Maitland Keiler (Aallyah Wright/Capital B)
I Helped Bring Health Care to My Hometown in Rural Florida
He started a conversation about the shortage of doctors where he grew up and it eventually led to a new medical facility in Sumter County.
Civil rights activist Maitland Keiler, 93, talks about his role in bridging healthcare access in rural Florida.
This account has been condensed and edited for clarity.
I can remember when my mother had to walk five miles to a place called Oxford. They worked for $2 to $3 a day. A lot of times they would tote big bundles of clothes on their head and bring them home and wash them in the night and take them back. Royal is one of the most outstanding communities there is. Royal is the only place that still has 40 acres. Some of it has been chopped up in three, four, five, 10 acres, but it’s still there. They had 80 acres, my mother’s father and his brother. They lived in the same house so they had 40 acres apiece, and today we still have 56 acres of the same land. I did a lot of farm work. My mother raised four children, and I was the oldest one. I didn’t go any further than 11th grade in school because I had to stay and help her raise the other three children. I picked oranges.
I left in the early ’50s, and I moved to Leesburg and stayed for approximately a year. I moved on down to a little town called Apopka, right out of Orlando, and picked a lot of fruit down there. Four white sisters moved down from New York to the Black area to open up a clinic for the farmworkers and migrants who didn’t have money to go to doctors. I was one of the first Afro-Americans to join that board.
One day I went to my director and said, “This is nice here in Apopka — hospital, doctor’s office. Where I’m from, a couple of counties over, there’s only two doctors in the whole county.” I said they really needed something like that over in Sumter County. He went down there and he asked questions. And then he told me, “We are going to get the same kind of clinic in Sumter County that we have here in Apopka.” They were able to go from that small, one-room shack to a huge-like hospital down there because of me sending this gentleman over to Sumter County. That’s how Langley Medical Center came about.
