Fred Thomas remembers what it is like to journey form the poor, black neighborhood of Bryan, Texas, to the predominantly white, rural community of Lafayette, Tennessee, where he is a well-respected doctor of internal medicine. Thomas recalls times when he chopped and picked cotton, hauled hay, mowed lawns, scrubbed floors, washed dishes, stacked bottles, and did whatever other honest work he could to help support the family and put himself through school.
Thomas moved to Lafayette in 1980, intending to stay only three years. This September marked his tenth anniversary in Macon County; he is so well liked that folks won't let him leave.
The first months weren't easy, through. "When Dr. Thomas first came here, everybody was talking about him being black and us being white," says Keith Scruggs, a local firemen. "But he just sat up and never looked back. And now we have ourselves the best doctor around." Lafayette resident Mary Dallas agrees. "During that first visit, I had so much to tell him," she recalls. "He made me feel so comfortable, I forgot what his color was."
People now speak of Thomas not as the "black doctor" but as the doctor "with the healing touch." You need only talk with him a short time to learn that the initiative and inner force that brought him to where he is today are linked to his upbringing. Thomas' outgoing personality and ability to put people at ease have helped him turn obstacles into challenges.
Source Of Strength
"My mother was a very religious person," Thomas says, "a Church of Christ member. A lot of my inner strength and determination came from her. It was my mother who taught us six children that when you are poor and black you put you faith in God.
'The whole family has to go to church, and this taught us something. And as I become older and understood better what was going on, I began to appreciate my mother's strong inner drive, her ability to take almost nothing and try to develop something out of it. That [ability] became one of the great gifts, along with her determination to keep the family together, that became must meaningful to all of us."
Thomas had been interested in medicine since he was in the fourth grade. When his sister cut a ligament in her left hand, a white doctor refused to treat her; first, because she was black and second, because she was poor and didn't have the fee he demanded - seven dollars. This incident stayed with Thomas, but without any hatred or bitterness. "You don't go around hating people," he says, "that will make you miserable person.”
"Being from the country, we learned how to work hard to make money. The dignity of work was ingrained in us, and it was my mother who set the pace for the family. She worked as laundress and as a kitchen worker in an academy. I was not fortunate enough to be born into a family of learned people, so we were educated by the premise of learning how to work in order to survive.”
“I used to see my friends going off to the parks and elsewhere, having a good time while we had to go to the fields. But with age came wisdom and
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