. Wilson, PhD in "African-Americans, Polio and Racial Segregation --- Putting Together the Pieces of Polio History," describes the efforts President Roosevelt made to respond to the criticism.

In 1937 FDR sent his White House adviser Basil O'Connor to Warm Springs to encourage them to think about starting to let Blacks go there for treatment. He met with the Warm Springs Board of Trustees and its Administrator Henry Hooper. He returned to the White House and told Roosevelt the facility was adamant that they weren't going to let up on their stand against admitting Blacks.

Hooper was sure that if they started to accept Blacks they would have to keep them separate from their White patients. He argued that all the efforts and expenses required to set up and maintain such a segregated facility would impose a heavy burden on them.

He said, "admitting Black patients would require building a separate cottage to house 8-10 patients and a separate pool in which they could receive the hydrotherapy that was key to the Warm Springs treatment."

He further argued Warm Springs would have to hire "a separate African-American staff including a graduate nurse, an attendant, a physical therapist, an automobile driver, a maid, and a cook. Hooper also noted that Black graduate nurses and physical therapists were almost nonexistent."

In the video Rogers said, "The general consensus among these trustees was that this was a serious political problem, but that there was no way that they were going to desegregate Warm Springs. Nobody wanted a situation where white children would have to swim in the same pools as Black children."

An unnamed speaker in the video said, "Under pressure from Black donors, the March of Dimes eventually began using some of the millions it had raised to build treatment centers open to all races, and train Black nurses and doctors. Posters featuring Black children as polio victims finally appeared in 1947."

Dr. Wilson described how in May 1939 O'Connor, by then the Director of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, announced they were giving the Tuskegee Institute a grant to build and staff a polio treatment center.

O'Connor said that new rehabilitation facility "would provide the most modern treatment for colored infantile paralysis victims" and would "train Negro doctors and surgeons for orthopedic work." It opened in January 1941.

Wilson did not heap unqualified praise on O'Connor and the foundation for that grant. "Once opened, it clearly provided the best polio care available to Black patients in the segregated South, but the overall number of patients treated was relatively small. For instance it was difficult for many Black families to transport their children long distances to Tuskegee and to pay for their care once there."

Wilson was probably chuckling when he reported that in the 1940s O'Connor became president of the Tuskegee Institute Board of Trustees. Wilson suggested that fact was "an interesting side note."

Rogers said, "One of the things that the history of polio tells us is that racial disparities, health disparities were not invented in the past ten years and that, very often, they have been deliberately ignored."

I was grateful I was able to learn about the history of Warm Springs. It was discouraging to learn about the deliberate discrimination practiced by a place with such close ties to a President of the United States.

Yes it is crucial that we recognize "that racial disparities, health disparities were not invented in the past ten years and that, very often, they have been deliberately ignored."

But it is also important for us to recognize that the battles against justice are not new inventions either.

We need to recognize the battles of those Black Activists in the 1930s. The struggles for Social Justice and Civil Rights and indeed for a better world keep on going.