Newton Resident Takes Center Court At Celtics Game For A Century Of Contributions

NEWTON, MA — A resident was honored by the Boston Celtics recently for his military service and contribution to the medical field.

Dr. Harold May took to center court at TD Garden during a break in the Celtics game against the Philadelphia 76ers on Tuesday, April 21 as the game’s designated “Hero Among Us.” May, 99, joined the Army Air Corps in 1945 and was one of the original Tuskegee Airmen who fought in World War II.

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“Tuskegee was the only place I could go, because I’m African American. We called ourselves colored then. We didn’t call ourselves black. We didn’t even call ourselves African American. We called ourselves colored at that time,” May said in a 2015 interview with Harvard Medical School. “But the only place any young man who was going into the air corps to fly could do that was Tuskegee because of prejudice.”

After years of service, the Peekskill, New York native graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1951 and broke racial barriers when he became the first Black surgical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital.

He served as the emergency medicine course director at his alma mater and developed an emergency response system in the early 1970’s that is still in practice by emergency services today. Pillars of May’s system included inter-agency coordination between different branches of assistance such as police, fire, emergency response, and hospitals during situations of potential mass casualty.

He accomplished these goals all while gradually losing his vision, as he was diagnosed with the degenerative eye condition keratoconus prior to his graduation. However, an operation in 1956 helped prevent total vision loss and allowed him to continue his world-changing work.

“It was well received by the medical students. It taught them, each of the medical students, how each of them should have a way of approaching any emergency situation, whether it’s for an individual or for a group of individuals,” May said in the interview. “And that led to my involvement with the emergency services system for Boston.”

The Heroes Among Us award has been presented to an individual or group at each Celtics home game since 1997.

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