For Beaufort’s Elijah Washington, delivering 10,000 babies was just the start | Opinion

The Rev. Dr. Elijah N. Washington could have easily become a root doctor.

Voodoo “doctoring” was common in rural Beaufort County when Washington was born in the Sheldon community in 1942. He had relatives who practiced voodoo, and his father kept a root around his neck at a time when many people believed root doctors had special powers and potions that could heal ills and resolve problems.

Washington once told me that when he began studying medicine, some locals assumed he would be both a root doctor and a conventional doctor.

But that’s not the path he took, and Beaufort County will forever be better for it.

Washington, who died Aug. 15 at Beaufort Memorial Hospital at the age of 83, was an obstetrician-gynecologist who delivered some 10,000 babies here over a 30-year career.

He was also the pastor at First African Baptist Church of St. Helena Island for more than 20 years.

Washington joined the U.S. Navy as a young man then became a conventional healer back home, answering the call from the new Beaufort-Jasper-Hampton Comprehensive Health Services in the early 1970s. Its clinic in Sheldon was named for him in 2023.

Later, Washington became chief of staff at Beaufort Memorial Hospital.

He was known to many for his constant smile, easy demeanor, words of wisdom and contributions to the community beyond the doctor’s office.

Among those flooding online memorials now are people saying he birthed all their children, married all their children, celebrated their 50th anniversary and led their family’s funerals and graveside prayers.

Elijah Washington touched every aspect of people’s lives in Beaufort County, and that makes him one of the rarest individuals to ever come this way. That also makes it imperative that we see, as best as we can, how his contribution came to be.

Washington said he heard his life’s calling as an 8-year-old, standing on a 5-gallon bucket to peer into a neighbor’s window as a midwife delivered a baby. He thought that cry was sweet music then, and he would hear it again and again and again.

But the trajectory of his life was set by the principal at the segregated, all-Black Robert Smalls High School in Beaufort.

“Professor” Kent Alston, who deserves a statue in the city of Beaufort, pushed all his students by bringing national celebrities like Marian Anderson and Joe Louis to town to let his students know — regardless of what state law and societal norms dictated — that their lives mattered and they could be somebody.

Washington said some of Professor Alston’s motivation was aimed at the brighter kids — seeing that they were pushed hard and that they targeted college and pushed themselves to be prepared for it. But everyone benefited.

Washington went on to study at the prestigious Morehouse College in Atlanta, and after that, earned additional degrees from Meharry Medical College in Nashville and the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark. In his 50s, he earned his doctorate in divinity in 1992 from Bethany Theological Seminary in Dothan, Alabama.

Away from the delivery room or the pulpit, a big part of his life was his leadership of the Sons of the Union Veterans of the Civil War and the Grand Army of the Republic Hall on Newcastle Street.

In this historic building is a miniature museum that includes a salute to Dr. Montgomery P. Kennedy, a Black obstetrician who practiced in Beaufort when Washington was a child.

Kennedy rose to national attention in 1946 in a Time magazine story headlined, “Medicine: What color is death?” that shared how he had helped a white woman with a post-childbirth hemorrhage in 1930 and had delivered dozens of white babies since that first one.

Kennedy’s father, Dr. Nathaniel J. Kennedy, was born in 1865 to parents who had been enslaved, and practiced medicine in Beaufort until his death in 1938.

The stories of the Kennedys and Elijah Washington weave threads of local and racial history into a much broader tapestry.

Washington’s is a story that will always have healing power.

David Lauderdale may be reached at lauderdalecolumn@gmail.com.