His Life · Chapter 1 of 8 · 1858 – 1920s
Roots
A doctor’s son on Cooper Avenue. His father came from Wetumpka by way of Meharry, his mother trained as a teacher, and their house took in the NAACP mail that others were afraid to receive.
When Frederick Burger asked him in 2002 where he was born, Gordon Alexander Rodgers Jr. was eighty-six. He started with the neighborhood.
“I was born here in Anniston, Alabama, in the area where the Monsanto PCBs are floating around in the air — on October 28, 1915.”
The joke is a dry one. He placed his birth on the west side of town, where Monsanto’s chemical pollution would later become a national story, and he said it plainly. The town he was born into was divided by its railroad tracks. He called them the Mason-Dixon line, and admitted the name was “mostly my own nomenclature.” White Anniston lived east of the tracks. Black Anniston lived on “this side,” though, as he remembered, poor white families who worked in the pipe shops and cotton mills lived on many of the same west-side streets.1
A doctor from Wetumpka
His father, Dr. Gordon Alexander Rodgers Sr., was born in Wetumpka, Elmore County, in 1884.2 He studied medicine at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, one of the few schools in the country then training Black physicians, and graduated in 1908. By about 1910 he was practicing in Anniston. Memorial records give 1910 as the year he married Fannie Lewis, an Anniston native born in 1892. Her son later remembered her being trained as a teacher at Talladega and graduating around 1912.3
“My father was born in Wetumpka. His name was Gordon A. Rodgers. And of course, after I was born and they called me that, he had to put a ‘senior’ on his name to tell us apart.”
The elder Dr. Rodgers was also a pharmacist and ran a drugstore, New Era Pharmacy, near Fifteenth Street and Brown Avenue. He owned a few rental houses, always let to Black families, many of them pipe-shop workers.4 “I wouldn’t call him a good businessman,” his son said, “but he’d try things.”
The family’s roots went back to slavery. The son read from the family papers that his grandfather, Alex Rodgers, was born in December 1858. Burger’s notes, made from a marriage certificate and census records the family kept, record that Alexander Joseph Rodgers married Amanda Bugg in January 1878.5
1618 Cooper
There were three children. Frances was the oldest, born in 1913. Gordon came next, and Samuel, “two years younger than I am,” was born in August 1917. They grew up at 1618 Cooper Avenue, between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets.6
Gordon’s first reading lessons came from his father’s mail. Dr. Rodgers Sr. did not belong to the fraternal lodges, but he supported the NAACP at a time when open membership could cost a Black worker in Anniston his job. So he let others use his address.
“He didn’t have anything to do with the fraternal organizations, but he supported the NAACP, and I learned how to read with the NAACP mail coming to our house.”
The boy would meet the postman when he blew his whistle and carry in membership cards addressed to neighbors. Soon he was reading The Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine. “Crisis had three-syllable words in it,” he recalled, “a lot of them.”7
His father was not a man to be pushed. His son said he carried a pistol all his life.
“My daddy was ready to die — I told you he carried a pistol all the time — and that’s the way he wanted to do it. But he never had to use it.”
The children also saw the other side of a doctor’s life in a poor town. Patients came to the door at night with no money to pay. Gordon believed those nights shaped his younger brother, who would spend his career trying to close that gap.
“He was a child there when people would come with these pitiful stories, somebody about to die in the family, and my daddy did all he could humanly do, but there’s a big gap between getting medical service to the — the underfinanced folks, I guess I’d call them.”
So the home on Cooper Avenue held a Meharry diploma, a mother who valued schooling, NAACP mail and a loaded pistol. It also held the expectation that the children would make something of themselves. That expectation would be tested first in Anniston’s schools.
Footnotes
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Dr. Gordon A. Rodgers Jr. on Blacks in Anniston (2002 interview), Side A, 0:06–1:53 and 17:31. Public Library of Anniston-Calhoun County. ↩
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Birth date and place from the Find a Grave memorial for Dr. Gordon Alexander Rodgers Sr. (#59474154). His son confirms Wetumpka and “the eighteen eighties” in Alabama Oral History No. 93 (1995), Tape 1, 3:18. ↩
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The Meharry graduation year (1908) and the 1910 marriage and practice come from the Find a Grave memorial and a Russell Brothers Collection photograph caption; the two may share a family source. In the 2002 interview (Side A, 14:20 and 33:21) Dr. Rodgers Jr. remembered his mother graduating from Talladega “in 1912, I think” and his parents marrying in 1912. ↩
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2002 interview, Side B, 9:00–9:53. Frederick Burger’s same-day notes give the pharmacy’s location as 16th Street and Brown (Burger research file, notes p. 2). ↩
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2002 interview, Side A, 15:22; Burger research file, notes p. 1. On tape he gives the wedding date as January 10; Burger, working from the certificate, records January 17. ↩
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Samuel’s birth date (August 10, 1917) is well documented in Kansas City records. Frances’s birth year is from the family’s Find a Grave entries. Address: 2002 interview, Side A, 34:21. ↩
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2002 interview, Side A, about 20:00–22:45. ↩