Journal and Guide (Norfolk, Va.), 4 February 1928.

What in the East Germany is this?

In 1928, the Negro Business League suggested that “members of the race” become “a committee of one” and carry little notebooks to jot down their neighbors’ patronage habits. Beyond the bizarre and chilling embrace of citizen spies, this brief bit, which appeared as part of an otherwise breezy column of Wilson society news, raises some interesting implications.

Readers were counseled to “see whether” others “are having a white or Negro physician, a white or Negro undertaker.” An examination of death certificates discloses that up until about World War I, white undertakers like A.D. McGowan and Amerson-Boswell handled a significant amount of black custom. There’s less evidence of this practice by 1920, however.

It’s more difficult to assess the degree to which black residents patronized white doctors instead of black physicians like Drs. Frank S. Hargrave Michael E. DuBissette, Matthew S. Gilliam, or William A. Mitchner. Major surgeries, especially in emergency situations, were often performed by white doctors at one of the two white hospitals — black patients returned to Mercy to recuperate — and some white doctors, most notably A.D. Williams, routinely delivered black babies. However, death certificates of the era were signed overwhelmingly by black doctors.

Finally, there was concern about who was “patronizing the white theatre for Negroes and who is patronizing the Negro theatre.” The Negro theatre, of course, was Samuel H. Vick‘s Globe, housed in an upper floor of the Odd Fellows building he constructed on East Nash Street. The “white theatre for Negroes” was the Lincoln, opened by a Greek-American in the Nash Street block just east of the railroad. Vick was an early member of the Negro Business League and no doubt was stung by the financial hit the Lincoln created.