It was a traumatic stretch of years for Phebe Hayes. She retired from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she was the dean of the College of General Studies and a professor of communicative disorders, in January 2013, somewhat reluctantly. 

“I love UL,” Hayes said recently. “I absolutely love UL and will always be grateful for that university, and what it has meant for my family.” 

Her father had been sick for some time; then, rather suddenly, her sister — her “twin and only sister, and best friend for life,” she said — was diagnosed with late-stage, terminal breast cancer. And Hayes’ own case of mild MS was worsening.

“I took it all as a sign that it was time to retire. I decided to attend to the family,” she said. 

As the health of her father and sister deteriorated, Hayes found herself at times running from one floor to another at Our Lady of Lourdes Regional Medical Center in Lafayette, attending to the both of them.

In 2014, on their 60th birthday, her sister died. Within a year, her father also died. 

“It was a really traumatic time,” Hayes said. “After suffering those losses, we got through it, but I decided to do some volunteer work in the community, because — well, I can’t just stay still, right?” she asked rhetorically. “I needed to get back to some level of normalcy with my brain.” 

Hayes began volunteering in the genealogy room of the Parkview branch of the Iberia Parish Library. 

“I love libraries,” she said. “Plus, I’m a researcher. So this is easy to move into — to take those research skills and to start delving into family history.”

One day, thumbing through books in the genealogy room, she came across a book purporting to be a definitive account of the “Great Physicians of Iberia Parish” covering the span roughly from 1860 to about 1960. But there was something conspicuously missing from the account, something that didn’t accord with the stories she’d heard growing up in Iberia Parish. There was not a single person of color mentioned. She began doing some research. 

This year, that research has produced a nonprofit Iberia Parish historical society, the Iberia African American Historical Society; approval from the Louisiana Office of Tourism for the placement of a historic marker commemorating the state’s first black physician — Dr. Emma Wakefield, born in New Iberia — on New Iberia’s Main Street and a forthcoming book from UL Press. 

Running off troublemakers

Hayes first began with the four black doctors in New Iberia that she’d grown up hearing about. 

Many African Americans in New Iberia know the year 1944. That year, with the backing of the nascent, local chapter of the NAACP, a welding school was built in the city to train black workers. Several white residents and civic leaders were unhappy with it. 

Educating blacks in skilled trades in the Jim Crow South was controversial for several reasons. But, writes the Louisiana historian Adam Fairclough, “In the cotton and sugar parishes, planters feared that FEPC (Fair Employment Practice Committee, the recently formed, Roosevelt administration committee) pressures would aggravate labor shortages by speeding up the migration of blacks to the cities. Their traditional supply of cheap, docile workers had already been threatened by the Louisiana Farmers Union, whose efforts to organize sharecroppers and farm laborers evoked threats, beatings, arrests and near lynchings.” 

The school opened May 7. On May 15, the school superintendent and the sheriff’s office deputies began a reign of terrorism that targeted prosperous and professional blacks in the city — doctors and teachers, primarily — quickly driving many of them out of town. On May 17, deputies picked up Dr. Ima A. Pierson, Dr. Luins H. Williams and Herman Joseph Faul. 

“One was taken as he sat in a barber’s chair, another half-clothed from his bed. The deputies drove them out of town and dumped them by the roadside. All suffered beatings of varying severity,” writes Fairclough. Doctors and teachers, hearing tales of the beatings or visiting the exiled and seeing their wounds, began to flee.

“New Iberia whites applauded the sheriff’s department for running off the ‘troublemakers,’ leaving the city without any black physicians,” writes historian Thomas J. Ward. 

A year later, Dr. Howard C. Scoggins, practicing in New Orleans after being run out of New Iberia, was approached by white leaders from the city and asked to return, the health of the black population having deteriorated in the absence of any black physicians. Scoggins was distrustful. He refused.

“I was shocked!” Hayes said. “I had grown up with that story. I heard about the expulsion of the black doctors of New Iberia from my grandmother. But I was shocked that that stuff had been written up. I thought it was just passed on in stories. I remember being so excited when I read the article (in Fairclough’s book, “Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana”) because it supported what my grandmother had told me. They were no longer stories but documented facts.”

Hayes began tracking down living relatives and ancestors of the black doctors of New Iberia. She followed leads out to archives at Tulane’s Amistad Center and at Dillard University in New Orleans; at the Meharry Medical College in Nashville; at Howard University in D.C.; to archives at Duke University in North Carolina, and more. She pored over documents in the courthouses of Iberia and St. Martin parishes and purchased subscriptions to websites like newspapers.com, archives.com and ancestry.com. 

The latter she labeled a “gold mine.” On it, she connected with descendents of New Iberia’s displaced, some who had no knowledge of their ancestral exile. They sent her their father’s and granfather’s papers and old family photographs. 

Hayes now has a list of 20 black doctors who were born in and/or practiced in New Iberia between Reconstruction and the end of the Jim Crow era. She spends her early mornings now working on a book for UL Press that tells their stories. 

“It’s more than just a list of doctors. These doctors have stories. And most of them I have pictures for. The only one I do not have a confirmed picture for is Emma Wakefield,” she said. “That’s the only one … and I’m hot on it.”  

A Louisiana first, born in N.I.

Louisiana’s first black physician was born in New Iberia on Nov. 21, 1868. 

Emma Wakefield-Paillet was born to a local, prominent black family just after the Civil War. Her father, Samuel Wakefield, was one of the first black state senators during Reconstruction — that brief period between emancipation and Jim Crow in which black civic, political and business leadership flourished. Her mother was Amelia Valentine Wakefield. Her brother, A.J. Wakefield, was the first and only clerk of court for New Iberia.  

In 1897, Emma graduated with honors from New Orleans Medical University, which merged in the 1930s with Straight College, where she’d earned her undergraduate degree, to form the present-day Dillard University. Wakefield passed the state medical boards at the top of her class, earning her license to practice on April 15, 1897. Of 67 candidates, five were black and she was the only woman. 

“The colored woman passed an exceptionally good examination and the Board made special mention of her case,” the board’s recorded minutes noted at the time. 

An accomplished classical pianist, Wakefield considered putting medical practice on hold to attend New York music conservancy, but apparently decided against that. A July 3, 1898, edition of the Times Democrat carried an ad announcing the relocation of her medical practice in New Orleans. She later moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, Joseph Oscar Paillet, and practiced there. 

The effort Hayes put into recovering the lost history of Louisiana’s first black physician is being rewarded by the state’s Office of Tourism, which recently approved the placement of a state historical marker for Emma Wakefield in Bouligny Plaza. Hayes said she anticipates an installation ceremony this fall, roughly coinciding with the sesquicentennial of both the founding of Iberia Parish and of the birth of Emma Wakefield. Dr. Darrell Bourque, Louisiana Poet Laureate, is writing a poem in her honor. 

It is the first official act of the Iberia African American Historical Society, the nonprofit that has grown out of Hayes’ research on the black doctors of Iberia Parish. The historic marker for Dr. Wakefield costs about $2,000. Working with Hayes, the Bayou Teche Museum has been accepting donations for the marker, as Hayes finalizes her 501(c)3 status, the final approval of which is expected in May.  

“I don’t have grandchildren, but I fantasize that one day I can drive them to the library, and  they can be assured that some of the stuff they look at is going to be truthful, that they’re going to be enlightened. This …” Hayes said, speaking of the original book of Iberia physicians that began her quest, “is an outright lie. That silly little book wiped out the history of black doctors in Iberia Parish.”

It can sometimes seem, she said, as if black people have no history here. 

“It’s as if we’re invisible. The only thing people might be able to say about us as a group of human beings is that most of us are probably descended from slaves,” she said. “And our history is much richer and much longer than that.” 

Hayes said she has encountered zero resistance to her efforts. On the contrary, she said, residents have packed library rooms to hear, with great interest, presentations she has given, and the Bayou Teche Museum and other historic groups in the parish are eager to build a more encompassing picture of the region’s history, she said. 

“This organization (IAAHS) is not just about black history, or black things. Our histories are connected,” she said. “I’m interested in understanding … What are the factors that contributed to these four black women that I eventually found getting their medical degrees …? Were there factors also preventing white women from getting medical degrees?” 

Hayes said IAAHS has a four-pronged mission: research, preservation, commemoration and public education. Hayes deliberately avoids singling out names in her presentations by focusing on larger historical context, a decision that is not always universally popular.

“I’m not so keen on calling out names. Those people that are alive today, they didn’t do anything. Some of them don’t even know. I’m not trying to blindside families and tear people apart,” she said. “Black, white — we all have to get together and talk about this shared history. Some of it’s not pretty. But, by talking about it — because it affects all of us — we can get rid of it. We can get rid of the shame.”