The Crimes of Harvey Cushing

BALTIMORE – Every potential eyewitness present when surgeons covertly transported a 23-year-old Black woman from a New York mental asylum to a hospital down south just so that they could experiment on her brain – are all now dead.

While the victim’s name was never intended to be disclosed, with the benefit of time and the advent of the Internet we now know her name is Ida Jones. The young woman was brought to Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital (JHH) during the summer of 1910 and returned to New York in a pine box (minus her organs). This is but one example of how Hopkins became known as the body snatcher hospital.

Ida J, patient, in Cushing’s 1912 book
The Pituitary Body and Its Disorders

Although the details of Jones’ demise have been buried for over a century, parts of her brain (along with hundreds of others) are open for casual public viewing as part of a collection of human remains on display at Yale University’s library.

Ida Jones arrived at the racially segregated hospital not as a patient but as the intended lab rat for the celebrated “father of modern neurosurgery.” Harvey Cushing, head of Hopkins’ newly opened Hunterian Experimental Surgical lab, was an expert surgeon on dogs and monkeys before the institutionalized Black woman was delivered to him. Hopkins’ officials, eager to compete with Ivy League teaching hospitals up north, enthusiastically supported Cushing’s quest to forge a new surgical frontier specialty¹.

In addition to Jones’ remains, the museum in Yale library’s Cushing Center is the final resting place for brains removed from over 2,000 Cushing’s patients spanning his 35-year career as a neurosurgeon at medical schools at both Hopkins and Harvard University. In some cases, brains were removed without the patient’s knowledge and often in opposition to the family’s consent.

Generations of Baltimoreans have heeded the warning to steer clear of Johns Hopkins Hospital (JHH) at night fearing being snatched for medical experiments. Public officials and newspapers routinely dismissed the Blacks’ fear of roaming “night doctors” as tales of ignorance. For Baltimoreans of African ancestry, surviving fractured families using collective memory is a time-honored tradition. Passing along oral history has not only kept unsuspecting victims safe, but the lack of media acknowledgment adds yet another layer of trauma to urban existence.

Had it not been for Cushing’s dedication to documenting every step towards building his Brain Tumor Registry that he hoped would be his lasting legacy, we might not have ever known what happened to Ida Jones or be able to piece together the story of the human remains that Cushing collected. Most of what we know about the crimes of Cushing comes from his very own words, his dedication to taking photographs, and those who knew him best.

Exhibit A: The Deceased

As an inmate at the massive mental health asylum in New York City known as Wards Island, Jones was selected as a surgical experiment candidate on the recommendation of Cushing’s friend. As good fortune would have it (for Cushing), the Hopkins doctor was in need of surgical case studies for a lecture planned for later that year.

Ida Jones was brought to the east Baltimore hospital in the custody of New York City officials reportedly with complaints of headaches and failing vision on June 20, 1910. Ten short days later she was lying dead on the operating table with Cushing holding the bloody scalpel. X-Rays did not reveal any evidence of a “brain tumor” for case number XLII².

Circa 1930. Yale Collection. Harvey Cushing performing surgery at Harvard’s medical school.

Before Cushing arrived as a medical resident, Hopkins had attempted only two brain surgeries because of the mortal dangers. Surgery conditions were primitive with no monitoring system and anesthesia was often an afterthought.

Group C 07/30/2009 Cushing Brain Specimens in Glass Jars before restoration

The first of Ida’s two operations, Cushing caused massive and uncontrollable bleeding while cutting through the brain’s dura layer. Ida stopped breathing on multiple occasions, and she was resuscitated during the hours-long event. It was miraculous that Ida survived the first surgery on June 25, 1910.

A second operation was attempted on the 5’3” young woman five days later. Ida J bled out and died on the operating table, Cushing confessed in his book. However, a more antiseptic version is provided on the certificate he signed. Cushing blamed her death on a “brain tumor.”

On the certificate, the petite native of North Carolina is listed as married, a New York City resident, with no parents’ names provided. Her remains were reportedly sent to New York City on July 4, 1910, for burial.

In contrast, the 1910 federal census depicts Ida as an unmarried 22-year-old inmate at Ward Island. At the time, Ward Island was the largest hospital in the country with over 5000 patients on its grounds that covered 320 acres in Manhattan. Under the guidance of Adolph Meyer human experimentation without consent or caution was the norm instead of the exception.

It is assumed that Ida’s remains are buried unmarked in a mass grave in one of the city’s potter’s fields.

1910 federal census for Wards Island New York

Surgeon or Serial Killer?

Cushing often got away with murder. The evidence was kept in a private little black book that documented each death that was different than the data he published.

While at Hopkins, his patients’ mortality rate is often described as abysmal but without specific data. “[Cushing] seems to misstate his operative deaths,” wrote his biographer Michael Bliss.

Feuds erupted within the walls of Hopkins about Cushing’s lack of “scientific integrity.” Cushing complained to his father about negative press that lampooned his inadequacy based on the series of deaths that stemmed from numerous and consecutive fatal operative attempts.³

Hopkins provided little structure and often failed to reign in its young surgeons. “[Cushing] made significant mistakes. Pictures and descriptions of some of his cases suggest a tendency to overclaim for his organ [pituitary], that he may have been too eager to label a fat boy or a big man a pituitary problem,” wrote Bliss.

Cushing was not above ending the life of patients as Christopher Wahl wrote in his 1996 dissertation: “Not only does Dr. Cushing take action to euthanize his unfortunate, decerebrate patient, but he thinks nothing of revealing his intention in the operative note. By the standards of medical care today, Cushing’s actions would be morally and legally indefensible; in 1913, he could act with impunity”.

Assuredly Cushing’s actions would land him in prison today. On two different occasions Cushing used a baby’s brains in attempt to save the life of a wealthy and well-connected man from his home state of Ohio. When news agencies learned of the first brain transplant attempt, Hopkins officials issued an “indignant denial” that any such procedure had taken place, according to Bliss’s 2005 biography.

When news agencies learned of the brain transplant attempt, Hopkins issued an “indignant denial” that any such procedure had taken place.
Michael Bliss, Author, “Harvey Cushing A Life In Surgery”

The Ohio businessman (whose wife’s father was the grandson of ex-president William H Harrison) had been in a coma at Hopkins for nearly six months. William T. Buckner, twice received the pituitary of infants delivered at Johns Hopkins Hospital a procedure funded generously by his wife.

The first transplant failed, according to news accounts, because too much time passed between the infant’s death and the transplant. Hopkins procured the second infant (who died from malnutrition) with hardly any time passing before initiating the transplant. A brief mention indicates that they obtained the parent’s consent, but that is not substantiated, nor likely.

Headline of California newspaper from April 1912 that embarrassed
both Cushing and Johns Hopkins Medical School.

Exhibit B: An Active Crime Scene

Perched precariously between the promise of Pennsylvania’s freedom to the north and the seat of the Confederacy to its south, even today Baltimore remains an active crime scene, generations in the making.

Ida Jones took her last breath at Johns Hopkins Hospital, named for the wealthy Baltimore financier and enslaver. From its inception, Johns Hopkins institutions (the University and Hospital) have been one of unimaginable deceit, denials, and mythmaking that started with erasing enslaver from his official historical record.

Undated photo of children in the foreground of the domed Hopkins Hospital

Even while Hopkins’ parents and grandparents forced enslaved families of African descent to labor from birth to death on their Maryland tobacco plantation, Blacks were being transported through Maryland for risky medical experiments further down south. In her book Medical Apartheid, author Harriet Washington refers to the abundance of “clinical material” forcibly removed from people of African descent that fed medical research and medical training in the United States.

Another Black woman, Henrietta Lacks, unwittingly had her Cancer cells collected by Hopkins researchers after her 1951 death. Hopkins later shared the specimens with doctors around the globe without the knowledge or permission of her husband and children. Her family’s pursuit for justice continues today. Hopkins was also involved in the decades-long syphilis experiments at Tuskegee³.

With each passing decade, the more difficult it is to prove the elements of a crime, let alone one conducted in the privacy of a hospital surgical ward. The smoking gun in Cushing’s case remarkedly was his own published words.

The Verdict

Neither Hopkins nor Yale have commented on growing efforts to remove human remains of oppressed people from public collections, like the Smithsonian. Since the collection of brain specimens was brought out of its sub-basement in 2010, Yale University began exploiting the stolen remains by extracting DNA for additional study.

The Hunterian Lab today still exists but with modern facilities.

End Notes

1. In a major address in 1908 St Louis, Cushing described the over 300 craniotomies he performed in less than a decade when there had just been two in all the years prior to his arrival at Hopkins although 32 tumors had been identified and 13 had been referred to surgery. Christopher Wahl Dissertation.

2. The year before Ida was included in the 1912 publication about the pituitary that garnered him widespread attention, Cushing spoke about her at a New York gathering. Cushing also thanked the hospital’s pathology department for stepping aside and allowing him free reign over all the pathology of patient specimens (even those who died at his hand) without their interference.

3. Once the Tuskegee experiment story broke that revealed how Black men were left untreated for syphilis and permitted to die a long, slow death, the federal government responded to the crisis by requiring institutions who receive federal funding to have an “Institutional Review Board.”

Bibliography

Bliss, M. Harvey Cushing. A Life in Surgery. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2007.

Cushing H. The Pituitary Body and Its Disorders, Clinical States Produced by Disorders of the Hypophysis Cerebri. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott. 1912 [Google Scholar]

Fulton, J. Harvey Cushing: A Biography. The Classic of medicine library. 1946. [Internet Library]

Pendleton C, Adams H, Mathioudakis N, Quiñones-Hinojosa A. Sellar door: Harvey Cushing’s entry into the pituitary gland, the unabridged Johns Hopkins experience 1896-1912. World Neurosurg. 2013 Feb;79(2):394-403. doi: 10.1016/j.wneu.2010.12.007. Epub 2011 Nov 11. PMID: 22079823; PMCID: PMC3936577.

Wahl. C J. The Harvey Cushing Brain Tumor Registry: Changing scientific and philosophic paradigms and the study and preservation of archives. A thesis submitted to the Yale University School of Medicine in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Medicine, 1996.

Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid. Random House, 2019.

Johns Hopkins’ Brain Collector

The first dozen times Harvey Cushing experimented on the human brain as a young surgeon at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine, nearly all of his patients died.

Professional failures¹ notwithstanding, medical historians have all but deified Dr. Cushing, commonly referred to as the father of modern neurosurgery. Following his death in 1939, newspapers lauded Cushing’s early cracks at intracranial surgery and unfailingly mentioned that the celebrity doctor’s daughter was married to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s son.

“During the first few years [Cushing’s] mortality rates from operation[s] were high, so high indeed, that he was many times discouraged, and on more than one occasion the question was raised whether he was justified in proceeding.”
“Harvey Cushing A Biography” by neurophysiologist John F. Fulton published in 1946.

Cushing today is most known for his extensive collection of patient brains removed while he was a surgeon first at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and later at Harvard’s Peter Brent Bingham medical school in Boston. The final resting place for Cushing’s brains is at the Cushing Center in Yale’s medical library, since it opened in 2010.

Visitors are encouraged to take pictures of the rows of jars with floating brains and skulls lined up in cabinet drawers, but in a “respectful” manner. Although had Hopkins had its way, the 700+ brains collected by Cushing would be on display closer to the gravesite of gothic writer Edgar Allen Poe, but the good doctor declined the offer from the Baltimore hospital and chose his alma mater in New Haven instead.

Despite the slight, Cushing’s portrait is prominently displayed on Hopkins’ campus and a life-sized bust of him greats visitors in the neurosurgery administrative office.

Owning the remains of humans is no longer the flex it once was.

The ethical breaches that allow museums to display human remains today are camouflaged by referring to dissected and dismembered people as “specimens” and using “preservation of medical history” when they are actually discussing institutional exploitation of systemic social and political oppression.

Strong-Armed Autopsies

Hopkins’ early influence on the medical profession is indelible. So much so that when it set the low bar by using strong-arm tactics to obtain cadavers, it normalized insensitivity to survivors and cultures. Even today, the federal government has largely left regulations to state legislators, who in turn permit the medical community to enact and conduct oversight of its own standards of professionalism.

While at Hopkins Cushing boasted what was considered an astronomically high rate for obtaining consent for autopsies. A closer look revealed many such authorizations from grieving families were seized under “inauspicious circumstances.”²

Harvey Cushing (middle) surgical resident staff, Johns Hopkins Hospital, 1899 Yale University Online Collections

Later, while at Peter Bent Brigham (Harvard Medical School’s teaching hospital) in Massachusetts, rumors persisted that Cushing’s’ autopsies were direct results of coordinated body snatching of corpses so that he could stack up brains for his collection.

Under today’s standards, Cushing’s patient notes would likely land him in prison³. In June of 2023, the federal government indicted seven people on charges that they absconded with remains from Harvard Medical School as part of a human remain trafficking organization. Along with the manager of the school’s morgue, those indicted (including a mortician in Arkansas) are suspected of profiting off of “the desecration of stillborn babies, faces, brains, hearts, skin genitalia, bones.”

Biographer and close friend of Cushing, Fulton noted that Cushing’s 10 years at Hopkins and later his 20 years at Harvard, the celebrated brain surgeon instructed his staff to go to “great lengths” to obtain the bodies of “important or unusual cases” for autopsy. Uncovered in Cushing’s notes include descriptions of bribes paid to morticians as well as various ruses concocted to disrupt funerals in order to surreptitiously conduct an autopsy.

“I went over to talk to the man’s wife. They were right in the middle of the wake. When I told her what I had come for, she screamed and called us all names. The assembled mourners jumped up and grabbing whatever was handiest started for me. I easily led the parade for quite a distance.”
Cushing’s diary from January 1893 entry as published by biographer John F. Fulton

Cushing was hands on. “The Chief [Cushing] cut all the brains in his own cases” and afterwards provided pathology labs with detailed notes and specimens, is how Cushing’s administrative team remembered the activities at Brigham hospital to Fulton. Cushing’s “dry collection” includes thousands of brain matter specimens on slides, many obtained by “inauspicious circumstances” as well.

Building a Brain Museum and a Legacy

Largely unsaid by his biographers, but repeated often by his peers and critics, was that Cushing’s unflinching desire to create an archival brain registry could have compromised the medical needs of patients.

Cushing’s best and only hope at achieving a legacy suitable to his ego was to build the biggest and best brain museum the world had ever seen. Cushing’s legacy as the nation’s top neurosurgeon as he neared retirement was already being usurped by the more skillful Walter Dandy. The distinction for being the first was earned by European surgeons who had successfully removed tumors in the brain and the pituitary.

“Not many men … liked [Cushing]” said Bertram Bernheim, a Hopkins vascular surgeon and pioneer in blood transfusions. “He rode roughshod over [students] and was ruthless.”
From the 2005 biography Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery by Michael Bliss

When a career move took him from Baltimore to Boston and later to New Haven, Cushing brought what remained of his deceased patients with him – in bits and pieces. During modern medicine’s early years, all that existed by way of patients’ rights was the hope that trained doctors abided by the ancient Greece Hippocratic oath to do no harm.

Black and white photograph with man (Cushing) dressed in surgical scrubs standing over a young child in a hospital bed. They are both staring at the camera. — Title: Cushing and patient. Yale University Online. Harvey Cushing Photograph Collection 1920s to 1932

By the time Cushing died in 1939, he had photographed about 2,200 patients, captured extensive personal histories of each, and placed about 800 brain specimens in one-gallon jars (“wet collection”) cementing his legacy as the creator of the Brain Tumor Registry.

Photo negatives totaling 15,000 in the registry “tell the tale of human misery, bravery, suffering and triumph.”³ Black and white photographs of pre- and post-operative people of all ages (mostly with solemn faces seen confronting their mortality), have been the most celebrated aspects of the collection. Cushing often appeared in photographs with his patients.

Not so much as an asterisk accompanies Cushing’s official portrait or bust on display at Hopkins. The haunting photos of nude and nearly nude posing patients can be viewed either online (in a downloadable handy booklet) or in person at Yale’s medical museum. While other websites have alerts about those culturally sensitive materials, no such warning prepares for the display of human remains of people obtained by unethical methods. At present, some university museums (as well as the Smithsonian) are rethinking their continued ownership of human remains.

Hopkins’ Slippery Slope

The most famous coerced autopsy at Johns Hopkins occurred in 1951 after physicians discovered the unique properties of cells removed from Henrietta Lacks, a Cancer patient. During the course of her treatment Hopkins clinicians discovered that “HeLa cells” (named in her honor) were unlike any before in that they were immortal and would alter the course of medical research for humankind.

Lacks’ family on multiple occasions denied Hopkins’ request for an autopsy on the 31-year-old mother of five. When promised that the autopsy results would more than likely provide aid to the health of her young children, the family acquiesced.

Hopkins’ records indicate that the autopsy was performed at 10:30 am on the morning of her death and that the cranial cavity was not examined because permission was not received by the family. Whether or not Hopkins removed Lacks’ brain (or other organs)without permission is unknown.

Lacks’ descendants settled a civil lawsuit against a biotechnology company in August 2023 for profiting off of her scientifically unique immortal cells known as “HeLa cells”. It remains to be seen if the racial reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement will move Hopkins to repair the generational damage that lingers today over its foundational practices of oppression and exploitation.

The Problem with Museums

The unquenchable desire for humans to pursue ownership of other humans continues to be the most unaddressed issue in United States.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, there’s still not one good reason why Johns Hopkins University would keep a mummified adult in storage on campus for nearly 100 years. Finding no cultural value or without consideration of repatriation to Egypt, Hopkins allowed interns to unravel the carefully preserved 2,000 human for “scholarly use”.

At the hands of novice students in 1979 the contents turned to dust. The person’s skull with teeth as well as a few bones were placed in plastic bags for storage at Hopkins. It us unknown if and how the remains are stored.

In a separate mummy incident, Hopkins’ main draw for the opening of its new Archaeological Museum in 1988 was a mummified Egyptian person on loan from neighboring Goucher College. Instead of unraveling it, scientists used CT scans and facial recognition software to render a photographic likeness of the woman. On the website discussing the “Goucher Mummy” Hopkins announced a three-year project of “racism and repair” of its museum after winning a $4.4 million grant in 2021.

“In light of recent tragic and disturbing events surrounding the disrespectful use of deceased people in university departmental collections, our museum is reflecting upon and redrafting our collections guidelines and policies around the care of human remains.”
Website of Johns Hopkins University Archaeological Museum

UPenn Museum lent a mummified woman who lived about 2,300 years ago to a scientific consortium for autopsy in 1975. Out of the group of about 250 physicians and scientists, a handful took part, including the curator of the Detroit Institute of Arts, reported the New York Times at the time.

Scientists met ”once or twice a year to unwrap and cut up a mummy by day and party by night.”⁴ Those unable to attend were sent pieces of major organs or a bit of bone. Lungs typically were sent to University of California, eyes to University of Illinois and the lungs to Johns Hopkins.

The desecration of bodies uniquely preserved for thousands of years as a party game aside, the mainstays for display in medical museums are full skeletons, diseased hearts, fetuses, and whole brains. A visitor to the Warren Anatomical Museum (WAM), which opened in 1847 at Harvard University, gave her visit five stars on Yelp in 2009:

“Fabulously morbidly, but intensely interesting!” wrote the elite level poster. “Fetal skeletons, dried body parts, outdated surgical tools, kidney stones, skulls with various injuries and maladies”
Ashely P of Coventry Rhode Island on YELP

As of this the date of publication, Yale finds itself in the same predicament as many other museums grappling with the “ownership” of artifacts gained by questionable methods. Increasingly, museums associated with universities are being asked to reconsider the multitude of human skulls, body organs, bones and skeletons they have on hand.

Aggressive finger pointing between two Ivy-leaguers, Princeton and UPenn in 2021 reignited the thorny issue of medical ethics aka largely allowing physicians to police themselves. A news reporter revealed that two children’s anatomical remains who were killed in 1985 were not returned to their family for burial but instead ended up in Penn Museum’s 2019 anthropology collection.

“The idea that the museum was holding the bones of a Black Philadelphian who was alive as recently as 1985 in the same way that it has held the skulls of enslaved people, procured by grave-robbers, was beyond comprehension”
The New Yorker reported in 2021 on the revelation of “Move” bombing victims’ remains.

Johns Hopkins Leading from the Rear

A century ago, Johns Hopkins University rightfully boasted of its leadership in medical innovations but since the new millennium, it has fallen way behind the competition, when it comes to repairing harm cause by its racist past beyond token gestures using Black Lives Matter slogans. Hopkins’ neighbor in Washington DC, Georgetown University offers slavery reparations. Other universities consistently demonstrate increased social consciousness that has marked the opening decades of the 21st century but doing the work to make amends.

Penn Museum and the University of Pennsylvania apologized in 2020 for the “unethical possession of human remains” in its Morton Cranial Collection. A committee formed in 2021 acknowledged the grave robbing practices that helped build UPEN in its report which also included its findings and recommendation for repair and atonement. In 2023 UPEN announced repatriation plans to have the cranium of 20 people of African descent respectfully buried .

College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s Müller Museum removed its online videos early this year seemingly walking back their promise to provide “disturbingly informed” content for thrill seekers. The removal was explained as temporary while officials contemplate policies on the continued display of people’s remains who never gave their consent.

Harvard announced the establishment of a Human Remains Returns Committee in a 2022 report to widespread support with the goal of repatriating the 3,200 skeletal and 900 fluid-preserved human remains in its museums.

At the time of publishing this article, neither Hopkins nor Yale have formed as much as a commission to study the ethics behind Cushing’s brain registry collection.

Endnotes

[1] Mortality rates for Cushings’ patients are detailed in Sellar door: Harvey Cushing’s entry into the pituitary gland, the unabridged Johns Hopkins experience 1896-1912. World Neurosurg. 2013 Feb.

[2] John Turner’s autopsy was performed without his family’s consent as directed by Cushing from Harvey Cushing, a Biography|. John F. Fulton. 1946.

[3] Upcoming in this series, The Crimes of Harvey Cushing. October 2023.

[4] The Harvey Cushing Brain Tumor Registry: Changing Scientific and Philosophic Paradigms and the Study and Preservation of Archives. Christopher Wahl. Yale University. Dissertation 1996.

[5] Mummy Autopsy Seeks Clues to Ancients’ Health. New York Times. 28 August 1975.

Next up: The Crimes of Harvey Cushing

Notes from Maryland: The Perils of Electing a “house Negro”

Determining a “real one” from a “house Negro” is no easy task.

Maryland, by virtue of being the most northern of the country’s southern states, is uniquely positioned to tackle the challenge of ascertaining the validity of one’s card, especially if that person is seeking election as representative of an oppressed people.

Since the gubernatorial election is mere weeks away pitting Dan Cox (R), who has displayed sympathy towards white supremacist ideology against neophyte Wes Moore (D) a Black graduate of Johns Hopkins, it is Baltimoreans’ solemn duty to peel back the layers on the Black man selected by primary voters to impede Cox’s path towards the state’s governorship.

Blacks are unfairly burdened by dual loyalties when attempting to navigate the minefields of combating white supremacy and pursuing political aspirations. In Wes’ case, his origin story has left him vulnerable to critique about his authenticity; Moore enjoys favorable press considering weeks before the election he has been a no-show at the candidate conference and has declined debates. He essentially is playing the I’m Black, vote for me (because the other guy is a white devil) card.

Less Is Known About Wes Moore

Westley “Wes” Watende Omari Moore, an author, motivational speaker and military veteran from the DMV (or maybe even the Bronx, but definitely not from Baltimore) is brand new to politics and has no record to stand on or defend. For someone constantly in the limelight, there is very little known about his politics or his world view beyond talking points.

The grandson of Cuban and Jamaican immigrants gained celebrity status from authoring the biographical 2010 book: The Other Wes Moore, Two Fates. Wes once aspired to be an NBA star and president when he was a teenager. He has come closer to commander and chief than lacing it up against Steph Curry. His Curry is slated to produce a feature film based on the book.

Gov Larry Hogan(R) and Candidate Wes Moore (D) 19 August 2022. Facebook Screengrab.

In 2006-07 while working as an investment banker in New York, Wes served as an assistant to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in George W. Bush’s administration. Although the selection as a White House fellow was seminal moment, Wes claims not to be beholden to either party’s ideology nor does he speak often about either Condi or W. Wes supported Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries over the eventual winner, Barack Obama.

Moore is leading in the polls, unlike the last Black man who captured the Dem’s nomination for the state’s executive chair. In the 2018 election, former head of the NAACP, Ben Jealous lost badly to incumbent Larry Hogan who greatly benefited from positive press endorsements and a lack of media scrutiny. Born in raised in California, Jealous’ mother is a native of Baltimore. Jealous’ parents, real ones by any measure, were activists in the monument city during the height of civil rights movement.

Baltimore has a proud history of laudable civil minded leaders that shepherded the city away from its Confederate-leaning roots: Rev. Harvey Johnson, Thurgood Marshall, Lillian Carroll Jackson, Juanita Mitchell, Carl Murphy, Walter P. Carter, Pete Rawlings, and Kurt Schmoke come to mind. The power couple of Willie and Victorine Adams were legendary for their realness. In comparison, Johns Hopkins surgeon and Donald Trump confident Ben Carson (a Detroit native) who Baltimore embraced like one of her own, is someone we would like to forget.

Oreo, Coon, Stepin Fetchit are some of the more incendiary terms tossed around when Blacks reach a status of visibility in established white-led institutions. Being called “house nigga” is the accusation most relevant to the Maryland experience thanks to Johns Hopkins.

Screengrab. The Atlantic January 2019 (L to R) Donald Trump, Darrell Scott, Ben Carson

HUD Secretary Ben Carson is imminently qualified to be a House Negro, but remains as unqualified as ever to lead HUD
Keith A. Owens, Michigan Chronicle, 17 August 2017

Understanding the past can help frame today’s dilemmas. When used improperly “house nigga” can be disparaging and downright disrespectful, but in Maryland’s case it’s a literal interpretation of what happened in elections in the not-so-distant past.

Maryland’s first documented political “house nigga” died in 1981 at age 91. His name was J. Alvin Jones and his grandfather, James Jones, was enslaved by the wealthiest man in the state (at that time) Johns Hopkins.

Puppet and Puppeteer

Being a Black voter is exhausting. Beyond the normal work of analyzing candidates’ platforms and separating the bluster from actual policy, Blacks have an additional burden that stems from institutions of white supremacy using Blacks as front men. It happened with J. Alvin Jones.

Because of the lack of real power afforded to minoritized people in systems dedicated to upholding white supremacy, Blacks must ascertain whether the person is authentically representing the interests of the Black community or if candidates are merely puppets and simply executing the white man’s bidding.

Ebony magazine featured J. Alvin Jones in a December 1959 article that included a photo (pictured below) of then-governor James Millard Tawes standing behind Jones casting a great shadow. The governor is pointing out a window overlooking Mount Royal station in central Baltimore where Jones’ eyes is transfixed.

The photographic depiction of “house Negro” has never been captured so clearly.

Ebony Magazine. December 1959. Google Books.

J. Alvin Jones’ single term as state senator in 1958 started under the direst of circumstances: at the behest of party bosses. Jones’ soul qualification was that he was an educated Black man that had no baggage from a previous run for office. Before party boss “Jack” Pollack spearheaded his campaign when Jones was 69 years hold, Jones had spent his adult life with patronage jobs on the federal, state, and municipal levels.

Blacks, wary of the political machine, never embraced Jones the way they did the first Black elected in 1954 Delegate Harry Cole (who preceded him) or Verda Welcome (who defeated him) who both received grassroots support. The Black voter registration drives were working.

Pollack was Baltimore’s first Jewish boss, and during the 1940s and 1950’s the city’s most powerful boss. Operating from a base in the northwest part of the city, he picked and elected candidates to the state legislature, City Council, judgeships and the judicial clerkships.
Washington Post, 18 March 1977 “Baltimore Buries Once-Powerful Boss“

Although it was not publicly reported and few Blacks likely knew in the 1960s, Jones’ grandparents had a cozy relationship with the wealthiest of white city’s financiers one hundred years prior, straight off the tobacco plantations – The man Johns Hopkins himself.

Sad. J. Alvin lost his senate seat in a contested primary that signaled the weakening of Pollack as a Democrat party boss in the city of Baltimore. The first Black woman elected, Verda Welcome denounced any association with organized political leaders suggesting any Black who did was a puppet. “I am that man’s worst enemy,” Welcome was reported as saying in a November 1, 1962 Baltimore Sun article. Morgan State University students at the gathering made it clear that any Black politician backed by Pollack or accepted the fund-raising money Irvin Koven, another leader in the city’s Jewish community, was to be distrusted.

Welcome’s enemies were more than haters, they were homicidal. Struck by two bullets, the North Carolina native, survived an assassination attempt in April 1964, midway into her first term. Five men associated with the Democratic party were charged with conspiracy to kill the woman who gathered grassroots support to obtain her seat; four were convicted. The bullet to Welcome’s back and heel certifies her “real one” status. Her tenure in the state house lasted 25 years.

So many have given so much to squander if the candidate will not be answerable to the Black community’s concerns, especially by a Black man who moves comfortably within the higher echelon of the Johns Hopkins power brokers.

Six Degrees of Johns Hopkins

J. Alvin Jones was born to John “Johnsey” Jones and Hattie Taylor on 20 November 1889. He was their only child. In 1913 he graduated from University of Pennsylvanian a private school in Philadelphia. After serving in WWI, he married Clara Baptiste of Pennsylvania and had two sons, J. Alvin Jr and Jerome. He had no known grandchildren.

His sons were not known to have served in public office, but enjoyed patronage jobs in the city. Picture below, J. B. Jones, was a city housing manager, and later oversaw the mass relocation of Black residents as part of the city’s “urban renewal” programs from his office in West Baltimore.

Jerome Baptise Jone obituary, 28 April 1970 Baltimore Sun

Straight from the Literal and Figurative Planation

Maryland’s new constitution of 1864 prohibited slavery. J Alvin’s father “Johnsey” was born a free person in 1866. J Alvin’s grandfather’s status under the new Constitution transitioned from being enslaved by multi-millionaire Johns Hopkins to being employed by him.

Clifton Mansion. The summer home of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

J Alvin’s grandfather, James Jones. was born in Virginia in about 1820. He was enslaved by the Tayloe family in Virginia and during a visit, Hopkins took a liking to James and brought him to Baltimore. James’ inclusion on the 1870 census kick-started the debate over the veracity of Hopkins’ PR machine that promotes him as an abolitionist.

Johns Hopkins, railroad magnate and banker, derived forced labor from James Jones for nearly four decades in the industrial port city of Baltimore. There were zero crops that needed harvested, only wine to be poured and dinner parties to host. Hopkins, from a family of Quakers, was wealthy enough to pay good wages for servants to run his bathwater and clean his bedsheets as he admired the artwork that adorned his Saratoga St winter home and his Clifton Mansion summer home.

1860 Federal Census for Johns Hopkins the president of Merchant Bank worth $2 million

After emancipation James stayed on as Hopkins’ servant. The city’s cantankerous bachelor banker/political influencer remembered Jones in his will with a $5000 payday in 1873 (roughly $130,000 in today’s valuation). Formerly enslaved men in Baltimore with no other marketable skill and lacking a formal education crowded almshouses or other penal institutions.

Jones, his wife Elizabeth (both identified as “mulattos”) and their children lived a quiet life in a house they owned with white eastern European immigrants as neighbors – outside of the strict racial redlines that kept Blacks in substandard housing. James continued to work as a servant/waiter up until he died in 1893.

1870 Federal Census for James Jones and wife Elizabeth, both unable to read or write

J. Alvin attended Douglas High School and later the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania school and graduated with an engineering degree. The WWI vet worked patronage-provided government jobs on the federal, state and city level before Pollack selected him to defeat Cole. Once his short-lived political career was over, Jones returned to work in a variety of civil service jobs and generally lived the remainder of his life in obscurity.

The year he died, 1981, the grandson of the former enslaved man from Virginia had truly moved on up as he lived and died in a high-rise apartment in the Charles Village area, a stone’s throw from Johns Hopkins University.

“All skin folks ain’t kin folk”
Melanated peoples since forever

Annapolis has been influenced by those with white supremacists’ ideals since the days before, during, and after Johns Hopkins wielded extreme political power that resulted in a hospital and university in his honor. The path to Annapolis is littered with the Black names discarded by the machine they served: Catherine Pugh, Cheryl Glenn, Nathaniel Oaks, are the most recent casualties. The ethics surrounding Gov Larry Hogan’s questionable, but lucrative business dealings have mostly gone unexamined.

Calling out Frauds

To catapult his name recognition, Wes Moore benefited from people believing he was a “Baltimore native.” Who could not pull for a troubled Black boy of a single mom succeeding despite the challenges posed by being educated in the city’s public schools during in the 1980s crack era? The problem is, he never went to school in Baltimore. Forever on the wrong side of history, The Baltimore Sun editorial board’s stance is that there ought to be more Wes Moores.

Wes Moore, pictured in front of the city landscape where he was not born and raised.

Moore, the author/candidate let the lie stand because he wanted to be seen as a “real one” like the other Wes Moore that he wrote about. Moore calculated ways to avoid suffering the fate as J Alvin Jones. Moore’s gamble is to present himself as a man of the people without having a rigorous debate where he faces the people. Moore declined Morgan State University’s invitation to debate. A single debate is scheduled for October 12th.

Black Republican Trump supporter Herman Cain famously embraced the term “house Negro” and urged author/candidate Ben Carson to do so as well. This followed an opinion published in a Michigan paper shaming Carson as a House Negro who ” forfeited the well-earned status of a brilliant medical career” to gain proximity to power. Cuba Gooding, Jr portrayed Carson in the Hollywood production of his book “Gifted Hands”.

“If being called a ‘house Negro’ is what some of us must endure for succeeding in this nation and thinking for ourselves, then let all of the ‘house Negroes’ stand up and be counted,” – wrote Herman Cain, Black Republican and Donald Trump supporter
Taryn Finley, HuffingtonPost.com 2017

Who gets to rise to the top in Maryland politics may not be groveling for anointment by the party bosses of yesteryear (to be sure the Curran family of old Baltimore still has weight today). In some ways not knowing who may be pulling the strings is even more disconcerting. Diligence in discovering to whom Black leaders may be beholden must remain a priority.

The struggle is real. All Marylanders, regardless of race, religion, or socio-economic status deserve more than someone competent in maneuvering amongst the power elite. If the first Black Governor does not pledge to dismantle the systems of white supremacy, he will be remembers only as the most recent in a long line of house Negroes.