One More River to Cross—Looking Back, Moving Forward: BLACK PHYSICIANS

Here again, if we “rewind the tape,” we see that this problem of unequal treatment in the U.S. healthcare system is not a new problem.

The NMA was founded during early Jim Crow, when African Americans pursuing careers in medicine were banned from all-white medical schools and barred from hospital practices. It was a time when the laws of the land consigned African-American patients to separate and unequal health facilities.

As late as 1912—right here in the City of New York, well north of the Mason Dixon line—there were 10 Jim Crow hospitals. And only three of the city’s hospitals permitted black physicians to treat black patients.

It was not until the introduction of Medicare in 1965, when hospitals faced with the threat of losing hundreds of millions of Medicare reimbursement dollars, finally pulled down the “white-only” signs from their admissions departments. viagra plus

Those were hard times for black patients and black doctors. Many of you know the extraordinary story of our very own Dr. Edith Irby Jones, who became the first female NMA president in 1985.

In 1948, almost a decade before the “Little Rock Nine” integrated Central High School in Little Rock, AR, Edith Irby Jones became the first African-American student to attend the University of Arkansas Medical School.

She entered the school at a time when blacks and whites by law could not eat together in public or share the same bathroom facilities.

A high-school teacher had helped her get a scholarship to the historically black Knoxville College. Blacks in Little Rock scraped up dimes and quarters for her medical school fund, and her high-school alumni pitched in for tuition, while similar efforts by a black newspaper, the Arkansas State Press, helped pay for her living expenses.

When she arrived at the medical school, she faced daily ostracism and isolation. As she dined in solitude in a segregated cafeteria, she noticed that every day the custodial staff left her fresh flowers— a sort of unspoken way of saying, “We are here.”
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You all know the rest of the story: Dr. Edith Irby Jones graduated and set up practice in inner-city Houston. She went on to become a great NMA leader, and, in 1991, she set up a medical clinic in Haiti.

Our nation has made tremendous strides over the past few decades. Today, gone are the white-only medical school admissions policies. Gone are the legally segregated hospitals and clinics. Gone, too, are the colored-only bed gowns, exam tables and thermometers.

And today—there are over 30,000 African-American physicians. Yet despite these spectacular gains, African Americans have arrived in the 21st century still bearing the highest mortality rates, still afforded second-class healthcare and still attended by far too few African-American doctors.

Today, blacks make up almost 13% of the U.S. population but only 2% of all physicians. Likewise, blacks are in short supply in our nation’s medical school student bodies and faculties and still too scarce in top management and policy-making positions. Yet we know that diversity is critical to increasing cultural competence at all levels of the health system and crucial to improving healthcare delivery to minority patients. Diversity is essential for improving patient trust and satisfaction. And black physicians tend to practice in underserved areas. generic topamax

And so we have one more river to cross. If “looking back” has taught us anything at all, it has taught us that integration and equality are two very different things. It has taught us that there is heavy work ahead.

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