Here’s a handy word cloud I came up with a few years ago to describe Howard: gun owner, political activist, civil rights legend, columnist, millionaire, host with the most, big game hunter, impresario, boycott leader, abortionist, serial philanderer, feminist, anti-Communist, affordable surgeon and Republican.
Yet Howard’s remarkable story is barely known. He was neither a liberal crusader nor (despite a sterling upbringing in the Adventist Church) affiliated with any particular religious strain of civil rights activism.
His story is also full of intrigue. The eventual cooling of Howard’s relations with Jackson seems to have stemmed from Jackson’s late-1970s instantiation as an anti-abortion firebrand (an episode now elided from most biographies). This put him at odds with Howard, a substantial portion of whose fortune may have come from the discreet medical services he provided to the cream of both black and white society.
But I think Howard’s low profile is also a function of our thin appreciation of our own history. In the mainstream civil rights narrative, African Americans lay in passive bondage until an activist federal government led them out of Egypt. This history has no place for a guy who, through both excellent luck and a level of ambition that should shame the rest of us, made himself a success by every standard that mattered in America.
In fact, forget Howard: The Black History syllabus never seems to find room for even completely uncontroversial stories of capitalist success. Why aren’t schoolkids tormented with assignments covering National Benefit Life Insurance Company founder Samuel W. Rutherford, or Madam C. J. Walker, who was not only the richest black American of her day but possibly the first American woman of any ethnicity to become a self-made millionaire? Something's weird about a country where only socialists acknowledge the market's power to create winners even in the face of awesome political obstruction.
Originally Posted by Swordsmyth
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