Steven Bowman was a St. Ignatius High School student in the 1970s who was considering a career in medicine.
Maxine Duster stepped in at that point. She urged him to submit an application for a scheme that linked Black students with Black physicians. He followed a doctor throughout the former Cook County Hospital, which provided him an adrenaline-pumping night.
“They put me to work,” Bowman said. “I was helping do a gastric lavage on a guy that had gastrointestinal bleeding, putting a tube in his nose and push water into it, irrigating his stomach.”
I returned to County upon my graduation from the Washington University School of Medicine. Bowman, who is currently the medical director of the Illinois Department of Corrections, claimed that she spent thirty years working there in emergency medicine.
He claimed that Mrs. Duster was responsible for “all these other amazing things happening” to him.
According to her daughter Michelle Duster, Mrs. Duster, an 83-year-old educator and civic activist from Chicago, passed away on October 26 in a memory care facility in Rockford.
When he was a 15-year-old student at St. Ignatius, according to Dr. Darryl L. Fortson, she also connected him with Black doctors at the facility that is now Stroger Hospital.
“It was a fantastic experience,” he said. “We wore white coats, and we were just following physicians like a school of fish.”
Fortson remarked, “She saved a lot of lives.” “All the individuals we cared for are permanently in her debt, not just the people in the medical disciplines.”
The programme, according to Fortson, was a component of the anti-racism group Chicago Focus for women, which Mrs. Duster co-founded. It campaigned department stores to hire Black salespeople and display Black mannequins in the late 1960s.
Additionally, she worked to promote Black achievement and exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Science and Industry. She also advocated for Black hires at Illinois Bell and Peoples Gas and served on the boards of the Harold Washington Foundation and the Chicago Child Care Society.
Mrs. Duster was born in Pelham, Texas, a small settlement established by former slaves. According to Connie Hicks, Mrs. Duster’s cousin and curator of the Pelham Community History Museum, its Black farmers formerly had 6,000 acres on which they farmed cattle and cotton. She said that the town’s population, which is currently about 35, peaked in the 1930s and 1940s at 400.
According to Michelle Duster, all of Mrs. Duster’s playmates, elders, and teachers were connected to her by blood or marriage. Running from house to house to play and drink lemonade, the kids felt secure.
“She would go to her grandmother’s house, and they would have cake, and they would ride a horse called Paint,” her daughter said. “She had pet chickens.”
According to an interview she gave to the online publication The HistoryMakers, little Maxine enjoyed listening to “The Lone Ranger” radio show and her great-ghost grandfather’s stories.
“The town was all about family,” Hicks said. “During segregation, we depended on each other. Pelham had its own post office and our own school and cotton gin, and we had a bank and store. I think everyone who grew up here got this instilled in them — that they were somebody.”
Mrs. Duster remembered her youth with pleasure. She assisted in planning reunions that reunited past residents of Pelham with their offspring from throughout the nation.
She, along with her five siblings, all attended college. The university she attended was Texas Southern.
“Max” followed a cousin to Chicago, where she got a master’s degree in communications from Governors State University and a master’s in human resources management from National Louis University.
