Camper, John Emory Toussaint

Source:

 African American National Biography

Camper, John Emory Toussaint

(27 Feb. 1894–21 Nov. 1977),

physician, political activist, and civil rights advocate, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Mary J. Cromwell, one of the first black teachers in Baltimore, and John Heyward Camper, principal of an elementary school in Sparrows Point, Maryland. Camper had two brothers and several sisters. The Campers lived in Sparrows Point from about 1896 until 1900, when John's father's death forced a move to Towson and then to Baltimore. John attended eighth grade in Baltimore and graduated in 1913 from what would become the city's Douglass High School. He worked as a longshoreman and steelworker before receiving a bachelor of science degree in 1917 and a medical degree in 1920 from Howard University. A strong and gifted athlete, he was named several times to the All-American Colored Football Team, became the assistant coach for the Howard football team in 1920, and from 1921 to 1922 was the coach of the Morgan College (later Morgan State University) football squad. Even after he began his medical career in 1920, Camper remained interested in sports, serving as a member of Howard University's Board of Athletic Control in 1926 and 1927. While he was still a medical student, he was drafted by the army at the close of World War I but served only two months at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, before receiving an honorable discharge.

After completing his medical training, Camper worked at Old Provident Hospital and served on the state board that oversaw the Crownsville State Mental Hospital. He maintained a private practice for the rest of his life. On 7 September 1920 he married Louise G. Nixon; they had four children. His first marriage ended in divorce, and he later married Florine Thompson and had two more daughters.

Camper's first brush with racism occurred after he returned to Baltimore at the end of World War I. Still wearing his uniform, he was ordered by a train conductor to remove himself to the Jim Crow car. When he refused, the conductor called a policeman. He asked Camper if he had a ticket. Camper replied that he did, and the policeman then turned to the conductor and said: “Well, he's in the uniform of the U.S. Army. He'll ride where he damned please!” (Maryland Historical Society Oral History Interview). When Camper threatened to kill the conductor if he touched him, the incident ended.

In the early 1940s Camper became involved with Baltimore's branch of the NAACP, led by the legendary Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson, who had staged protests against employment discrimination since the 1930s. He admired Jackson and supported her work, especially her campaign against the telephone company that refused to hire African American operators. He also helped found MeDeSo, a Baltimore club for black physicians and dentists that funded many Baltimore NAACP activities. Frustrated by the nation's failure to live up to the democratic rhetoric of World War I, Camper became incensed by the unprovoked killings of blacks—including uniformed soldiers—by white Baltimore policemen during the early years of World War II. Indeed, as Camper angrily recalled, one white policeman earned a reputation for murdering blacks “just like you'd shoot ducks” (Maryland Historical Society Oral History Interview).

On 1 February 1942 Officer Edward R. Bender shot a black soldier in the back during an argument over a taxi. The incident enraged Camper and the entire black Baltimore community. With Jackson and Carl Murphy, owner of the newspaper the Afro-American, Camper organized a protest: “March on the State Capitol!” he exclaimed (Cahn, 285). To implement the plan, Camper and Murphy created the Citizens’ Committee for Justice, in which he worked closely with Juanita Mitchell (Clarence Mitchell's wife and Jackson's daughter) to speak for Baltimore's black community and organize the demonstration. Camper—with Jackson's tireless assistance—employed his network of MeDeSo colleagues and friends to gather a sufficient number of cars, trucks, and buses to transport protestors to Annapolis. To focus state and national attention on the march, Camper invited the firebrand New Yorker Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to serve as keynote speaker. On the evening of 23 April 1942 Powell addressed an overflow crowd at a local church, inspiring them to turn out the next day for the historic march. Over two thousand angry protestors surrounded the state capitol on 24 April to demand an end to the killings, the firing of the Baltimore police chief, the hiring of black policemen, and equal opportunity in housing, employment, and education. The unprecedented action produced results.

Governor Herbert R. O'Conor created a legislative committee of black and white members to study the status of Baltimore blacks. He included the Annapolis march leaders on that committee and on other legislative committees to address black housing, employment, and health in Baltimore. O'Conor's move was designed more to placate the protestors than to produce meaningful change. But the city's police chief eventually resigned, and some African Americans were added to the police force.

Camper became an overseer of the Crownsville Mental Hospital and was appointed to the Prison Board (the first black to serve there) over the objections of its white members. Camper and the Citizens’ Committee for Justice became a force in the community, initiating voter registration drives and continuing the NAACP's campaign to pressure local retailers to hire African Americans. As chairman of the Total War Employment Committee, Camper worked to desegregate state defense industries, backed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order No. 8802 that barred government contractors from engaging in any employment practices that discriminated on the basis of race, color, creed, or national origin.

Camper's influence continued to grow after World War II. In 1946 Governor O'Conor appointed Camper to his nine-member State Fair Rent Commission. Camper, as chairman of the Baltimore Citizens’ Committee for Justice, joined with lawyers, bankers, businesspeople, and representatives of the real estate industry to recommend policies that would “keep rents, in a vast majority of cases, at a fair level” (Washington Post, 16 July 1946). At the urging of his fellow physician William Watts, Camper joined Henry A. Wallace's Progressive Party, becoming state co-chair in 1947 and 1948 and a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives. Wallace attracted the support of many African Americans such as Camper who respected his bravery in campaigning against segregation in the South. Energized by Wallace's commitment to civil rights, Camper led the state party in a series of protests that employed a wide range of tactics, some that would not become common for another ten years. In March 1948 he protested the threatened defrocking of a Methodist minister, Richard H. Bready, for spending too much time working for the Progressive Party and not enough on his Cumberland, Maryland, church. Camper denounced the act as a “witch hunt,” asserting that a “group of bigots in Cumberland have taken punitive action against a minister who dares to entertain independent political convictions” (Washington Post, 30 Mar. 1948). The next month Camper filed suit on behalf of the Progressives to compel the Baltimore Board of Supervisors of Elections to open their registration books for examination. He sought to verify the names of people who were signing petitions to get party candidates such as himself on the ballot, but the city declined to cooperate. Nevertheless, Wallace and his running mate Glen H. Taylor, Camper, and two other Progressive Party congressional candidates did make it onto the state ballot.

In May 1948 Camper and party co-chair James Stewart Martin sent an open letter to Maryland governor William Preston Lane and Baltimore mayor Thomas D'Alesandro Jr. (father of the future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi), calling on them to enforce the Supreme Court's recent decision barring restrictive real estate covenants. “No longer,” Camper insisted, “may the courts uphold racial and religious segregation.” He believed that the Court had struck a blow against Jim Crow and anti-Semitism and called upon the state to extend “the spirit of the decision to the fields of education, recreation and employment. America and Maryland must be freed completely of every vestige of discrimination and segregation” (Washington Post, 5 May 1948).

In July 1948, as part of wider assault on segregated public facilities, Camper and a group of about twenty-three black and white (male and female) protestors staged an interracial tennis match in defiance of city ordinances that segregated such public facilities. When police ordered the group to leave, the protestors sat down—some laid down—compelling authorities to arrest the protestors and carry them off the courts. Over five hundred supporters jeered the police as they removed the group. Camper and the state director of the Progressive Party, Harold Buchman, denounced the arrests as “a flagrant violation of the constitutional rights of these well-mannered, orderly players.” One member of the Young Progressives exclaimed that they would not “recognize any color line” (New York Times, 12 July 1948).

Newspaper reports, following national trends, expected that Republicans, led by presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey, would carry most state races in 1948. Camper's own bid for a congressional seat in the Fourth District encountered some resistance. Although the party publicized arrangements for a rally at a firehouse in Glen Echo, Maryland, town officials, who had previously agreed to rent the facility, at the last minute revoked permission. While town officials denied that politics motivated their decision, Camper and his allies clearly saw the move as an attack on his campaign and an attempt to limit party members’ “civil rights” (Washington Post, 25 Apr. 1948). Nevertheless, Camper attracted enormous attention and drew Paul Robeson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elenore Gimble, Lena Horne, and even Joe Louis to Baltimore to help him bring out the vote. Harry S. Truman's victory in 1948 stunned pollsters. The competition between the Democratic Truman, the Republican Dewey, the Socialist Norman Thomas, the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, and the Progressive Wallace appeared to swing the election to the Republicans, who did carry Maryland. In his district Camper garnered only 6,552 votes to the Democrat's 38,486 and the Republican's 21,084. Allegations of voter fraud, vote rigging, and intimidation proved real when Camper entered one polling station and found cronies of the city machine buying votes with money and liquor. Unintimidated, Camper rolled up his sleeves and chased the thugs from the station. It is not clear if a clean election would have seen Camper elected. He remained with the Progressive Party, hoping to gain strength in the 1950 elections. He became chairman and leader of the state Progressive Party in February 1950, but cold war politics and the onset of the Korean War put an end to the ultraliberal party. He resigned his chairmanship in August, disgusted with the party's extreme opposition to the war.

During the early 1950s Camper and his well-to-do associates in MeDeSo assisted the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund and its campaign to win the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. With the fund's war chest at low ebb, Camper and MeDeSo raised $15,000 to see the case through to victory. Camper had maintained his medical practice throughout his fight for civil rights. Locally he became known as the “NAACP Doctor,” treating indigent blacks who usually could not afford to pay for his services. Additionally, beginning in 1930, he served as the medical examiner for the Household of Ruth, a women's auxiliary of the African American Odd Fellows fraternity, of which he was a member. He also belonged to the Freemasons, the Elks, the National Medical Association, and the Maryland Medical, Dental, and Pharmacy Association and was a charter member of the Gamma chapter of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity. His courageous work earned him a place on the NAACP Honor Roll, and he received a merit award from the Citizens’ Committee for Justice in 1947. Camper never wavered in his struggle “for freedom for millions of human beings,” as he declared in 1948, “of their black brothers in Nigeria … in Panama … [with] oppressed peoples all over the world” (Cahn, 283). “Maryland was fortunate,” Robeson remarked, “that there could be a man of such character and love for his people” (Baltimore Sun, 22 Nov. 1977). Camper practiced medicine for fifty-seven years and died after a brief illness at Baltimore's Provident Hospital, which was founded in the year of his birth and where he began his medical career.

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