Belinda Straight, psychiatrist and civil rights activist, dies at 95
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Version 0 of 1. Belinda C. Straight traveled from Washington to Selma, Ala., in March 1965 partly to stand ready as a first-aid provider at the voting rights march scheduled to depart from that city. But mainly, she told the Washington Evening Star at the time, she went “to lend support to the civil rights movement.” Dr. Straight, who gave medical care to dozens of protesters when the Selma march turned violent, an event that became a turning point in the decade, died Dec. 5 at an assisted-living center in Chevy Chase, Md. She was 95. The cause was pneumonia, according to her son Michael Straight, who said Dr. Straight also had dementia. The daughter of a British-born importing executive, she had joined a prominent American family as the wife of Michael Whitney Straight, the editor and publisher of the New Republic magazine, founded with help from his parents, in the 1940s and ’50s. Influenced by her mother, she had developed a strong interest in social causes. She was in her 30s and the mother of four when she received a medical degree in 1952. For more than half a century, Dr. Straight practiced psychiatry in Washington, providing psychotherapy and psychoanalysis to children and adults. Through colleagues, she learned that the Medical Committee for Human Rights, a national organization that assisted civil rights workers, was dispatching a contingent of medical professionals to Alabama in advance of a march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. Dr. Straight arrived March 6, 1965, the day before the demonstration, and was soon briefed by James Bevel, an assistant to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who anticipated that the peaceful protest would not receive a peaceful response. “God’s on our side,” Bevel said, according to an account by Dr. Straight published at the time in The Washington Post, “but this time God and us, we’re both in trouble.” Dr. Straight said that she and her colleagues had four ambulances, including two converted hearses. A minister offered his home as a first-aid station, with his dining room table serving as an examination station. The march began as planned, but when the 600 participants crossed Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, they found state troopers and others waiting to attack with tear gas and billy clubs. From the minister’s home, Dr. Straight said she heard screams. “The injured began to pour into the kitchen,” she wrote in The Post. “The little house rocked with cries of anguish. Stumbling, limping, bleeding, retching — more and more staggered in. Some were blinded, others could scarcely breathe, some in terror did not know who or where they were. Over the choking fumes rose the sobs and cries of horror of the relatives.” With limited supplies, rolled-up newspapers doubled as splints, bedsheets as slings. Dr. Straight said authorities in some cases prevented the first-aid workers from reaching or caring for the wounded. She recalled that two doctors rescued children who had been trampled by horses. By her count, the minister’s home accommodated between 40 and 50 wounded at a time. Among the people she treated was John R. Lewis, at the time chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and today a Democratic congressman from Georgia, who suffered a skull fracture. “I lost consciousness on the bridge, and the group carried me back, and it was there that a group of medical people tried to help us,” Lewis said in an interview. “If it hadn’t been for some of these doctors, I’m not sure some of us would have survived. . . . It was very dangerous for the men and women of medicine to come to assist us. It took a lot of courage on their part.” Weeks after the brutal encounter on the Edmund Pettus Bridge — an incident seen by millions in news footage and photographs and now known as “Bloody Sunday” — protesters completed the 54-mile march to Montgomery. Their efforts were credited with helping rally support for the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. “The tension was so great that I lost all sense of time,” Dr. Straight told the Star after returning from Alabama. “When I left Selma, it seemed that I had been there a lot longer than three days.” Belinda Booth Crompton was born in Port Chester, N.Y., on Aug. 15, 1920. She attended the private Perse School in Cambridge, England, before marrying in 1939. After the death of her father, David Crompton, her mother, an American, the former Lillian Sheridan, married Charles W. Tobey, a Republican senator from New Hampshire. In 1965, she would join her daughter in Selma in support of the civil rights cause. Dr. Straight completed her medical training at New York University in 1952, teaching and practicing over the years at what is now Children’s National Medical Center, George Washington University, Howard University and the Washington School of Psychiatry. She ran a private practice from 1960 until her retirement in 2007 and was particularly known for her treatment of victims of sexual abuse. “I’ve seen patients from all walks of life — State Department children who have been overseas and in the care of a non-English-speaking caretaker where it happened over a period of time without the knowledge of the parents. It happens to middle-class children and children on welfare,” she told The Post in 1973. “It can happen anywhere.” Dr. Straight and her husband divorced in 1969. The following year, they donated their home and surrounding property to the Fairfax County Park Authority, which used the land to build what is now the Green Spring Gardens public park. Survivors include five children, David Straight of Knoxville, Tenn., Michael Straight of Rockville, Md., Susan Straight of Trumansburg, N.Y., Dinah Straight Krosnick of New York City and Dorothy Elmhirst Straight of Newbury, Mass.; and four grandchildren. |