Thomas Embittered by Blalock’s Racial Rejection

In 1960, an extravagant celebration for Dr. Blalock was planned by Hopkins and its surgeons. For the dinner event with hundreds of invited guests, they chose Baltimore’s Southern Hotel as their venue. This hotel, as its name implies, was despised by Black Baltimoreans due to its unceasing discrimination against them. The Southern doormen even harassed Black pedestrians to cross the street rather than walk on its city sidewalk. However, economic pressure from professional sports teams and employee groups attending conferences eventually forced the Southern Hotel, by 1960, to serve Black guests in their dining rooms if they were greatly outnumbered by white people (and did not spend the night at the hotel).

The party’s organizing committee members noticed that Clara and Vivien Thomas’s names were not on the invitation list. When the planners realized that Mr. Thomas’s name was missing, they sent an emissary to ask Dr. Blalock about including Vivien Thomas. It’s “simply something that isn’t done,” said Blalock, referring to a Black couple dining with white people.

The party committee approached him two times about his exclusion of Thomas, to no avail. Making matters worse, the group sent a member to tell Mr. Thomas that if he entered through the Southern Hotel’s kitchen door, he “would be allowed” to hide unseen in the back of the room. Then, he could watch the white guests eat dinner (five courses) and listen to everyone’s speeches. (This photo shows the dinner celebration.) To camouflage Blalock’s racially based exclusion, Thomas was inaccurately informed that it was the Southern’s policy not to allow Blacks inside the dining rooms.

When he heard this plan, the usually tightly controlled Vivien Thomas lost his temper. He shouted that no policy at the Southern Hotel prohibited him or his wife from participating and he turned down “their kind invitation,” as he sarcastically phrased it, to enter through the hotel’s back door. This party was the catalyst that triggered Thomas’s seething resentment at Blalock, at the surgeons he’d trained and at Johns Hopkins University. As a bitter Thomas later wrote, “Hopkins wasn’t ready. It was only 1960 and I had only been there a little over twenty years.”