Houston Brummit M.D.

Houston Brummit, M.D. was born January 22, 1928 to Anne Lord McLeod Brummit, a Cincinnati elementary public school teacher, and William Houston Brummit, realtor, co-owner of the downtown Sky’s Pharmacy and a billiard-pool table parlor. Their son attended the Frederick Douglass Elementary and Junior High Schools before he transferred to Walnut Hills College Preparatory High School. By way of an accelerated program he entered the University of Cincinnati in his senior year of high school and completed two years. He then transferred to Wilberforce University outside of Xenia, Ohio. Applying to a dozen medical schools he was accepted by the Nashville, Tennessee Meharry Medical College, the same college his paternal grandfather, William H. Brummit, M.D. a surgeon and civil rights activist had attended. From 1909 to 1910 the wealthy Goodnow family of Massachusetts built his grandfather the first Talladega hospital, a two story, 21-bed structure on the Talladega College campus. In time he initiated the construction of a large office complex in the downtown of Talladega. A group of KKK vigilantes responded by kidnapping him in May of 1924, beating him in a wooded area and giving him 90 days to leave Talladega, Alabama. He resettled in Chicago, Illinois.

On getting his M.D., Houston migrated to Brooklyn, N.Y. where he did a rotating internship at Kings County Hospital. With the 1950-53 Korean Conflict the U.S. Military drafted all available young doctors ahead of him. In July 1954 he started a neurology residency and became the solo physician with two registered nurses in charge of the KCH 80-patient, four storied neurology D building. Its OPD clinic ran from 1-5 PM. The bulk of the patient overload had been dumped on neurology by the psychiatric G. Building. Working 20 hour shifts he stopped the dumping and with three-month prescriptions for chronic patients the clinic schedule was reduced to 1-2pm. In December the U.S. Military requested his presence before a huge freestanding computer registration machine that gave him 36 hours to report to active duty in the U.S. Air Force. With three weeks of read-in basic training, a few drills and the rank of second lieutenant he was flown to Landstuhl, Germany to work in that U.S. Air Force base medical clinic.

The Air Force base became his entre to all of Germany, France, London and the rest of Europe. As a 6’8 ½, thin African American, the Germans were often naïve enough to stop traffic and gape at him in wonder. In the Landstuhl vicinity he attended the nearby Landstuhl U.S. Army’s General Hospital’s surgical and neurological ward rounds. At the end of the two years, Captain Brummit was honorably discharged and flown back to New York City. There he pursued his first year of adult psychiatric residency at the Brooklyn V.A. Hospital. He then did a two-year program at the NYU Bellevue complex under Stella Chess. There were lectures by Erick Fromm, Theodor Reik and other scholars. He went on to complete a child psychiatry residency at Metropolitan Hospital and became board certified in both fields. In 1960 he had entered the Karen Horney Psychoanalytic Institute and finished in 1967. With two colleagues he opened a six room office suite on the second floor of an East 50th Street building a half block from the Waldorf Astoria. He coerced an analytic colleague and his wife to acquire a four-story brownstone on East 49th across the street from Katherine Hepburn. His office gave a few black and Latino professionals a midtown location.

Outside of medicine Houston had interest in theater and in junior high school he wrote sketches that were broadcasted over a microphone to his English class. At Wilberforce University he organized variety shows. In NYC he attended New York theaters and happened to become enthusiastic about a comedy he saw in Greenwich Village. He took it to Off Broadway’s Provincetown Playhouse. While it garnished only one good review and six unfavorable ones, it gave Equity Union admission to Arthur French, Barbara Ann Teer and other actors of color. Thereafter he went on to write and showcase three musicals of his own: “Too Late for Tears” which highlighted the naïve psychoanalytic approaches to drug addiction, “Makin It” a tuneful musical comedy featuring the songs and lyrics of Jimmy Justice, and “The Theater of Suggestion,” a Hispanic drama inspired by the abandoned Brooklyn RKO Bushwick Movie Palace. He also wrote “Meshuggeneh,” a lighthearted novel about a genius girl who grows up in the pre-cellphone era. In 2007 he retired from theater and his private practice. Subsequently he published, via the Cincinnati Public Library, the 1938 summer sojourn of four teachers (friends of his mother) into Nazi Germany. He also documented the legend of his grandfather in a biography entitled “Talladega Days.” Houston is survived by his Aunt Martha Brummit Peters of Chicago, Illinois.