Books

Dr. Larry James Ford was born September 1, 1951, in Albany, Georgia. In 1956 at the age of four, his family moved to Aberdeen, Maryland, and later to have a Havre de Grace, Maryland, where he grew up and attended the Havre de Grace Consolidated School, C1, a legally, racially segregated school, from 1957 to 1964. He attended Havre de Grace High School, an integrated school, from 1964 to 1969, graduating as vice president of his class, a lettering member of the football team, and an officer in the National Honor Society.

He has four siblings, an older sister, Patricia, and three younger, Wayne, Pamela, and Pelbea. Continuing his education, he attended Syracuse University for one year, and then transferred to the Johns Hopkins University, where he graduated in 1973. He then attended the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in New York City, graduating in 1977. Afterwords, he did an internal medicine residency at the University of California- San Francisco. He began his practice in Georgia in the US Public Health Service and has also practiced in Alaska and California before retiring in 2011.

Dr. Ford’s retirement from medicine came after being diagnosed with systemic mastocytosis, a rare clonal disorder, which affects a white blood cell important to the immune system, affecting multiple organ systems. There is no specific treatment, and the disease has an incidence of 1 in 10,000 people, or a total of 30,000 individuals diagnosed in the U.S. with it.

One of the most memorable experiences he has had, related to the book, was sitting down with one of his teachers from the Consolidated School, Mrs. Mabel Hart, before starting to write. At the time of the release of the book, she was 104, and had recently published a book of her own. Throughout his professional life and journey, he was able to repeatedly call upon the commonsense knowledge and wisdom imparted by his teachers, which was needed to handle the many challenging situations he would face.

In 2020, he returned to his hometown, where he completed “C is for Colored,” and continues to enjoy his passion for playing music, spending lots of time with his guitars (playing anything slow), reading and honing his photographic skills. He has twin daughters, Lauren and Leslie, and he tries to hang out with his grandchildren, Isabel, Eli, and Karina, whenever possible. They call him “Lolo,” and all remember and laugh about him, as being moderately obsessed with anything having to do with mathematics, and the related game of craps.

The second year of my enrollment at the whilom White school began with a reunion. Having realized they did not have the funds to continue paying for separate school systems divided by race, the county Board of Education had suddenly, reluctantly, and unexpectedly announced the system’s overdue demise in the spring of 1964. The announcement was all the more curious because Dr. Willis, and the Board, had again prevailed in the Christmas versus Harford County Board of Education lawsuit. My sister, brother, and I were plaintiffs in the suit, which asked for the immediate closure of the two colored schools and the transferral of all Negro students and teachers to integrated county schools. Of course, they beat us one more time in the lawsuit, to the taunting and mocking delight of many White citizens of the county, as evidenced by articles in the Bel Air Aegis newspaper. Evil and whiteness had once again triumphed right before it sort of surrendered.

All of the county’s Negro students, who had decided to remain in the moribund Central and Havre de Grace Consolidated Schools, now had no option but to attend the once-forbidden white school. I could not understand why some of my Consolidated School classmates refused to integrate the previous year, but they did, and time was now up for them too. I had some sympathy for them not wanting to jump at the chance to go to the school and be around White people in a way they had never experienced, especially the adults. Some of the students may have had a personal or family history that made it difficult to be comfortable in this environment.

It wasn’t so much a hatred of them, in general it was more a cumulative, grinding nausea and disgust that many Negroes had for the unsavory goings-on between the races in Harford County before, and since the Civil War. Occasionally, you would hear snippets of a conversation from an adult or at the barbershop, referring to lynch mobs in Aberdeen, or an actual lynching in Bel Air, in the early 1900s. There were other stories not spoken about frequently or loudly. Many Negro citizens and families, had been personally touched by the savagery, perversion, and cruelty that interactions with whites could bring. There were whispers, or quiet conversations, between adults that touched on subjects they would hesitate to voice aloud.