Chapter One
Doc Nelson Lands in the War Zone
Elbert Nelson was happy to be on the campus of Meharry Medical College in 1964. He well knew how proud his parents—father an employee of the Southern Railway Company, mom employed in a dentist’s office—were of his ambitions. Like most young Blacks interested in medicine, he had been inspired by the life of Charles Drew. Drew had been a stellar student and football star at Amherst College in the mid-1920s. Black publications wrote of his achievements. After college Drew became interested in medicine, but American medical schools were ignoring Black applicants, no matter how gifted academically. He left America to attend McGill University Medical School in Montreal. A pioneering career of fellowships and teaching stints followed. His breakthrough while studying the preservation of blood plasma—and consequently better shipping of blood—was known to have saved countless lives during World War II. Drew was only forty-five when he died in 1950 in a car accident, leaving many to wonder what other gifts he might have offered to worldwide medicine.
Meharry Medical School had been born from the nation’s history of racial segregation. Howard University’s medical school in Washington, D.C., and Meharry had trained most of the Black physicians in America. Elbert Nelson looked forward to joining the small fraternity upon graduation. But another dose of reality struck Nelson about the year 1964: “I knew, if I hadn’t been in medical school, I would have been in Vietnam.” In that time of explosive civil rights activism, even some faculty members from Meharry were joining the busloads of Freedom Riders that traveled into the deep Southern states. Nashville itself was the scene of memorable lunch-counter sit-ins in which a coterie of students challenged all-white eating establishments.
Nelson would not allow himself to miss the early-evening national news broadcasts—with correspondents filing reports from civil rights hot spots. He watched the unfolding events of the clash on the bridge in Selma, Alabama. Then, five months later, in August 1965, he watched as the streets of a South Los Angeles neighborhood, Watts, turned into a weeklong and horrifying emblem of America’s racial agony.
While Elbert Nelson was studying the organs and mysteries of the human body, he couldn’t shake the imagery of those two events from his mind. Selma had exposed the wanton savagery of white law enforcement, all absent any help from the federal government to anyone—man, woman, or child—in their time of need. In Los Angeles, throngs of Blacks who had never had much—had never fully experienced the American Dream and were still hemmed in by the depths of racism and real-estate segregation—had broken free as if from harnesses, and wrecked deadly havoc in their community, shocking the nation. And beyond those two events, the drumbeat of Vietnam was at America’s front door. Elbert Nelson began to worry: Because of the draft, he had no illusion that he would escape the jungles of Southeast Asia. And what he had seen emanating from Selma and Watts—especially Watts—convinced him that Black anger and defiance would be percolating in Vietnam, because whatever had been loosed upon the American landscape could not be put back into any kind of a bottle. “Watts changed everything as far as race and Vietnam” is how he put it.
Here is what happened on a chilly day in Selma that gripped Elbert Nelson, and had begun to haunt his memory:
It all actually began twenty-five miles away, in the small Alabama town of Marion. A young man by the name of Jimmie Lee Jackson had begun to wonder why Blacks so often were denied the right to vote in the state. He had heard many stories about relatives and parents of friends who had fought in military campaigns for America, and yet couldn’t vote. By 1965, the meetings at the local Zion United Methodist Church in Marion, where the Lee family lived, paid taxes, and worshipped, had become more intense concerning the issue of voting. On February 18, 1965, one such church gathering took place. Local law enforcement had tired of and been made nervous by these meetings, and had already summoned Alabama state troopers as reinforcements. Church members sketched a plan to leave the sanctuary after this latest gathering and march over to the local jail, to sing civil rights songs in protest of the arrest of James Orange, a civil rights activist who had been arrested for organizing. About a hundred marchers waded into the night air that evening, leaving others at the church to monitor developments as best they could. But shortly into the march, streetlights in the area were flicked off. The dark got darker. (The lights had actually been turned off by law enforcement, but none of the marchers yet imagined that a trap was unfolding.) The police chief, T. O. Harris, yelled through a bullhorn that the marchers would have to leave the area immediately. A minister among the protesters told of his intention to pray first, and knelt on the ground. When he did, a trooper bashed him in the head with a club and quickly arrested him. Then others, blinded by the inky darkness and the goose-stepping troopers, began to scatter and run. “Negroes could be heard screaming and loud whacks rang through the square,” stated a later New York Times report about the police attack. Troopers eventually cornered Jimmie Lee Jackson and his mother, Viola, inside Mack’s Café. Viola’s father and Jimmy Lee’s grandfather, Cager Lee Jackson, eventually stumbled into the café. Cager Lee was bleeding. When his daughter and grandson leaped to aid him, Viola was assaulted by troopers, and Jimmie Lee, coming to her aid, was shot twice in the stomach by a trooper. Lee—a twenty-six-year-old deacon at the church—stumbled back outside, into the horror-filled night. He died eight days later.
Those in the Alabama civil rights movement decided they must respond to the Marion tragedy and the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson. A march in nearby Selma was planned.
On March 7, two weeks after the events in Marion, there was a gathering at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, named after a renowned slave owner and Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Everyone prepared for a march to Montgomery, the capital. This would surely bring attention to the plight of Blacks who couldn’t vote. Not long after everyone had assembled at the edge of the bridge on March 7, they spotted, in the distance, snorting horses mounted by Alabama troopers in gas masks, evoking a scene of trench warfare in World War I. “May we have a word with the major,” Hosea Williams, an aide to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., asked one of the Alabama deputies. He was rebuffed, with an admonishment to leave the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but the marchers stood fast. “Troopers, advance,” came the Alabama trooper’s cry. The attack, and the subsequent bedlam, was swift; blood was sprayed, backs were lashed with batons, screaming was nonstop, tear gas plumed in the air, and schoolchildren fell, then rose like angels to scamper onward with horror in their eyes. Those watching on TV sets in their living rooms—like the medical student Elbert Nelson—found it hard to believe what they were seeing: dozens upon dozens of white state troopers running to stomp those in front of them. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” the young, brave, and bloodied John Lewis said in a phone call to SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) headquarters in Atlanta. “They are shooting gas, acid. One very old lady I know has a broken arm.”
The day and date—March 7, 1965—would be marked in infamy.
On the very next day, the first American soldiers—soldiers in a military force that was fully integrated for the first time in American history—arrived in South Vietnam to wage war.
Here is what happened five months after Selma, on August 11, in Los Angeles: A potent civilian Black force—resembling an ungainly battalion—had, with great spontaneity, unleashed all that mayhem in Watts. White police officers—members of a force that was often accused of brutality—had stopped a Black man, twenty-one-year-old Marquette Frye, at an intersection. The officers arrested him after he failed a sobriety test. Bystanders were now gathered. When young Frye’s mother attempted to intervene, she and her son and some bystanders all started yelling. This ignited the swinging of batons, and reports of another example of police brutality swept the neighborhood like a fire gone wild. Calmer heads might have stopped the ensuing outburst, but to Black Angelenos, the time for calm was over. They had long felt aggrieved. Of three thousand California highway patrolmen in 1965, only three were Black. There was not a single Black in the Los Angeles Police Department above the rank of sergeant. The Frye confrontation—against a backdrop of racial apartheid in one of the nation’s largest cities—sparked a weeklong spasm of violence and shock: burnt stores, rampant lethal shootings, looting. TV cameras caught a lot of it. One proof of the reality of separatism in so much of American life was that the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest newspapers in the country, had not a single Black reporter on its staff. The newspaper quickly corralled Robert Richardson, a member of their advertising sales staff, and gave him a pep talk and the kind of instructions any cub reporter might be given: Go to the scene of the action and get a story! A press pass in hand, Richardson hustled off to Watts. The scenes he came upon both shocked and frightened him. He trembled, but managed to put together a dispatch, which the newspaper thought to be so remarkable—given the circumstances of his presence on the scene—that the editors attached the following note in parentheses to his byline:
eyewitness account “Get Whitey” Scream Blood-Hungry Mobs by robert richardson (Robert Richardson, 24, a Negro, is an advertising salesman for the Times. He witnessed the rioting in South Los Angeles for nearly eight hours Thursday night.) [Editors]
The opening lines of Richardson’s page-one story: “It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen in my life. I went along with the mobs, watching, listening.”
The rebellion served to expose the very deep racial fault lines of America, a spasmodic crime wave that the more expansive-minded believed was a call for justice against a system of racial pain. That Watts was on the West Coast reminded many that racial inequality stretched from coast to coast. The tallying of numbers for the Watts uprising was searing: thirty-four dead, more than a thousand injured, and more than thirty-four hundred placed under arrest. The Los Angeles Times referred to the Watts saga as “the four ugliest days in our history.”
Though the Times’s assessment may have been hyperbolic, it was not hard to convince the Elbert Nelsons of the country that Watts had certainly become one of the most televised and horrific events witnessed throughout the nation.
White House phone operators got no rest in the aftermath of Watts. President Johnson knew that beneath the riot lay a multitude of ills. “Let’s get busy and let’s get into this housing,” Johnson told Martin Luther King, Jr., in a phone call. “Let’s get into this unemployment. Let’s get into this social security situation. Let’s get into this education . . . I’ve spent the biggest part of my life the last four years on civil rights bills, but . . . all of it comes to naught if you have a situation like war in the world or a situation in Los Angeles.”
Lyndon Johnson, with an instinctive sense of the ravages of inequality, appointed a commission to study Watts. “We’ve just got to find some way to wipe out these ghettoes,” Johnson told John McCone, a former CIA chief whom he used as a sounding board. “And find some place . . . housing . . . and put them to work. We trained 12,000 last month and found jobs for them.” He was talking about inner-city residents—residents of the American ghettos. He was talking about many of the families suddenly depleted by one member—the one who was off to Vietnam.
The renowned evangelist Billy Graham flew over Watts in the days after the riots, along with Mayor Sam Yorty. The burning embers of Watts took his mind in a unique direction: Graham told the mayor he believed the riots were a rehearsal for “sinister and evil forces . . . whose ultimate objective is the overthrow of the American government.” Graham had a huge following.
Martin Luther King, Jr., accompanied by his longtime adviser Bayard Rustin, arrived in Los Angeles nine days after the riots had been quelled for a community meeting organized by a neighborhood association. There were catcalls at the meeting, signs of disrespect, sudden evidence of a more militant attitude toward these traditional civil rights leaders. “All we want is jobs,” a man cried out to King. “We get jobs, we don’t bother nobody. We don’t get no jobs, we’ll tear up Los Angeles, period.” Southern audiences were always more deferential to King and his nonviolent approach than audiences from other areas of the country. He had solidified his reputation at Southern pulpits. “I’m here,” King told the gathering, “because at bottom we are brothers and sisters. We all go up together or we go down together. We are not free in the South, and you are not free in the cities of the North.”
Reading the headlines and watching the nightly news, Elbert Nelson knew he wouldn’t have control of his future. “The federal government had a lottery program. This meant some medical students, those going into surgery as a specialty, would get deferments. The other half would be sent to active duty. For those like me whose number did not come up, we would be conscripted in.” Elbert Nelson’s draft notice arrived in the mail in September 1967. The military gave him time to finish school; then, in August 1969, he was bound for boot camp—and Vietnam. He still couldn’t shake what he had seen happen in Selma and Watts. For the average Black recruit and soldier, Selma and Watts had become reflecting mirrors onto society. They were the portals into the starkly different reactions against inequality: nonviolence (Selma) and violence (Watts).
Elbert Nelson’s family worried a lot about him as he set off for the Army. They would have preferred he return to Georgia and set up a nice family medical practice. There were too few Black doctors in Georgia.
In boot camp, Elbert Nelson didn’t hear much about inequality back home; instead, he was hearing a lot of talk about the dangers of communism.
Copyright © 2026 by Wil Haygood. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
