Psychiatry, Integration, and Civil Rights
Arnold Richards recalls living and working in the 1960s American South
Courtesy IPBooks. Cover art: Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Quatre espaces à croix brisée, 1932, Musée national d'art moderne.
A psychoanalyst, author, and former editor of both TAP and the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA), Arnold Richards has had an accomplished career. Richards shares his story in his memoir Unorthodox: My Life in and Outside Psychoanalysis (IPBooks, 2023), with colorful input from his wife Arlene Kramer Richards, also a psychoanalyst, and other family members. The following excerpt details the start of Richards’ career in the early 1960s against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement in the US South.
My clinical experience began at the Petersburg Federal Reformatory [in Virginia], where from 1962 to 1964 I was the chief medical officer and chief psychiatrist. … When I arrived at this southern reformatory in 1962, it was segregated by race but, at the beginning of my second year, it was integrated. Robert F. Kennedy, in charge of the Federal Bureau of Prisons as US attorney general, decreed that all federal prisons be integrated. I met with the staff members in small groups to help them deal with the change. This was during a time of high tension in America, and not just because of the civil rights struggle. The Cuban missile crisis happened while we were in Petersburg; what I remember is the sound of army trucks going by. So what was remarkable to me was how smoothly integration occurred. We accomplished the transition in a single day, even though the move was not popular with the staff or, especially, the inmates, both of which groups included many redneck southerners. I was at Petersburg on November 22, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I was horrified that both inmates and staff expressed approval of the murder. The inmate who worked in my office openly celebrated. These people hated both Jack and Bobby because of their push for integration.
[My wife] Arlene remembers her shock at the realities of life in the Jim Crow South: “I used to have a way of dealing with moving,” she says. “I’d get a babysitter for a whole day, go down to a department store, and buy all the things one needs for a new place. Curtains, curtain rods, picture hooks, all kinds of things. Do it all in one day. So I went to the department store in Petersburg—it had all the stuff I needed. About halfway through the day, I needed to use the ladies’ room. So I got to the front and saw a sign that said ‘Women.’ But as I went toward it, a saleslady pulled me by the back of my neck and said, ‘That’s not for you. You have to go to the third floor where it says ‘Ladies.’ This one’s for the colored.’ So they didn’t have to say ‘Colored’ and ‘White,’ they said ‘Ladies’ and ‘Women.’ And then I noticed there were separate drinking fountains, which did say ‘Colored’ and ‘White.’ There were all kinds of segregated facilities throughout Petersburg. We were both disgusted with this, but we had to be there for two years. It was the least bad possibility of all the choices we had. I mean, Arnie could have been a conscientious objector and gone to jail. That wouldn’t have been too fun. He could have gone to Vietnam and not be with the three kids at home, and that wouldn’t have been fun either. Neither of us believed in the Vietnam War, so that would have been very uncomfortable. This was the best possibility. To stay in the public health service and to stay at the prison.”
“They were suspicious of us Jews from the North. They thought we were masquerading as Americans.”—Arlene Richards
We had a nice little house, on prison grounds, in a lovely setting with an alley of dogwoods. The prisoners were adolescents, not older hardened criminals. And this was a desirable place to be for them—at least by comparison. The idea was, if you steal a car, you take it across state lines, so instead of going to a state prison, where conditions were horrible, you go to a federal prison where you get three meals a day and learn to recap tires and finish furniture. The federal prisons were, relative to the state institutions, country clubs.
Still, the environment presented issues for our young family. “Living on prison grounds,” says Arlene, “we were near a big tower, with guns, a big fence, and a very active little boy who always wanted to climb the fence. But it was electrified, so I was scared all the time.” …
“I remember at least one day when our mom said a prisoner escaped so we have to stay in the house all day,” recalls [our daughter] Rebecca. “I think she did a very good job at keeping us sheltered. I never felt like somebody was going to come in and get me. I just thought this was inconvenient: Why do we have to stay inside? I didn’t really think a prisoner was going to come and shoot us. And there was the fact that my dad was working with them. I have vague memories of his talking about the prisoners and how he was helping them. And how they needed help. He said that some of them had committed a crime because they felt they had a better life in prison. They got fed and they got housed. My dad worked there and I thought, ‘Well, he’s fine. He comes home every day and he’s fine.’ My visualization was, these were not bad people in prison, because my dad somehow conveyed that. I mean, if he was a psychiatrist and he was there to help them, it implied to me that there was something good in them that could be helped.”
“The warden was a neighbor,” says Arlene, “and the assistant warden, and the psychologist, and a few of the senior guards. One of the guards had young children—our kids played with those children, and that was quite uncomfortable, because they were ardent segregationists. Very southern, very White, very Christian, and they always tried to convert. Especially Rebecca. They were suspicious of us Jews from the North. They thought we were masquerading as Americans.”
“The warden had the biggest house,” says [our son] Stephen. “We had the next biggest house. Then there were a number of other smaller houses for soldiers from Fort Lee. Along with the children of these men, we used to play soldiers incessantly. We had our own platoon; I had the rank of corporal. We played two sorts of games. One was war games, pretending to be soldiers—US soldiers, Korean soldiers. Also, we’d recreate Civil War battles with toy soldiers, with elaborate settings that we’d make out of mud and whatever. From that period onward I was interested in the Civil War. There were a lot of political discussions around the dinner table. In Virginia, I began to read on my own. I’d read late at night. Because I was put to bed at nine o’clock, and I didn’t like to go to sleep so early, I would read by dim light whatever book I had. My parents gave me The Complete Sherlock Homes at age eight. My mother was very good at reading to us. At a later point, she read the entire Lord of the Rings to us, all three volumes,” Stephen says. …
I even developed a small private practice. I was approached by someone from Virginia Union University, a local Black institution, as to whether I would be interested in seeing some of its students. These young people were experiencing problems both in school performance and in relationships, particularly with their families, who expected too much of them. In the segregated South, many of these students carried a massive burden, representing their entire family’s hope that they would succeed and help everyone advance. I saw the students at our home.
Arlene explained that … considering what had happened to their people in Europe, they she had to stand up for people suffering here in America.
We tried to invite Harry Golden, the editor of the Carolina Israelite and well known as an anti-segregationist, to give a talk at our local synagogue. “Harry Golden was a really good Jewish columnist, who wrote the Carolina Israelite, a newsletter that went out to Jews of the South,” Arlene says. “The newsletter was pro-integration. I went to our rabbi and said, ‘We want to invite Harry Golden. He will speak, and we will, of course, pay for his accommodations and his travel. But we need a venue, and we would like to use the synagogue for the venue.’ And the rabbi said, ‘As long as you don’t bring any of your nigger friends.’”
“I was aghast,” Arlene says. “And we never did get a place. He never came.”
Added to the bigotry was fear. The rabbi and members of the congregation were afraid that inviting Golden to speak might cause local White gentiles to boycott Jewish-owned stores.
“There was really a split in the Jewish community over this issue,” says Arlene. We belonged to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and met Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr.’s right-hand man.
This was the time of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality), a time of sit-ins and demonstrations as Black Americans fought for their civil rights. When Arlene and I first got to Petersburg we, along with Ebba and Bill Kossick, organized an art show at the local teachers college, in which the paintings of White artists and Black artists hung side-by-side. “We rented a store in town,” Arlene says, “and had an art show with Black painters and White painters, a Black ceramicist, and Ebba, who was a White weaver. The show was a scandal because it was integrated.”
That’s what those two years were about. The fight against segregation. The assassination of John F. Kennedy. The desegregation of the prisons by Robert F. Kennedy. A lot of change.
Arlene worked at Richard Bland College, a local junior college, teaching reading and study skills. She said, “It was part of William and Mary University. I did essentially the same thing I had done in Kansas. By then I had a curriculum, because I’d been doing it already for two years, and I had a very nice group of students. It was all fine.”
The morning of August 28, 1963, Arlene got up early and went to the Gillfield Baptist Church, whose pastor, Wyatt Tee Walker, was a founder of SCLC and MLK’s chief of staff. Arlene and Sheldon Elster, the Fort Lee Virginia Jewish chaplain, were the only White people on the bus to D.C. for the March on Washington. “The Black people on the bus,” she recalls, “were extremely suspicious of why this White lady and White man were getting on the bus.” Arlene explained that she and Sheldon were Jewish and that, considering what had happened to their people in Europe, they she had to stand up for people suffering here in America. So she was on the Mall and heard Martin Luther King. I wish I could have been there, but members of uniformed services aren’t allowed to participate in political gatherings.
“There was a feeling of exhilaration by the end of the day,” says Arlene. “And the ride home was great fun. Everyone was exhausted, but singing, and having a good time. The whole day felt historic. Every moment of it felt like something new was being born. And it was. Something new was happening.”
Arlene also had one private pupil, a boy named Jobo Riddle whom Arlene was able to help with his trouble learning and reading. Jobo belonged to a family listed in what were called the First Families of Virginia, the White Virginia social elite.
“I had volunteer-tutored at the Bolingbrook Country Day School, where our kids went,” Arlene recalls. “There was a little boy there in the third grade, Jobo Riddle, and Jobo couldn’t read. His father was a doctor and the family were business people. They all had advanced degrees and everything, and here they had this child who by third grade still hadn’t learned to read. And they were very worried about him. (He’s now a surgeon.) I volunteered to teach him to read. And after about a year, he was reading on grade level and beyond, and he was starting to read newspapers (most newspapers are written on a fourth-grade level). His grandmother, the matriarch of the family and the grand lady of the town, invited me to tea as a thank you for having done this wonder for her grandson. I had to say, ‘I’m so sorry Mrs. Riddle, but that’s the day I’m marching on Washington.’ And she did not bat an eyelash. She said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry dear. Would the following Wednesday do?’ So I went to tea at Mrs. Riddle’s house. You have to know, tea in the South is the most intimate thing: You could have a business lunch and you could have a political dinner, but tea is where you invite your sister or your sister-in-law, your daughter-in-law, your second cousin—but no one more distant than that. Tea is really a time for the closest people in your life. It was a very elegant tea and I was totally overwhelmed. She asked me about the March on Washington, and I told her. And she was fine with it, unlike my rabbi. I guess she was not afraid. She had nothing to lose.”
We met many community physicians in Petersburg. We connected with members of the Jewish community, and some Protestants such as the Kossicks, our partners in the integrated art exhibit. Ebba was a student, Bill was in the army at Ft. Lee. Ebba learned to weave; they later left Petersburg and moved to Maine, opening the Weave Shop in the town of North Deer Isle. We visited them in Maine and bought a house nearby. These doctors were anxious that we stay in Petersburg so that I could practice psychiatry there. The medical community in general was concerned that segregation discouraged competent physicians from moving to Petersburg.
“We were trying to make life as normal as possible,” says Arlene. “So we found a synagogue at Fort Lee, Virginia, and we went there. They didn’t have a Sunday school. So I found a Sunday school in Petersburg and took our son, Stephen, there on Sunday mornings, so that he should know that there were other Jewish children in the world. Because there weren’t any in the place where we lived, and there weren’t many in town altogether—I think there was one other Jewish child in his elementary school. I taught for two years at the little Sunday school. It wasn’t really a Hebrew school. They did the Bible and stuff, but they didn’t teach the language. And the kids just loved my class, because I was by then a professional teacher, and I knew how to make things fun for kids and how to make them want to learn. They’d always go home with projects they’d done in school, so the parents were pleased.”
While we were in Petersburg, the public schools had been shut down before because of integration. In response, a group of residents, professional people, started a private school which they called the Bolingbrook Country Day School. “Only White kids were allowed to go there,” recalls Arlene. “And we were in a dilemma, because we knew we weren’t going to stay in Petersburg forever, but our kids would have to go to school somewhere that year. Otherwise, Stephen, who was a very lively, not to say hyperactive, child, would be home with me all day. How could I entertain him?”
With no place else to send our son Stephen and daughter Rebecca, we sent them to this segregated private school—third grade for Stephen, first for Rebecca, who was born in Baltimore in 1958. I was elected the chair of the Parent Teachers Association for the entire school and chaired the meetings. Why I was chosen for this honor was a mystery, given that the school was formed, in part, to isolate children from integration, which Arlene and I so deeply believed in. I suppose they selected me because I was a physician.
“The other interesting thing about our time in Virginia was,” says Arlene, “the second summer we were there, we sent Stephen to a camp in Ashville, North Carolina, called Blue Star. With a white flag featuring a six-pointed blue star as its emblem, it was a camp for all the Jewish kids in the South to meet each other, so that they could know other Jewish kids. They were in so many small towns in the South. There were department stores run by people who had been peddlers and settled down in these towns, often becoming quite wealthy, Nieman Marcus being the prime example. Lots of such stores in lots of such places. When we went to the camp to visit Stephen, he asked us not to park in the parking lot, because we were the only ones who didn’t drive a Cadillac.
“Still, he got along well and liked the camp, and they liked him. It was a really good experience for him. And it was a very good experience for me, because then I didn’t have to worry about his climbing the electric fence.”
So, in numerous ways I did become involved in the Petersburg community and did, briefly, consider remaining there. Members of the Jewish community wanted me to stay. But I decided that my professional career path needed to be pursued elsewhere.
This excerpt is edited and condensed.Published August 2024