By Terri Jo Ryan

Tribune-Herald staff writer

This is how Time magazine reported Feb. 9, 1953, on the honor accorded to one of Waco’s native sons:

“To their guest’s great surprise, civic leaders of Taylor (pop. 9,000) in central Texas’ cotton belt invited Dr. James Lee Dickey to dinner at the country club (and) named him the town’s outstanding citizen of 1952. Practicing there 31 years, Dr. Dickey did much to clean up a typhoid-breeding open sewer and replace a shanty slum with model housing. Reason for his surprise at the honor: he is a Negro.”

It made national news for a segregated town in the Jim Crow South to gratefully acknowledge the achievements of its first black doctor. But Dr. James Lee Dickey was worthy of the accolades, and more, for the crucial role he played in Central Texas’ public health picture.

Dickey, the son of John S. and Linnie A. (Sears) Dickey, was born in 1893 near Waco. He attended Waco’s public “colored” schools from 1900-1912 and attended Tillotson College (now Huston-Tillotson College) in Austin. After his graduation in 1916, he worked briefly as an industrial arts teacher in Marlin before he entered Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tenn., where he graduated in 1921.

He dreamed of going north or east, to an urban center to practice medicine. But just before graduation, his father died in an accident and left his mother with him and eight other children.

Dickey learned that Taylor needed a physician for its black population and started a practice there so he could stay closer to his widowed mother and his siblings. He later said, “The hand of destiny guided me to Taylor. I came to stay a few years; I remained to do my life’s work.”

He married Magnolia Fowler of Nashville, Tenn., on Nov. 29, 1922, and brought her to Taylor, where they worked together on many projects, including support of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The only black practitioner in Williamson County in those years and one of only 130 black doctors in all of Texas, Dickey saw a need for a medical facility. He began with a three-bedroom clinic and eventually expanded into a 15-bed hospital with modern surgical and obstetrical facilities. Because there were no such facilities for black residents of neighboring counties, he also served patients from Bell, Lee, Milam and Bastrop counties.

In his investigations into the leading causes of death among his patients, Dickey discovered that the principle causes were typhoid fever, diarrhea among infants, convulsions and complications of childbirth, tuberculosis, venereal diseases and violence.

So he conducted public health campaigns for clean water sources and a free clinic for the treatment and prevention of venereal diseases. He established a prenatal clinic where all expectant mothers who were unable to pay could have free exams. Early in his career, he also curbed a typhoid fever epidemic in Taylor through a vigorous vaccination program.

With the help of white physicians, he was able to get black patients admitted to a state tuberculosis sanatorium. To fight violence, Dickey led community efforts for youth recreational facilities, park land and a black community center.

Dickey died in Williamson County on May 18, 1959. The science building at his alma mater is named in his honor. In June 2007, a Texas State Historical Marker was erected on the site of his home, which community historians hope to restore into a local African-American museum.

Sources: Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin; Handbook of Texas On-Line; Williamson Museum; Time.com.