Deluxe Jim Crow: Civil Rights and American Health Policy, 1935-1954

9. Training Black Doctors in North Carolina

|| 229 || chapter 9 Training Black Doctors in North carolina In February 1951, just before the controversy began to heat up over admitting the first African American student to the University of North Carolina SchoolofMedicine,DeanWalterReeceBerryhillreceivedaletterfromJ.Charles Jordan, president of the Old North State Medical Society. Jordan protested that there were “less facilities provided for the training of Negro medical aspirants in the entire United States than there are for North Carolina’s approximately two million white people.” Such a situation was “greatly jeopardizing the health of all the citizens of our State,” and Jordan demanded that “there must be some provisionmadeforthetrainingofNegrodoctorsinNorthCarolina.”ButJordan went further to beseech Berryhill and his colleagues, in the name of Christianity and democracy, “to consider immediately and seriously the admission of Negroes to the University of North Carolina, which is being maintained out of State funds provided by all citizens, black and white alike.” Education, civil rights, medicine and public policy converged in the desegregation of medical education, which provides important comparisons to the concurrent efforts to overturn institutionalized segregation in K–12 and higher education as well as in the Hill-Burton federal hospital construction program.1 Postwar Change in Southern Medical Education NorthCarolinawasembroiledinthesouthernbattleoverraceyetprideditselfon being a national leader in health and education reform. The University of North || 230 || chapter nine Carolina (unc), the state’s flagship university, embodied the conflict between tradition and change in race relations. unc president Frank Porter Graham was one of the most outspoken southern liberals and a member of President Harry S. Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights, which published its prointegration report, To Secure These Rights, in 1947. unc sociologist Howard Odum, famous for his studies of southerners black and white, stood out as an early advocate of including blacks in the public health and welfare systems. Odum’s colleague in sociology, Guy B. Johnson, proposed the idea for a landmark collection of essays by prominent black intellectuals across the political spectrum, What the Negro Wants, published in 1944 by unc Press. Edited by Howard University historian Rayford W. Logan, the book was an unequivocal call for equal rights for African Americans and an end to segregation, forever destroying the myth that southern blacks were content with their “separate but equal” status. The School of Public Health, under the leadership of Dean E. G. McGavran, was one of the most vocal opponents of segregation on campus. In 1945, McGavran cofounded the health education program at the North Carolina College for Negroes (ncc) in Durham. Yet the university’s upper administration and the majority of its political supporters in the state legislature were committed to maintaining unc as an all-white institution. During the 1950s and 1960s, the university’scontroversialroleindesegregatingsouthernhighereducationwould be subject to radically differing interpretations. To white progressives, unc was leadingthewaytowardharmoniousracerelations;towhitesegregationists,unc stood for “the University of Negroes and Communists,” in Jesse Helms’s memorable formulation; and for many black North Carolinians, the university would never overcome its 160-year history of excluding members of their race.2 unc’s drive in the late 1940s to convert its two-year medical school to a fouryear degree-granting program owed its success to a legislature that had passed health reform as an affirmation of states’ rights and an antidote to Truman’s policies supporting universal health insurance and civil rights. At the same time, the campaign undertaken by the National Medical Association (nma) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) to desegregate medicaleducationconvergedwithgrowingcallstoincrease the production of black as well as white M.D. graduates. With only nine state medical schools among the sixteen southern states and five states with no M.D.-granting schools at all in 1940, residents who studied medicine out of state often did not return to practice in their underserved home districts. During the Great Depression, Alabama had fewer doctors per capita than any other state, and by black doctors in north carolina || 231 || 1938, the total number of physicians in Alabama had declined by four hundred. As southern historian Tennant McWilliams observes, even the University of Alabama’s two-year medical program “was chasing doctors out of the state,” since students had to transfer to another school for the third and fourth years. unc’s two-year program had similar effects in North Carolina, whose twentyone hundred practicing physicians in 1945 ranked the state forty-fifth in doctors per capita. W. C. Davison, dean of the Duke University...