Collier, 66, grew up in the heart of the Arkansas Delta, an expanse of dark, fertile earth stretching over bayous and through thick stands of cedar and live oak along the west bank of the Mississippi.This was one of the last bastions of the Jim Crow South, a ferociously segregated place where former plantation homes still dot the landscape and a commanding statue of Robert E. Lee on the town square bears testimony to the persistence of the old system.
If anyone got sick, they’d see a local black woman who practiced folk medicine. “We didn’t have money for a doctor,” Collier recalled. “Nobody did.”None of the town’s four white doctors would see a black patient who didn’t have cash. “We just had to take care of ourselves,” Collier said.That didn’t seem to trouble the physicians, who told a CBS News crew that visited Marianna in 1969 that black patients got what they needed.
The local medical society blocked the clinic’s first doctor, a young physician from St. Louis, from admitting patients to the hospital in Marianna, forcing them to travel to Memphis or Little Rock, more than an hour away. Several workers at the clinic were beaten up outside a local restaurant.
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