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From History of Stromsburg 1872-1997 DR. GEORGE ALBERT FLIPPIN George Albert Flippin was born in Ohio on February 8, 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War. His father, Charles Flippin, was a freed slave who fought in the war for emancipation. His mother, Mary, was Caucasian. Both parents were respected physicians and surgeons and they opened a medical office and drug store in Henderson, Nebraska, in 1888. Flippin attended the University of
Nebraska from 1891 to 1894 and the University of Illinois and its College of
Physicians and Surgeons in Chicago, Illinois. He was the first black athlete at the University of Nebraska and only the fifth black athlete at a white university in the nation. Missouri refused to play a scheduled football game, forfeiting 1-0, because of Flippin’s presence on the team. He was the first black player inducted into the Nebraska Football Hall of Fame in 1974. George Flippin married Georgia Smith in 1893. Georgia, from Des Moines, Iowa, had been a piano student at the Nebraska Conservatory of Music in Lincoln prior to their marriage. They had two children, Dorothy May (Jeffers) and Robert Browning Flippin. After their divorce, Flippin did what was then nearly unspeakable. He married the hospital’s head nurse, Martina Larson, who was Caucasian. Dr. Flippin opened the first hospital in Stromsburg in 1907, was part of the first civil rights case in Nebraska, owned the first car in Stromsburg and received the first warrant issued by York’s police court for speeding and was the first black man buried in the Stromsburg Cemetery. George Flippin was a respected physician and surgeon, known across the county for his willingness to make house calls regardless of the distance.
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