Meet Mary Thompson and George Strait

Dr. Mary Thompson was a founding member of Natick’s FHPC and former Selectman George Strait found a home in Natick with the help of the Fair Housing Practices Committee.

Dr. Mary Thompson posing by her mailbox in Hyannis, 1982. | Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

Dr. Mary Crutchfield Thompson

Dr. Mary Crutchfield Thompson was born in 1902 in North Carolina and moved to Cambridge with her parents when she was six. After attending Cambridge Public Schools, Dr. Thompson graduated from Tufts Dental School, one of the first Black women to do so. She opened her private dental practice in Boston and worked at the Boston Dispensary (a hospital that cared for poor patients, now part of the Tufts Medical Center). Dr. Thompson also founded a dental clinic for children, running out of her Cambridge home. From 1937 to 1947, she organized trips to send professionals to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, to offer dental services. In 1953, Dr. Thompson and her husband, Oscar (his friends called him “Tom”), moved to North-East Natick when a friend sold their house.

In Natick, Dr. Thompson and her husband were two of the founding members of the Natick Fair Housing Practices Committee. As members, they organized informational events about redlining to develop public support for fair housing. They worked to connect Black families with homeowners willing to sell their homes directly to new buyers without a realtor. In an interview she did for Harvard’s Schlesinger Library in 1977, Dr. Thompson recalled being one of only about fifty Black families in town when she moved to Natick in 1953, and that started to change as the NFHPC got to work. Mary and Oscar also helped found the South Middlesex branch of the NAACP in support of the NFHPC’s work. In 1960, they visited Lagos to witness Nigeria’s independence celebrations.

Dr. Thompson received several awards for her community service and humanitarian service work, including a certificate of merit from the Press Club of Boston in 1938 and an outstanding achievement award from the NAACP in 1973. In 1976, her sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha (a historically Black sorority) created a scholarship in her name for dental students at Tufts. After retiring from her dentist practice, Dr. Thompson moved to Hyannis in the 1970s but maintained close friendships with those still in Natick. In her interview with the Schlesinger Library, she recalled visiting friends who still lived in Natick for Thanksgiving and kept in close contact. Sadly, Dr. Thompson passed away in 1985.

George Strait (middle), his wife: Margaret (left), and their son: George Jr. (right), being interviewed by CBS in 1964. | Photo by Kenneth F. McLean, NHS Collections

George A. Strait

George Strait, a veteran of the Pacific Theater during WWII, had a brief but impactful stay in Natick, living there for ten years before moving away. George moved to Natick with his wife, Margaret, and their 19-year-old son, George Jr, in 1962 from Oxford, Massachusetts. George worked at the Harvard Law School Library, Margaret was a secretary at the Wellesley College infirmary, and their son was a pre-med student at Boston University. George Sr. also worked part-time as a lawyer and managed cases from home. When the family chose to move away from Oxford, they searched for a home closer to their work and searched from the North Shore down to the South Shore. The family worked with real estate agents and fair housing committees but finally found their Natick home through a fair housing organization in Boston that connected them with the Natick committee. The family that sold their home to the Straits, the Jicks, were the Natick Fair Housing Committee members.

In 1964, the Strait family was interviewed by CBS for a special program on housing integration in the US that would air on Walter Cronkite’s show. After living there for two years, they were asked about their house-hunting process and how they felt in the neighborhood. George and his wife said they had experienced no unkindness from community members after moving in but had much difficulty finding a home to move into in the first place. It seems George fit into the Natick community very well, as he was elected to the Board of Selectmen in 1970. George was the first Black selectman to hold the office and was reelected again in 1972. However, George resigned only a couple months after his reelection, and he and his family moved to Washington, DC, to pursue a new position at the Antioch School of Law. George had a long and successful career as a law librarian and professor, finally teaching at the University of Iowa until he retired in 1984. Sadly, he passed away in 1989. He was posthumously inducted into the American Association of Law Libraries Hall of Fame in 2010 as an inaugural class member.

By: Rachel Speyer Besancon