does everyone in New York NOT know who Dr. Thomas Matthew is?
Before moving forward, this question is meant for New Yorkers with a history, not the new blood who stumbled onto this place in the past few decades. With that…..
Around the time production began on the Cinemax/Soderbergh project, “The Knick,” I was researching the doctor who saved my life in 1962.
After glancing at photos of Greenwich Village that they were using as lower Manhattan, I found out the subject of my study was born in the real Knickerbocker Hospital on Convent Ave. and 131st Street and played a surprisingly unknown but important role in the city’s black history.
He was the son of a maintenance man who worked at Knickerbocker Hospital and what’s more, he was born in the basement there because black people were not permitted in Knickerbocker Hospital as patients….in Harlem. Imagine that.
“The Knick,” did do one thing. It’s given me a chance to speak about an historic Afro-American New Yorker who needs to be talked about. His name is Dr. Thomas Matthew.
(I’ll be using the word “black,” in historical context, as you’ll see in the accompanying links at the end.)
He was the first black graduate from both the Bronx High School of Science and Manhattan College. He followed this with the decision to take up medicine and became the first black neurosurgeon in the United States. In 1956, he became the head of neurosurgery at Coney Island Hospital, another first. That’s where we met and for some reason, our lives would intersect over the next decade and he’ll remain on my mind until now, forty-two years later. Dr. Matthew would be investigated, tried and convicted of tax evasion by the IRS in 1969 and pardoned by the President of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon in January 1970 in his first act of executive clemency. Six months later, he would board a boat with a group of activists, seize Ellis Island in New York harbor (we call it “occupied” now) and get away with it…and there’s more!
Yet, no one knows who he is, so here goes;
On January 22nd, 1962, I was an eight-year-old latch-key kid in his first year — third grade, second semester — in St. Edmund’s Catholic School, located on Avenue T and East 19th street in the Sheepshead Bay area of Brooklyn.
Since our move to East 17th street, it seemed a good idea to incorporate me into the same school where my older brothers were enrolled. Before then, I was in public school and very happy to be there. I”ll always wonder what was on my mind after the lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise sandwich I had for lunch that day. Maybe I was pining for Anita, now unattainable and unknowable, five blocks south at PS 153, my memory receding in her curly-haired brain and heart, but whatever it was, when I reached the corner of Avenue T at East 17th street to cross, the screech of a car’s brakes to my left, caused me to bend at the knees in order to brace myself.
Impact and flight are two pieces of irretrievable information from that day, but my life’s data-recorder reconnected as I found myself on the pavement, rising to my feet and standing, then looking for the book I was carrying. Walking over to where it lay, I heard a woman begin to scream, “He’s bleeding….HE’S BLEEDING!”
I focused on picking up the book, then realized a crowd gathered around the woman, who was directly in front of me on the far corner of the avenue I was trying to cross. Everything was all so confusing. Why was I here?
‘HE’S BLEEDING,” she cried, pointing at me. I said, “I’m ok. I have to go to school.” I felt no pain, something I would learn was common with head trauma. I was in the “shock bubble,” because my muted sense of self was un-alarmed, but it sure looked like I was getting a lot of attention. There were people on both corners and in the street in front of me now. Everyone looked worried or confused and I’m sure they were talking, but their voices were garbled, like speaking underwater. That is, except for the “HE’S BLEEDING,” lady.
Glancing behind me and to my left, the Chevrolet that probably struck me was stopped and the driver was staring at me from his open window. No cars were passing in any direction and more people were appearing in my view, but no one came near me. “I’m ok. I have to go to school,” I repeated out loud. Maybe these were the only words I knew now. I heard sirens. The green, white and black Plymouth police car, with the single cherry-light flashing on top, arrived almost immediately, no doubt due to its proximity from the station. The cop on the passenger-side of the car climbed out and removed his winter-police coat.
Approaching me, he asked, “Are you ok?” “I have to go to school,” I said and turned to walk in that direction.
“Kid, I really think you need to go to the hospital,” he said and before I knew it, he was simultaneously wrapping one of the heavy coat sleeves around my head with his left arm while corralling, lifting and holding me against his chest with his right arm, carrying me to the now-open rear passenger-side door of the police car.
I struggled, all the while repeating, “I have to go to school.”
Tears hadn’t found their way out of me until my hand discovered that the dark blue coat sleeve wrapped around my head was soaked with blood. The struggling ended and I began to go away, right then and there. The cop was talking to me, maybe to keep me awake. I don’t remember what he said.
Then I was rolling somewhere on a gurney. Ceiling tiles and fluorescent fixtures passed above me, then for a second, I saw the faces of my parents appear at my right, but the wheels kept moving me forward. I can still recall their faces when I passed them, but can’t put words to their expressions.
Then I remember a mask being placed over my nose and mouth and a voice telling me, “now, count backwards from….,” but never got to the number.
Three or four days later, my mother told me I was in Coney Island Hospital and was in a bad accident with a car and a big part of my skull was gone, so I shouldn’t touch my head, “even if it’s itchy.” She said more motherly things, too, and the thought of these make me emotional even now, a half-century later. Then a moustachioed, bowtie-wearing black man appeared before me, probably snatching up the clipboard hanging at the foot of my bed. Doctors always snatch clipboards when they enter a patient’s room, don’t they?
“The young have extraordinary recuperative powers,” Dr. Matthew said, as he looked around my eyes and ears, then concentrated on the very soft, stitched-together area above my left ear, as my mother looked on. His main concern was swelling or infection. He had a kind, reassuring manner, smile….and that bowtie.
Race is not an issue to an eight-year old, but the doctor would be a powerful *asterisk* in my mind. It was one of the nurses who told me I was lucky to be alive because he was in the halls and not his office in Manhattan. “Good thing the number-two neurosurgeon in the United States was there,” may have been her words. After a few weeks, he told me about the next operation and how he was going to put a metal plate over the hole in my head. “Ok,” I said and that’s what he did at Lefferts General Hospital. After a series of post-op visits, first weekly, then monthly, our business was over.
I thought that would be the end of our relationship, but the fates re-joined us in 1967 when two IRS agents came to the door and asked to speak to my parents. It was just past dinnertime. My mother and father spoke to the men in the kitchen. They were investigating Dr. Matthew’s tax filings for the years 1961, 62 and 63. They were building a case against him for tax evasion and wanted our medical billing records. As my mother walked to the hutch in the dining room where these records were stored, I followed her and asked, “Mom, do we have to do this? He saved my life.” She had the gray-metal strongbox that held these papers in her hand and rested it on the dining room table. Putting her hand on my shoulder, she turned me around and we walked back into the kitchen.
“My son wants to know if we HAVE to give you this information. You know, Dr. Matthew saved his life and to do this, he feels, is an act of betrayal and frankly, I agree with him.” One of the agents replied, “At the moment, this is only an investigation and we have a lot more people to interview, so no, you aren’t required to give this to us, but in the event we do proceed in a case against him and require this information, we’ll return with a subpoena and you’ll be required by law to hand it over.” He turned to me and said, “fair?”
“Ok,” I answered.
“I guess you were a pretty lucky kid,” he said.
“Yeah, I was,” and awkwardly pointed at my skull above the left ear, long-ago covered by my lengthening hair, adding self-consciously, “he put a plate in my head.”
That was all I had.
In late 1969, Dr. Thomas Matthew was convicted of failing to report his income for the years explained in the indictment and in late November, sent to a federal lockup in Danbury, Connecticut to serve a six-month sentence, but in January 1970, Richard Milhous Nixon, in his first act of Executive Clemency, pardoned him on the grounds that he did not enrich himself with the money he was supposed to have given to the government, rather, he organized a non-profit called N.E.G.R.O. (National Economic Growth and Reorganization Corporation) and invested it in establishing small business opportunities in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
At the time, this was the largest minority self-help program in the country and in the coming years, would launch the opening of Interfaith Hospital, the first minority-owned-and-operated hospital in the country.
Nixon knew and admired Dr. Matthew since 1966, when he was introduced to him by Pat Buchanan while they were practicing law in New York and even mentioned him in speeches as an example of “black capitalism” when he was running for the presidency in 1968.
Now, in 1970, the capitalist/activist was considered an asset in helping get a percentage of the black vote in the coming presidential reelection in 1972. This was when the Republican Party courted minorities and understood that there was value in social programs. Nixon would be considered a dangerous progressive compared to the current Republican party and even much of the Democratic party. Imagine that. Pat Buchanan, Nixon’s NY law-partner, has since gone so far to the right, he’s lost his talking-head air-time on the networks and cable news except for occasional spots on Fox and the scarier talk-radio hosts. I would also venture to guess that he doesn’t frequent many soul-food restaurants these days.
Months after the the January 1970 pardon, Dr. Matthew went on a quixotic adventure. He held the idea that the only thing separating welfare recipients, addicts, alcoholics and prostitutes was rehabilitation and a job. Dignity. In July of that year, after filing papers with the Dept. of the Interior and the National Park Service, he alerted the press that he would be leading a group of men and women to seize Ellis Island and did so, for a period of two weeks. It was a publicity stunt aimed at talking about his plan. He drummed up enough support to get the states of New York and New Jersey to allow him to set up a therapeutic community of people who would renovate the grounds and work in concessions bankrolled by the state and fed, living in housing located away from the tourist area.
For a host of reasons, it didn’t work.
By that winter, the project was falling apart due to health and plumbing issues, dispirited addicts and drunks, as well as the Fed’s decision to pull the island’s restoration funds. The science of rehabilitation was still developing and it proved badly here. In the following two years, similar unravelings began to happen with his small businesses and he had to perform patchwork-financial surgeries to keep them afloat.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -
In February 1971, my brother and his wife went to Brooklyn Hospital to have a baby. The following day, I went to visit my new niece. After spending time with my sister-in-law and her child, as I was leaving, I passed the Hospital Directory of the officers and administrators. The name Dr. Thomas Matthew leaped out at me. I walked to the hospital’s offices. I was an 18 year old high-school senior with long hair. I approached the receptionist/secretary and asked, “Excuse me, but I noticed the name Dr. Thomas Matthew in the directory. I’d like to know if that’s Dr. Matthew, the neurosurgeon.”
The woman smiled and said, “Why, yes.”
“This might sound strange, but in 1962 he saved my life. Is there a chance I could see him?”
“Let me see if he’s busy.”
I was directed to a frosted-glass door. I knocked cautiously and heard his voice beckon me in. No sooner did I open the door, I heard him say, “Stephen! Look at you! You’re still here!” as he rose and welcomed me in. He remembered me like I was there last month. At this time, I was unaware that his world was falling apart. The conversation was casual, with me telling him about becoming an uncle and explaining how I saw his name by chance, which led to this moment. I had no desire to discuss his pardon, which made Daily News headlines and forgot about the Ellis Island story. All I had was an overwhelming desire to thank him again for being in Coney Island Hospital that day in 1962.
After a few minutes, he walked me out of his office and told his secretary about me. It was a good moment for all of us. A year later, I would read about another series of legal and financial misfortunes; things that would, for all intents and purposes, ruin him. He was indicted and convicted of a battery of SBA and Medicaid crimes, though he insisted he was the victim of character assassination. He admitted to shoddy bookkeeping and diverting funds to plug financial leaks, but to outright thievery, never. This was happening as Watergate was closing in on the Nixon Administration and Democratic investigations were exacting a lot of political pounds of flesh because of it. It’s how American politics work.
From a segregated birth in the Knickerbocker Hospital basement to the first recorded black graduate of both the Bronx High School of Science and Manhattan College, then onto becoming the first black neurosurgeon in the United States of America, Dr. Thomas Matthew may have been as bad a businessman as he was brilliant a student and doctor. For what I knew about him personally, it clearly wasn’t in his nature to be a crook. That yoke was to be worn by the President. Naive and foolish maybe, but not a criminal.
Not with those ties.
by june, 2020 — Then…….this happened;
over the years since posting this, i was contacted by an Atlanta, GA historian by the name of Nassir Mohammed who explained the ties to me.
Dr. Matthew saved the life of one of Elija Mohammad’s security detail in an assassination attempt……this tells me where he was and who he was listening to in the early 1960s.
How about that! A secret hero. Yup.
If Tricky Dick and Pat Buchanan knew then…….
maybe he would have lost the 1968 election……..if.
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Segregated Knickerbocker Hospital;
Bronx High School of Science mention;
http://www.bxscience.edu/history.jsp\
Ellis Island Plan story/opinion;
Photo/interview at Ellis Island;
http://www.corbisimages.com/stock-photo/rights-managed/42-23114444/dr-thomas-matthew
NBC film story — Matthew discusses N.E.G.R.O. — no access;
http://www.nbcuniversalarchives.com/nbcuni/clip/5112472105_s01.do
San Francisco Chronicle, 1973
http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/White%20Materials/Nixon%20Administration/Nixon%203780.pdf
Sarasota Herald Tribune — Black “Tom Paine” Doctor Founders in Red Ink; 1974
