Committee on Human Relations formed
In 1954, following a week-long series of articles in The Pottstown Mercury about racial discrimination in Pottstown, a group of concerned citizens met at a local restaurant to form a Committee on Human Relations.
The group, which eventually numbered 22, elected Dr. Daniel Lee, a young Black physician who lived on Walnut Street, as its chairman.
After meeting for several months, they wrote the “Pottstown Plan” to encourage racial integration in all aspects of the borough.
In February 1955, a brochure promoting the plan was mailed to more than 10,000 residents in Pottstown and the surrounding area.
The plan asked every organization “to take ‘a first step’ together in a march against discrimination wherever and in whatever form it might be found.”
The plan was endorsed by numerous churches, the president of the Pottstown School Board, the president of Borough Council, the board of directors of Pottstown’s Memorial Hospital, and many civic groups.
Each group was asked to pick a project and report it to committee members, whose names were printed in the brochure.
The Mercury pledged to write a news article about each initiative.
The Pottstown YWCA hired a young Black woman, Mary Banks, as its secretary. (She went on to a distinguished career, retiring as a supervisor for the state Department of Welfare and serving on the boards of numerous non-profit organizations in Pottstown. She died in 2013.)
Girl Scout Troop 242 of Zion’s Reformed Church invited members of the all-Black Bethany Center Girl Scout Troop to join them in an annual Easter Egg Hunt.
But if other groups took integration initiatives, they were not reported by The Mercury.
Meanwhile, the Committee on Human Relations lost its sparkplug in April 1955, when Dr. Lee was commissioned a captain in the U.S. Army and assigned to Fort Sam Houston in Texas for training.
At the end of the school year, Lee’s wife and two children left Pottstown to join him and never returned.
After his military service in Germany, Dr. Lee moved to Coatesville, rather than return to Pottstown, to work with Dr.
Whittier Atkinson, a fellow graduate of
Howard University College of
Medicine and the first Black physician in
Chester County, who began his practice in
1927.
Dr. Atkinson had founded his own hospital in Coatesville in 1936, primarily to serve Blacks, who faced racial discrimination at Coatesville Hospital and other Chester County hospitals.
After working with Dr. Atkinson for a few years, Dr. Lee set up his own practice in Coatesville’s predominately Black East End and eventually joined the staff at Brandywine Hospital. He was also physician for the Coatesville Area School District.
He retired in 1993. His eldest son, Daniel Jr., became a physician’s assistant, practicing at Coatesville VA Medical Center before his retirement.
Meanwhile, judging from Mercury archives, Pottstown’s Committee on Human Relations remained dormant for the rest of the 1950s.
Thursday: No history of the struggle for racial equity in Pottstown in the 1950s would be complete without discussing Pottstown’s most pioneering Black family, the Corums.