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To Bear Fruit For Our Race College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences

Dr. John Edward Perry

Photo of Dr. John Edward Perry

Dr. J. Edward Perry, c.1947.(Courtesy of Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library)

Dr. J.E. Perry was born April 2, 1870, in Clarksville, Texas. Both of his parents had been slaves. Dr. Perry graduated from Bishop College in Marshall, Texas in 1891, and later, in 1931, his alma mater conferred an Honorary Degree upon him. He received his M.D. degree in 1895 from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. Dr. Perry spent the following two years as a general practitioner in Mexico, Missouri and Columbia, Missouri. Despite negative racial attitudes of instructors and students, he enrolled in the Post-Graduate Medical School in Chicago, which he attended from 1897 until 1898. Dr. Perry spent the next nearly 50 years practicing general medicine in Columbia and Kansas City, Missouri. Although Dr. J.E. Perry spent the bulk of his career as a physician in Missouri, he played an important role in the Houston black medical community through his dedicated service as the executive director of the Houston Negro Hospital in the late 1940s.

Dr. Perry, called “Dr. J.E.” by his colleagues, was the moving force behind the black hospital movement in the central Midwest United States, especially in Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri. Dr. Perry’s main concern was provision of adequate hospitals, both for black patients and for training of black physicians. It was his experience in Chicago, of being ignored because he was a black man in a white institution that gave Dr. Perry the conviction that black hospitals were necessary both for service and professional development. He wrote, “If we as a race ever possess a large number of professional men of a high degree of efficiency, they will have to be developed in Negro hospitals. I am leaving here [Chicago] to build a hospital and dedicate my life to the service of young men, so that they may not meet the embarrassments and handicaps as it has been mine to experience.” Dr. Perry took his hardship and turned it into an incredible contribution to the African-American community in Kansas City and eventually, Houston.

On November 1, 1910 he founded the Perry Sanitarium in an old house in Kansas City. The sanitarium was renamed Wheatley-Provident Hospital in 1915 and Dr. Perry served as its superintendent for twenty years, from 1910 until 1930, when he was honored with the title of superintendent-emeritus of this institution. “The health of my people still weighed heavy on my heart,” Dr. Perry said about his reasons for creating Wheatley-Provident. After proving that the health of the entire black community in Kansas City was seriously affected by the lack of health service available to them, Dr. Perry and his co-workers finally received a grant from the city and laid the groundwork for a municipal hospital exclusively for blacks. From 1911 to 1929, Dr. Perry guided the process of developing an all black staff to take over the hospital in its entirety; the black staff received direction until they were determined competent to replace the instructors. For 31 years, 1910 to 1941, he was also chief of surgical service at Kansas City’s General Hospital No. 2, another black hospital in the city.

After 50 years of outstanding work in the field of medicine in Kansas City, pioneering for the health needs of the black population there, Dr. Perry, at the age of 76, came out of retirement to take charge of the Houston Negro Hospital in March 1947. Although he served in this position for only a few years, the hospital made great progress during his tenure. Addressing his goals as the hospital’s executive, he commented, “There is so much to be done in a city that will have such a great medical center as Houston plans. Here at the Houston Negro Hospital our beginning is humble, but through hard work will bear fruit for our race.” Through Dr. J.E. Perry’s dedicated efforts, the hospital became accredited and affiliated with Baylor College of Medicine.

In February 1952, the Houston Negro Chamber of Commerce honored Dr. Perry with a life membership as a tribute for his hard work and perseverance at the Houston Negro Hospital. Dr. Perry held several other leadership positions throughout his life and career, including 24th president of the National Medical Association in 1923, and board member of Lincoln University in Missouri (1921-1941) and Meharry Medical College (1936-1956). He received the first “Distinguished Service Award” for “meritorious achievement” from the National Medical Association in 1941, and in 1947 he published his autobiography, Forty Cords of Wood: Memoirs of a Medical Doctor. He was also instrumental in developing the Kansas City Y.M.C.A. Dr. J.E. Perry was widowed in 1943 and remarried four years later; with his first wife, he had one child, Dr. Eugene B. Perry, who became a surgeon and practiced in Houston. Dr. J.E. lived a long life of untiring service to the black community, constantly working to provide adequate health care to as many people in need as possible. He died in Houston in May 1962 when he was 92.

On the occasion of Dr. Perry’s retirement from practicing medicine in 1945, after 50 years of service, his friend and colleague, John A. Kenney, made a tribute in his honor. He called him, “a Negro-American who despite the handicaps of race and poverty lifted himself by his own bootstraps to respected prominence in the medical profession, and American civilization.” He continued saying, “Measured by any kind of a yardstick, Dr. J. Edward Perry is a true American citizen: one in whom not only his fellow Negro-Americans may take pride, but one who has risen above race to that higher station, which but for the traditional color phobia would give him rank with the leaders in American life.”

 

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