What Color Is Death?

When a flu epidemic hit Georgia in 1938, it felled the only available white doctor in Jasper and Putnam counties, left hundreds of his rural patients with one hard-to-swallow recourse. They had to call on gentle Dr. Frederick D. Funderburg, a Negro physician. Working virtually around the clock, Dr. Funderburg attended as many as 60 white patients a day, succeeded in checking the epidemic.

Convinced of his skill, grateful whites have been calling on him ever since with all sorts of ailments. The relationship between a Negro doctor and white Georgians was awkward at first, but Dr. Funderburg's competence has won him respect. Now 57, he shuttles busily between modest frame offices in both counties, where whites wait their turn along with Negroes. Among white people who visit him regularly are a bank official, a school teacher, several members of prominent Georgia families.

With a new flu season, Dr. Funderburg was not the only Negro who was overcoming prejudice with skill. Many a white Southerner, unable to get his regular doctor, was turning to a Negro for help.

Tall, spare Dr. Joseph B. Gilbert, 47, who practices in Georgia's Franklin and Hart counties, got his start in 1937. He was asked to see a 60-year-old victim of pneumonia whose white doctor was ill. Frightened but confident, Dr. Gilbert pulled his patient through. He has since treated whites continually, delivered eight white babies.

In the little aristocratic town of Beaufort, S.C., brisk, 46-year-old Dr. Montgomery P. Kennedy has been at it even longer. A specialist in obstetrics, he handled his first white case--a woman with post-childbirth hemorrhage--in 1930. He estimates that he has since delivered 85 white babies. With the local white doctors, he says he gets along "just fine, except for one Connecticut Yankee."

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