Lathen a pioneer in HackensackFriday, February 25, 2011
BY HOWARD PROSNITZ
Hackensack Chronicle
STAFF WRITER
HACKENSACK — When John Lathen was interning in 1950 at what was then Hackensack Hospital, there was concern that he might be unable to fulfill the requirement for interns to deliver 50 babies.
John Lathen (far left) was the first African American man to intern at Hackensack Hospital.
PHOTO COURTESY OF KAREN SABUR
Hospital administrators expected that white mothers-to- be would object to having Lathen, the hospital’s first black intern, deliver their babies.
The problem was solved ingeniously.
"My father would wait in the wings," said Lathen’s daughter, Karen Sabur. "Women in those days were given anesthesia just before childbirth. When the woman was unconscious, my father would come out and deliver the baby."
Lathen went on to a successful career, first as a general practitioner and later as a psychiatrist, maintaining an office on Second Street in Hackensack until his retirement in 1986.
But the road was not without hardships. At the very outset of Lathen’s medical career, Hackensack Hospital required the 1949 graduate of Howard University Medical School, to complete a second year of internship beyond the single year required of other interns. Hospital officials had misgivings that the black medical school was not up to their standards, explained Sabur, a Hackensack resident and social worker with the New York City school system.
Born in Wood-Ridge in 1916, Lathen was raised in poverty, the only child of a Pullman car porter and a piano teacher. Both his parents were bi-racial, and could pass as white, said Sabur.
"But they were proud to be African American and would correct people when they presented themselves and say, ‘I am not what you think I am.’ "
Lathen grew up as the only black child in Wood-Ridge and later was the only black graduate of the 1933 class of Rutherford High School. There was no high school in Wood-Ridge at the time.
Although neither of his parents had graduated high school, there was never any question that their son would attend college.
"In the African-American community, education has always been valued as the way to get ahead. As soon as the slaves were freed, they went to school," Sabur said.
At his parents urging, Lathen attended a historic black college, earning a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Virginia State University. During summers he taught Latin at the historic Jenny Dean Industrial School in Manassas, Va.
In 1942 Lathen married Almeta Virginia Crockett, whom he met while both were attending summer classes at Columbia University. Crockett, a groundbreaker herself, became the first black teacher in Teaneck public schools, teaching in the high school’s home economics department from 1959-62. From Teaneck, she went to the Montclair district where she was a guidance counselor until her retirement in 1982.
After completing college, Lathen returned to New Jersey and found employment at the Bendix Corporation. But despite his degree, he was allowed only to work as chauffeur. When World War II began, however, Bendix integrated, and in 1943 Lathen moved inside the plant as a chemist, becoming the first African-American professional to work for Bendix.
But Lathen had always aspired to become a physician, and left New Jersey in 1945 to attend Howard. While her husband was in medical school, Almeta Lathen worked several jobs to support the family, including as a dietician at Curtis Wright plant in Wood Ridge and as a home economics teacher at Lincoln School in Englewood.
Beginning as a general practitioner, Lathen later completed a psychiatric residency at Greystone Park State Hospital, but for many years he continued to see patients for a variety of medical issues.
"Psychiatry was less specialized in those days. If you had a cold or a fever he would take care of you," Sabur explained, noting that her father’s waiting room was sometimes filled wall to wall with patients. About half of Lathen’s patients were white, she said.
In 1962, Lathen became the first black president of the Bergen County Mental Health Association.
One of Lathen’s psychiatric patients in the late 1950s was a wealthy, white Hackensack businessman who became so distressed when Lathen was about to leave for a California vacation that the two families vacationed together.
Vacations were her father’s only time off from work, Sabur said. Although he had achieved financial security, Lathen was haunted by the poverty of his youth.
"My father didn’t play golf or have any hobbies. He was always working," Sabur said. Besides his private practice, Lathen worked at a Jersey City clinic and in a drug rehabilitation program in the Meadowlands. At various times, he served as Hackensack’s school physician and police physician.
Sabur noted that both her father and mother had low keyed personalities, an asset to them in their professional careers.
"They were not militants," Sabur said. "At that time, you didn’t barge your way in. You had to be very diplomatic. They were non-threatening, so people saw them as being safe to integrate things. They paved the way for everyone who came after them."
E-mail: prosnitz@northjersey.com
