"ARE YOU A N****R OR A DOCTOR?"

Stallworth reflects on his experience growing up as a Black child in the 1950s and ’60s in segregated Birmingham and his subsequent career as a doctor.

Stallworth grew up in Lincoln Park, a “Colored neighborhood” in Birmingham, Alabama, before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a time during which Martin Luther King Jr. called Birmingham “the most segregated city in the United States.” Schools, trains, water fountains, even dressing rooms in clothing stores were segregated. As the author observes: “My first required reading was the Jim Crow ‘White Only’ and ‘Colored Only’ signs plastered everywhere, even on city buses.” He didn’t cross the city line and leave Birmingham until he was 16, when he attended Howard University with the lifelong hope of becoming a doctor. He graduated from Meharry Medical College and became an anesthesiologist, but even after such accomplishment, bigotry continued to doggedly pursue him. A White patient, astonished at the sight of him, asked the question that became the title of Stallworth’s book. This thoughtful memoir is more impressionistic than documentary. In place of a comprehensive autobiography, the author provides a pastiche of anecdotes, some relating to racial identity. His writing style is unadorned, his delivery an easy and almost intimately familiar one (“I had not traveled by airplane, train, bus, boat, or even a taxi, but I boarded that train without a second thought, with no hesitation, curious to see what was inside of ‘The Southerner,’ which was a silver, streamlined train”). The stories he conveys are captivating and astutely tied into the tumultuous history of the times. The author recounts when he learned of Emmett Till’s brutal murder. He was not quite 10 at the time and saw Till’s mutilated face on the cover of Jet magazine, which he delivered. This is an extraordinary remembrance—as emotionally affecting as it is historically edifying.

A fascinating, moving memoir that focuses on one of the most tempestuous periods in American history.