From time to time movies, musicals, poems and books are reintroduced to a newer often younger audience. Classics like "High Noon", "The Magnificent Seven" and "West Side Story" come to mind. The stories and messages they convey are timeless and provide lessons learned to succeeding generations. Many Black parents and grandparents lament the fact that their progeny sometimes are unaware of their own history including civil rights leaders, literary figures, artists and elected officials who fought for justice and equality. 
Dr. Alvin J. Schexnider
Organ Thieves by Chip Jones, a former Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter refreshes our memory and reintroduces to a new generation L. Douglas Wilder, known primarily to many as the first Black to win statewide office as Lieutenant Governor; the nation’s first elected Black Governor; and Richmond’s first popularly elected Mayor.
Many will learn for the first time that before his election to the Virginia Senate in 1969, Wilder had earned a solid reputation as a skilled and highly respected trial attorney. It is here where the book, Governor Wilder and VCU intersect in timely fashion given current efforts to suppress and ignore Virginia’s sordid past. It’s doubtful that the lawyer cum professor and the university could have predicted this confluence of events but such is life.
In the vernacular of the streets, L. Douglas Wilder has been on the case for a very long time. Racism was stifling then just as it is now albeit more direct and in your face in the 1950s when he started his law practice. That he continues to confront racism wherever he finds it should come as no surprise. And so should we which is why efforts to sanitize history is dangerous, self-defeating and must be resisted. The Organ Thieves is getting attention at VCU where Wilder teaches at the School that bears his name and where the first heart transplant in the South occurred on its MCV campus. Although perhaps less well known than the Tuskegee syphilis study or the appropriation and monetizing of Henrietta Lacks’ cells at Johns Hopkins University, the brazen removal of a patient’s heart under hazy circumstances is no less egregious.
The Organ Thieves tells the story of MCV’s first heart transplant in 1968, removed from a Black man without his family’s consent and placed in the body of a white man. Wilder is hired to represent the involuntary donor’s family and sues.
