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Due to technical difficulties, some of the video links in this website no longer work. We are uncertain as to when or if we will be able to correct these problems. However, the video clips constitute only a small portion of the material in this website. Moreover, the full transcripts of the oral histories from which the video clips were drawn can be found by following the "Resources" link below.

To Bear Fruit For Our Race College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences

Glossary

  • American Medical Association

    Dr. Nathan Smith, while serving in the New York Medical Society, formed the American Medical Association (AMA) in 1847, believing that a national organization was needed to establish uniform standards in medical education and to outline a medical code of ethics. Growth of local chapters of the AMA was slow until the 1890s, when, among other Progressive Era reforms, there was a push for increased professionalization gained momentum. By 1910, membership in the AMA had “leaped to over 70,000.” 1

    Over the years the AMA has advocated on behalf of its members.  In an effort to regulate medical education, the AMA enlisted the help of the Carnegie Foundation, which provided funds to improve health care and education, and to conduct research on the state of medicine. The Carnegie Foundation hired Abraham Flexner, an educator, to head the research and evaluate the nation’s medical schools and make suggestions for improvement. The effects of the report changed medical education and the practice of medicine in the United States. The AMA also used its resources to lobby Congress and other governmental bodies at the national and local level regarding policies that influenced their members in matters, such as licensure, malpractice insurance, or Medicare, for example.

    The AMA accepted few African Americans in its first 100 years, in part, because its membership requirements dictated that a physician belong to a local partner association in order to join. Many local medical societies denied African-American physicians membership until the 1950s or 1960s.

    Today, the AMA remains the nation’s largest medical society. Its mission is to “promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health.” 2   The AMA admits all qualified physicians regardless of race or gender.

    For more information visit the American Medical Association website.

    Citations

    1. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920, New York: Hill and Wang, 1967. pp 111-116.
    2. American Medical Association Website.

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  • Apprentice

    Before the twentieth century, very few Americans of any race attended college or received advanced training at medical or other professional schools. Instead, young people became apprentices and gained knowledge of professions such as medicine, pharmacy, law, or engineering through on-the-job training with established professionals. In exchange for their work, apprentices often received room and board and more infrequently, minimal wages.

  • Anesthesiology

    The word anesthesia refers to the condition of having sensation and pain blocked. Any medicine providing a patient with a loss of normal sensation of feeling is called anesthesia. Its administration during a surgery or medical procedure can relax a patient, stop pain, make the patient forgetful and sleepy, or put the patient into an unconscious state.

    There are four basic types of anesthesia. Local anesthesia numbs a small area while the patient is awake. With conscious intravenous anesthesia, a combination of a mild sedative and pain medication, the patient is awake, but often does not remember the procedure. Regional anesthesia blocks the pain in part of the body. General anesthesia affects the entire body by putting the patient asleep.

  • Anesthesiologist

    An anesthesiologist sees patients prior to surgery in order to administer the medication.  During the surgery they monitor the patient, administer more anesthesias if necessary, and supervise the recovery of the patient out of surgery. 1

    Citations

    1. WebMD website
  • Bacteriologist

    A Bacteriolgist is person who studies bacteria and their relation to medicine. Bacteriology refers to the science and study of bacteria and their relation to medicine.

    Picture of bacteria

    Bacteria are single-celled microorganisms which can live as independent organisms or, dependently, as parasites. Among the more common and thus better known bacteria are strep, staph, and the agents of tuberculosis.

  • Baylor University College of Medicine

    Baylor College of Medicine, the only private medical school in the southwestern United States, began in 1900 as the University of Dallas Medical Department.  It became affiliated with Baylor University in 1903 in Waco, Texas. 

    In 1943, the Texas Medical Center (TMC) invited the Baylor University College of Medicine to join. The first building in the new TMC was the Roy and Lillie Cullen Building.  Completed in 1947, it became the permanent home for Baylor.  The following year Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, a well-respected pioneer in cardiac surgery, came to Baylor as the new Chairman of Surgery and immediately gave the institution greater national attention. 

    In 1948, Baylor became affiliated with the Veterans Affairs Hospital.  This affiliation provided teaching facilities where medical students gained practical training in a hospital setting.  This same year, Baylor laid the groundwork for an association with Jefferson Davis Hospital.  Other hospital affiliations followed, including the Methodist Hospital in 1951, Texas Children’s Hospital in 1952, St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in 1954, and the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research in 1959.

    Baylor College of Medicine began its affiliated residency program in 1955.  Affiliated residency combined the resources of several hospitals into a comprehensive curriculum.  It was one of the first such programs in the United States. 

    In the 1950s, Baylor admitted its first African-American resident, Dr. John Madison.  He completed a residency in internal medicine. Dr. Edith Irby Jones followed him as the second African-American resident in medicine at the end of the decade. 

    By an executive order, President Harry Truman had ended segregation in the military in 1948.  The order required that any facility operated and used by military be integrated. Thus, through Baylor’s affiliation, Dr. Madison and Dr. Jones trained at the Veterans Hospital in Houston at a time when other hospitals were not open to them. 

    In 1969, by mutual agreement, the College of Medicine ended its affiliation with Baylor University and became an independent institution. The separation allowed for greater nonsectarian support and greater access to federal research funding. The institution’s name changed to the Baylor College of Medicine.

    In 1969, Baylor also admitted its first African-American medical students.  Several of Houston’s physicians attended Baylor College of Medicine, or worked in one of its affiliated hospitals as a resident. 

    In 1975 Dr. Robert Bacon joined the staff as its first full-time African-American faculty member.    

  • Board Certification

    The American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) is an umbrella organization for 24 of the 26 approved medical specialty boards in the United States and one of three entities overseeing certification in this nation.

    Board certification in a medical specialty is evidence that a physician’s qualifications for a specialty practice are recognized by his or her peers. Board certification is accomplished through written, practical, and/or simulator-based testing that illustrates a physician has mastered the basic knowledge and skills of a medical specialty.

    The concept of a specialty board was first proposed in 1908. Ophthalmology became the first officially incorporated board nine years later. Otolaryngology was the second in 1924.

    Other American boards under the ABMS umbrella and the years of incorporation are as follows:

    • Obstetrics and Gynecology – 1930
    • Dermatology – 1932 (originally Dermatology and Syphilology)
    • Pediatrics – 1933
    • Orthopedic Surgery - 1934
    • Proctology – 1934 (later renamed Rectal and Colon Surgery in 1961)
    • Psychiatry and Neurology - 1934
    • Radiology - 1934
    • Internal Medicine – 1936
    • Plastic Surgery - 1937
    • Surgery - 1937
    • Neurological Surgery - 1940
    • Anesthesiology - 1941
    • Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation - 1947
    • Thoracic Surgery - 1947
    • Preventive Medicine - 1948
    • Family Medicine – 1969
    • Allergy and Immunology -1971
    • Nuclear Medicine - 1971
    • Emergency Medicine - 1979
    • Medical Genetics – 1991
    • Pathology – 813-286-2444
    • Urology – 434- 979-0059

  • Brown v. Board of Education

    In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (347 U.S. 483), the U.S. Supreme Court declared that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional because it deprives students of equal educational opportunities.  This decision directly countered the doctrine of “separate but equal” established in 1896 with the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537).  By 1954, seventeen, mostly southern states had laws requiring racial segregation in schools.  Four other states, including Kansas, allowed local school districts to segregate schools if they so chose to do so.       

    The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a major force in the civil rights movement in the United States, focused on legal cases to compel the integration of American society in the 1930s.  Its initial strategy involved forcing universities to admit black students.  The NAACP secured an early victory in Murray v. Pearson (182 A. 590) in 1935, when the Maryland Supreme Court ruled that the University of Maryland could not deny access to its law program based on race. However, before 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy still stood as the law of the land and many states continued to segregate educational facilities.

    By the 1950s the NAACP began to look for cases involving elementary school students.  It filed five cases in different parts of the country with several common elements: all involved elementary school children, all involved school districts where black schools were inferior to white ones, and each suit claimed that the “separate but equal” doctrine violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

    In 1952 the Supreme Court agreed to hear the five cases collectively—a major victory because it showed that school segregation was a national problem and not simply a southern issue.  Ultimately, the Court’s members recognized that they were divided and decided to rehear arguments.

    In the interim, in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed California Governor Earl Warren as the new Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.  Warren and the other eight justices knew that racial unrest was likely to follow their ruling no matter what they decided. Therefore, Warren concluded that unanimity was necessary to make a strong statement regarding segregation. To insure that the court’s decision would be enforced throughout the country, Warren worked hard to achieve this end. On May 17, 1954, Warren read the unanimous opinion holding statutory school segregation unconstitutional. 

    The next step in desegregating schools was to determine the manner in which integration should take place.  On May 31, 1955 Warren read the ruling now known as Brown II (349 U.S. 294) which directed states to move with “all deliberate speed” to end segregation in the classroom.

    Resistance to the Brown decision followed.  The governor of Virginia closed public schools to thousands of students rather than submit to desegregation. Three mass

    marches on Washington and a prayer pilgrimage in favor of integration took place. 

    In 1956, nineteen U.S. senators and seventy-seven members of the U.S. House of Representatives from the South prepared the Southern Manifesto. This document accused the Supreme Court of abusing its power and opposed judicially enforced racial integration of public places. The three southern senators who did not sign the document were Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas and Al Gore, Sr., and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.

    In Arkansas in 1957, President Eisenhower ordered National Guard troops to escorted black students to formerly all-white schools. Some southern states took more than twenty years to integrate public schools, and some commentators believe that complete integration has yet to occur.

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  • Carnegie Foundation

    Founded by Andrew Carnegie, the Carnegie Foundation constitutes a series of philanthropic, or charitable, organizations designed to “promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.” Carnegie used his wealth to fund many foundations.  After emigrating from Scotland, Carnegie first worked in a cotton mill, but by the time he was thirty, he helped to launch the steel industry of Philadelphia. He began donating money to fund education and libraries and wrote the book The Gospel of Wealth in 1889.  The book outlined, among other things, his theory that the wealthy should donate their excess money to better their community.  When he sold his company in 1900 to J. P. Morgan for $480 million, Carnegie pursued philanthropic activities and writing full time.

    In 1905, Carnegie established the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which provided research to write reports about improving education.  In 1910, the American Medical Association contacted the Foundation in order to fund research of the nation’s medical educational facilities.  The resulting report, known as The Flexner Report, changed the face of medicine in the United States by standardizing medical education.  Over his lifetime Carnegie donated money to establish schools, to promote the arts, to establish free public libraries, and to promote educational development.  A number of his schools, libraries, and performance halls remain today.  The Carnegie Foundation remains active today.

  • Camp Logan Riot

    Camp Logan began as a National Guard Camp located just outside of the city limits of Houston.  With the U.S. entry into World War I, two army units were sent to Camp Logan, one white and one black.  When they received passes to visit Houston, the African-American soldiers continually faced harassed from the city’s white citizens, streetcar conductors, and police officers.  The tension continued to build until August 1917. 

    On August 23, 1917, the Houston Police Department (HPD) arrested Sara Travers, an African-American woman. Private Alonzo Edwards, an African-American soldier, tried to defend her and also was arrested.  When Corporal Charles Baltimore arrived in Houston to inquire about the arrest of Private Edwards, HPD members assaulted and arrested him as well. 

    Rumors that the police had killed a black soldier quickly spread through the army camp.  Later that same evening, a group of the African-American soldiers stationed at Camp Logan collected arms and marched into Houston.  Throughout the night shots were fired as police came out to subdue these troops.  By the morning, fifteen whites were dead, including four policemen. Four black soldiers were killed. 

    African-American soldiers involved in the march faced court martial.  The military tribunals found 110 men guilty of mutiny for participating in the riot. Because it was wartime, the punishments were severe. Nineteen men were hung and another sixty three received life sentences.

    No white civilians ever faced trial for their abuse of the black soldiers.

  • Cardiology

    Cardiology is the branch of medicine dealing with the structure, functions, and disorders of the heart and the body’s blood vessels. Cardiologists are trained to diagnosis and treat diseases of the heart and the circulatory system. In order to become a cardiologist, training must be completed in internal medicine and the sub-field of cardiology.

    Cardiologists must be familiar with a wide range of diseases affecting the heart muscles, the blood vessels, the valves of the heart, and the electrical functioning of the heart. Among other conditions, cardiologists treat heart attacks (the interruption of the blood flow to the heart) and cardiac arrest (when the blood stops flowing through the body). Other conditions involve heart weaknesses, enlargement of the heart, abnormal heart rhythms, and vascular diseases.

  • Child psychiatry

    A child psychiatrist specializes in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental and emotional disorders that affect children, adolescents, and their families.  Examples of problems that a child psychiatrist might treat include depression, anxiety, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). 

    An important antecedent to the specialty of child psychiatry was the nineteenth-century recognition of childhood as a special phase of life with its own developmental stages.

  • Civil Rights Act of 1964

    The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was one in a series of civil rights laws designed to guarantee the basic rights of all American citizens.  Nearly a century earlier, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which attempted to prohibit segregation.  However, unscrupulous and racist legislators, law enforcement officials, and courts undermined this legislation and subsequent laws, limiting the rights of African Americans and upholding segregation practices.  Prior to 1964, neither the federal government nor state governments had been able to guarantee the equal rights of African Americans.

    After seven months of heated debate and political delay congresspersons passed a new and more comprehensive law.  On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the bill into law. This new law prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex, race, national origin, or religion in public facilities such as restaurants, hotels, on playgrounds, and in employment. 

    The law also established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to implement and enforce the law, and Title VI which forbid discriminatory practices in federally funded programs or activities.  When Medicare was enacted in 1965, for example, Title VI ensured that hospitals that maintained segregated facilities would not receive funding for Medicare patients. Following this Civil Rights Act, the Hill-Burton Act, and the Medicare Act, hospitals across the country integrated relatively quickly and quietly.

  • Dermatology
    Dermatology is the branch of medicine concerned with the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases of the skin and its appendages – nails and hair. The skin is the largest organ of the human body. Some of the more common aliments that dermatologists treat include acne, cold sores, fungal infections, warts, and skin cancer. Dermatology also can involve cosmetic care and enhancement.
  • De facto segregation
    De facto segregation refers to segregation that incurs in fact but is not imposed by law. De facto segregation is imposed most often through social custom and tradition.
  • Epidemics
    An epidemic is an outbreak of a contagious disease that spreads rapidly and widely in numbers in excess of normal rates. An epidemic occurs within a region or community. When a disease spreads rapidly over a large portion of a country or the world then it is a pandemic.
  • Family medicine

    Also called family practice, this medical specialty provides continuing and comprehensive health care for the individual and family. It is the specialty in breadth which integrates the biological, clinical, and behavioral sciences. The scope of family practice encompasses all ages, both sexes, each organ system, and every disease entity.

    The independent Board of Medical Specialties first recognized family medicine as the twentieth primary medical specialty in 1969. Board examinations have been offered since 1970. The growth of specialists in family medicine, along with the rise of other specialists, parallels the decline in the number of general practitioners.

  • Flexner Report

    The report on “Medical Education in the United States and Canada,” better known as the Flexner Report, appeared in 1910. It compiled information on the quality of medical education in an attempt to improve the practice of medicine in the United States.

    Before this time, medical education and the practice of medicine in the United States had received little regulation. Consequently, a number of schools offered substandard education and prepared potentially incompetent doctors.

    Under the new standards, medical students needed to complete at least two years of undergraduate pre-medicine courses as a prerequisite for medical school. All medical schools' curriculum required two years of basic science instruction, with anatomy labs and lectures, and two years of clinical work. Medical students needed at least one year of internship. Specialization required additional training through a residency.

    The report reflected the biases of the time. Flexner deemed many smaller, "proprietary" schools inadequate. These schools, however, were the most likely ones to admit African Americans, women, rural Americans, and students of limited means. These schools could not afford to implement the extensive changes recommended. All of the women's medical schools closed.

    All but two of the medical schools that primarily admitted blacks closed. Only Meharry Medical College in Tennessee and Howard University's Medical School in Washington D.C. survived.

  • Food and Drug Act

    One reform effort of the Progressive Era focused on the quality of the food and medicine ingested by Americans.  Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle (1906), depicted the harsh working conditions and poverty faced by immigrant workers in Chicago’s  stockyards, but most readers were more deeply concerned with what it revealed about the unsanitary and unhealthy character of the meat produced from the yards. 

    A year earlier, journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams wrote a series of articles in the magazine, Collier’s Weekly. These articles exposed the false claims of patent medicines. More significantly, the articles revealed that some such remedies actually harmed people or proved addictive.

    These exposes, along with other scientific research, led to the U.S. Congress to pass the federal Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.  This law provided for federal inspections of meat products, and forbade the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated food products or poisonous patent medicines.  Over the next thirty years similar laws placed further restrictions on food products and medicines to protect consumers. 

    By the 1930s, the Food and Drug Administration, which like its predecessor agencies regulated the quality of food and medicines, and the Federal Trade Commission, a federal agency that enforced consumer protection, began to determine which drugs were safe for over-the-counter sales and which drugs required prescriptions. These agencies also worked to eliminate false advertising for consumable products.

  • Fourteenth Amendment
    The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (Amendment XIV) is one of the post-Civil War amendments (known as the Reconstruction Amendments), first intended to secure rights for former slaves. It includes the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses among others. It was proposed on June 13, 1866, and ratified on July 9, 1868. It is perhaps the most significant structural change to the Constitution since the passage of the United States Bill of Rights.
  • Fourth Ward

    The Fourth Ward was established in the nineteenth century when the city of Houston divided into four political subdivisions.  Bordering Buffalo Bayou, the Fourth Ward, also known as Freedmen’s Town, extended west of Main Street and south of Congress Avenue.  The area became Houston’s oldest African-American neighborhood, and was heavily populated with freed slaves after emancipation.  These black settlers owned much of the land in the Fourth Ward. 

    Although the neighborhood was not exclusively black, the Fourth Ward housed some of the city’s most important black institutions, including schools and churches.  In 1870, the state legislature established the Gregory Institute, the first public school for African Americans in Houston.  The Colored High School was built in 1892 at the corner of West Dallas and Frederick Streets.  It was the first high school for blacks in Houston and was renamed Booker T. Washington High School in 1928. 

    A white missionary founded the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church at the corner of Rusk and Bagby in 1866, and between 1868 or 1869 Reverend John Henry “Jack” Yates become its pastor.  In 1879, Reverend Yates moved the church to Robin Street (now Clay Street) where it still stands.  Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest black church in Houston, and Antioch Missionary Baptist Church were at the center of the emerging African-American community.  Other early churches include Bethel Baptist founded in 1891 at 801 Andrews Street and the Friendship Missionary Baptist Church at the corner of San Felipe and Heiner.

    The first black medical facility in Houston was in the Fourth Ward.  Union Hospital opened in 1919 on Andrew and Genesee Street.  Old Pilgrim Hall stood at the center of the ward Heiner and West Dallas. It held many doctors’ and lawyers’ offices, the Forward Times newspaper office, ballrooms, and clubs.  All but one of the early African-American physicians practicing in Houston maintained offices in the Fourth Ward. 

    The Colored Carnegie Library was opened in 1913 at the corner of Frederick and Robin streets near the Colored High School.  Houston was the only southern city to build a library for African Americans.  In 1924 the city opened a charity hospital on Elder Street called Jefferson Davis Hospital. In 1939, when the original “Jeff Davis” became too crowded, the city built a new facility on Allen Parkway. 

    After World War II, African Americans move into other areas of Houston.  Large numbers moved to the Third Ward, South Park, and Riverside Terrace. 

    In the Fourth War, property owners were replaced by renters. Many buildings were knocked down. Recently, there has been a grassroots effort to preserve the physical structures and history of the Fourth Ward.  Several buildings were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.

  • Forensics
    Forensics involves the application of scientific knowledge to legal problems and legal proceedings as, for example, in forensic anthropology, forensic dentistry, forensic experts, forensic medicine, or forensic pathology. Forensics, for example, might involve the use of DNA for identification to establish paternity in child support cases; prove the presence of a suspect at a crime scene; or identify accident victims.
  • Freedmen’s Town

    The Fourth Ward was established in the nineteenth century when the city of Houston divided into four political subdivisions. Bordering Buffalo Bayou, the Fourth Ward, also known as Freedmen’s Town, extended west of Main Street and south of Congress Avenue. The area became Houston’s oldest African-American neighborhood, and was heavily populated with freed slaves after emancipation. These black settlers owned much of the land in the Fourth Ward.

    Although the neighborhood was not exclusively black, the Fourth Ward housed some of the city’s most important black institutions, including schools and churches. In 1870, the state legislature established the Gregory Institute, the first public school for African Americans in Houston. The Colored High School was built in 1892 at the corner of West Dallas and Frederick Streets. It was the first high school for blacks in Houston and was renamed Booker T. Washington High School in 1928.

    A white missionary founded the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church at the corner of Rusk and Bagby in 1866, and between 1868 or 1869 Reverend John Henry “Jack” Yates become its pastor. In 1879, Reverend Yates moved the church to Robin Street (now Clay Street) where it still stands. Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest black church in Houston, and Antioch Missionary Baptist Church were at the center of the emerging African-American community. Other early churches include Bethel Baptist founded in 1891 at 801 Andrews Street and the Friendship Missionary Baptist Church at the corner of San Felipe and Heiner.

    The first black medical facility in Houston was in the Fourth Ward. Union Hospital opened in 1919 on Andrew and Genesee Street. Old Pilgrim Hall stood at the center of the ward Heiner and West Dallas. It held many doctors’ and lawyers’ offices, the Forward Times newspaper office, ballrooms, and clubs. All but one of the early African-American physicians practicing in Houston maintained offices in the Fourth Ward.

    The Colored Carnegie Library was opened in 1913 at the corner of Frederick and Robin streets near the Colored High School. Houston was the only southern city to build a library for African Americans.In 1924 the city opened a charity hospital on Elder Street called Jefferson Davis Hospital. In 1939, when the original “Jeff Davis” became too crowded, the city built a new facility on Allen Parkway.

    After World War II, African Americans move into other areas of Houston.  Large numbers moved to the Third Ward, South Park, and Riverside Terrace.

    In the Fourth War, property owners were replaced by renters. Many buildings were knocked down. Recently, there has been a grassroots effort to preserve the physical structures and history of the Fourth Ward.  Several buildings were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.

  • Gastroenterology
    Gastroenterology is the branch of medicine that studies disorders of the esophagus, stomach, liver, intestines, and colon. Gastroenterologists treat diseases such as heartburn, acid reflex, ulcers, Crohn’s Disease, diverticulosis, diverticulitis, and colon cancer.
  • General surgery
    General surgery, despite its name, is a surgical specialty that focuses on surgical treatment of abdominal organs, e.g. intestines including esophagus, stomach, colon, liver, gallbladder and bile ducts, and often the thyroid gland (depending on the availability of head and neck surgery specialists) and hernias.
  • Great Society

    The Great Society involved a series of domestic programs enacted at the initiative of President Lyndon B. Johnson. These reforms included legislation to improve health care and education, eliminate poverty, and provide jobs.  Other programs contemplated new funding for the arts and protection of the environment.

    Under one initiative known as the “War on Poverty,” the federal government established the Job Corps, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, and the Model Cities program, while also increasing the minimum wage.  In 1965, Congress transformed the Department of Housing and Urban Development into a cabinet-level agency, in order to coordinate and administer many of the new programs.

    In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which offered student scholarships and loans, represented a major break from precedent because the federal government (rather than state and local governments) provided more than $1 billion directly to the nation’s schools. The act allowed for the purchase of new materials and the creation of special education programs. This act included Head Start, which has been recognized by most commentators as the federal government’s most successful initiative in education.

    The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal spending at the university level and created new scholarships and student loans. Three years later, the Congress passed the Educational Opportunity Act to help impoverished students pay for college.

    President Johnson also sponsored important health assistance programs. Medicare (1965) helped the elderly secure medical insurance. Medicaid (1965) paid medical expenses for the poor. The Child Health Improvement and Protection Act (1968) insured prenatal and postnatal care for mothers and their babies.

    Medicare and Medicaid continue today and enjoy wide support. The civil rights legislation that served as a foundation for many Great Society programs remains strongly entrenched.

    Yet other Great Society programs fell by the wayside. It became difficult for the federal government to fund many poverty initiatives due to the prosecution of the Vietnam War. Subsequent presidents, particularly Ronald Reagan, substantially cut funding for remaining programs. Conservative commentators criticized many Great Society programs for ineffectiveness and for creating a permanent underclass.

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  • Gynecology
    Gynecology refers to the surgical specialty dealing with health of the female reproductive system (uterus, vagina and ovaries). Literally, outside medicine, it means "the science of women". Almost all modern gynaecologists are also obstetricians.
  • Health Maintenance Organizations

    HMO is an abbreviation for health maintenance organization. HMOs are both insurers and health care providers. A HMO is a type of managed care organization that provides health insurance coverage through hospitals, doctors, and other providers with whom the HMO has a contract. The HMO Act of 1973 required employers with 25 or more employees to offer federally certified HMO options. Most people with HMO coverage obtain it through their employment.

    Unlike traditional indemnity insurance, care provided in an HMO generally follows a set of care guidelines provided through the HMO's network of providers. Under this model, providers contract with an HMO to receive more patients and in return usually agree to provide services at a discount. This arrangement allows the HMO to charge a lower monthly premium, which is an advantage over indemnity insurance, provided that its members are willing to abide by the additional restrictions. Only visits to professionals within the HMO are covered. All visits, prescriptions, and other care must be cleared by the HMO in order to be covered. A primary physician within the HMO arranges referrals.

    Begun in the last quarter of the twentieth century, managed care entities supposedly aimed to provide customers with affordable and convenient healthcare by controlling rising medical costs. HMOs and other managed care programs, such as PPOs (Preferred Provider Organizations), emphasized early detection and continuity of care, and hoped to lower the cost of medical care by cutting back on the number of tests, surgeries, hospitalizations, and procedures done, lessening the hospitalization of patients.

  • Hegemony
    The social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group.
  • Hermann Hospital

    Hermann Hospital opened in Houston in 1925. Money and land for the facility came through an endowment left by wealthy Houstonian George Hermann who died in 1914. Born in 1846 and following his service in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, Hermann made his fortune in cattle, real estate and oil.

    The original land for Hermann Hospital was expanded over time to become the Texas Medical Center. George Hermann’s endowment also provided the land for Houston’s Hermann Park and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

    The original charter for Hermann Hospital outlined the institution’s policy for extending privileges. The policy explicitly limited privileges to white males, although the hospital provided beds for black patients in a segregated ward. 

    When Dr. Edith Irby Jones completed her internal medicine residency in 1962 with Baylor Medical College in Houston, she opened a practice in the Third Ward and applied for privileges at various Houston’s hospitals. White members of the Hermann Hospital medical staff and board were eager for her to challenge their hospital’s original charter through a lawsuit.  Unwilling to become involved in protracted litigation, however, Dr. Jones refused to challenge the charter, forcing those staff and board members to overturn the charter rather than relying on a court to order them to do so.

    In 1962, Hermann Hospital amended its charter. Dr. Herman Barnett and Dr. Edith Irby Jones and Dr. Hermann Barnett were the first African Americans invited to join the Hermann Hospital medical staff that year.

    In 1997, Hermann Hospital merged with Memorial Hospital to form the Memorial Hermann Hospital which now includes a complex of sixteen hospitals within the Texas Medical Center. Its mission is to improve the health of the people of Southwest Texas by providing quality care.

  • Houston Medical Forum
    The Houston Medical Forum was founded in 1958 as an association for black doctors. Today it exists as a component society of the National Medical Association, Inc. and a branch of the Lone Star Medical Association. Its members consist predominantly of African American physicians and surgeons as well as residents and medical students.
  • Houston Negro Hospital

    On June 19, 1926, Mr. Cullinan dedicated the cornerstone for the new hospital to the black community and in memory of his son John, who died shortly after his military service in World War I. As an army officer, John Cullinan led black soldiers, and his favorable impression of their service influenced his father’s decision to offer financial support. The bronze tablet posted on the front of the building read,

    “This building erected A.D. 1926, in memory of Lieutenant John Halm Cullinan, 334th F. A. 90th Division, A. E. F., one of the millions of young Americans who served in the World War to preserve and perpetuate human liberty without regard to race, creed, or color, is dedicated to the American Negro to promote self-help, to inspire good citizenship and for the relief of suffering sickness and disease amongst them.” 

    Isaiah Milligan (I.M.) Terrell had retired the presidency of Houston College in 1925 to help raise funds for this new hospital. In the late 1800s, he had helped organize Prairie View A&M University for African-American students some 40 miles northwest of Houston. Named the hospital’s first superintendent, Professor Terrell expressed the gratitude of the African-American community at the dedication in 1926 and predicted that services the hospital would provide “would spread throughout the country,” inspiring others to, “erect similar buildings for the alleviation of human suffering.” 1

    The Houston Negro Hospital, which was later known as Riverside General Hospital, opened to patients on May 14, 1927. In a type of prepaid system that appeared in other facilities as well, the Houston Negro Hospital sold families memberships for $6 a year. These memberships guaranteed all family members were eligible for free hospitalization for a limited number of days each year. While such memberships were not a prerequisite for care and thus all African Americans were welcome at the hospital, this prepaid system helped underwrite hospital operations.

    In addition to providing a much-needed facility for black patients, the Houston Negro Hospital gave African-American physicians a place to work. In creating entities such as the Houston Negro Hospital and the National Medical Association, “black professionals identified the Achilles’ heel of white supremacy: Segregation provided blacks the chance, indeed, the imperative, to develop a range of distinct institutions that they controlled. Maneuvering through their organizations and institutions, they exploited that fundamental weakness in the ‘separate but equal’ system permitted by the U.S. Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. For all their violence, lynchings, prejudice, and hatred, white supremacists could not exterminate black people. The white supremacists’ major goal, after all, was to maintain a pliable, exploitable labor force that would remain permanently in a subordinate place.”

    Their education separated black professionals from other members of the African-American community and allowed them to emerge as community leaders. Parallel institutions, such as the Houston Negro Hospital, provided relatively safe havens for African-American physicians to hone their skills, nurture professional relations, and develop financial security. Black doctors tended to be more financially secure than black attorneys, for example, who worked within the country’s singular legal system. Nonetheless, both groups used parallel professional organizations such as the Lone Star Medical Association to forge innovative strategies for resistance.

    Citations

    1. "Houston Negro Hospital Opens on Juneteenth," The Houston Informer, 26 June 1926.
  • Howard University College of Medicine

    In 1867, just two years after the conclusion of the Civil War, the U.S. Congress issued a charter to incorporate Howard University. Established in Washington, D.C., Howard was designated a university for freedmen or former slaves. Today, Howard is home to some 7,200 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students from nearly every state and many foreign countries. It grants some 2,500 degrees each year.

    Notable Howard University alumni include Thurgood Marshall, long-time lead attorney for the NAACP and a U.S. Supreme Court justice; Stokely Carmichael, first SNCC leader and Black Power activist; Toni Morrison, novelist and Nobel Laureate; and performers Roberta Flack, Phylicia Rashad, and Debbie Allen, among others.

    In 1868, Howard University established its medical department. The medical school was open to students of all races, but assumed a special mission to provide superior training for would-be black doctors and to improve the health care African Americans across the country. Following the Civil War, freed black people migrated to the nation’s capital in great numbers. The founders of the medical college recognized that black physicians were needed to guarantee the health of this population and of African Americans across the country.

    At the time of its founding, the college included degrees in medicine and pharmacy. A degree program in dentistry was added in the early 1880s. Howard and Meharry Medical College in Nashville were the only predominantly black medical schools to survive the consequences of the Flexner Report in 1910. Abraham Flexner later served as Chairman of the Howard University Board of Trustees.

    The history of the Howard University College of Medicine (HUMC) is linked closely to that of Freedmen’s Hospital. In 1862, the War Department established a hospital in Washington, D. C. In 1863, the name of the hospital was changed to Freedman’s Hospital. Two years later, the hospital was administratively placed under the Freedmen’s Bureau. Known by 1869 as the Freedmen’s Hospital, the facility moved to the Howard University campus. Although affiliated with the university, the hospital remained under federal control until 1967 when it became the Howard University Hospital. For most of the twentieth century, this facility was one of the few in the nation which provided internships and residencies for black doctors.

    Before the 1960s, Howard and Meharry trained the vast majority of the nation’s black doctors. With few exceptions, medical schools in the U.S. South did not admit blacks or other minorities and schools in other regions kept only a few places available for them. Since the 1960s, opportunities have expanded for African Americans and other minorities at majority medical schools. Today, Howard University College of Medicine trains almost 500 medical students annually.

    Among the HUCM alumni who have practiced in Houston are:

    • Thelma Patten Law (1923)
    • Joseph G. Gathings (1928)
    • Eugene Boone Perry (1928)
    • Catherine Roett (1946)
    • Michael Banfield (1953)
    • Edison Banfield (1954)
    • John Coleman (1956)
    • Eula Perry (1961)
    • Levi V. Perry (1961)
    • William King (1968)
    • John Clemmons (1976)
    • Joye Maureen Carter (1983)


    For more information on the history of Howard University generally, visit the History page of the Howard University website.

    For more information on the history of Howard University College of Medicine, visit the History page of the Howard University College of Medicine website.

    Close Howard information^

  • Internship

    A person who is in a medical internship has completed his or her training in medical school but is not yet certified to practice medicine without supervision. Following a year long internship in which the student practices medicine under a fully certified physician, the intern either continues on to a residency program to train for a more specialized field, or stops training and can become certified to practice general medicine.

    For the first half of the twentieth century most doctors completed their internships after medical school and became general practitioners. Less then twenty hospitals in the country provided a place for African-American doctors to complete their internship. With the increase in medical knowledge and technology the need for specialization increased, and many doctors began to specialize in one branch of medicine. Since hospitals provided the place for training, and many hospitals offered places in their residency programs to whites only, until the mid twentieth century many African-American physicians were unable to complete a residency program. This caused a great number of African-American doctors to become general practitioners.

    Today, the number of medical school graduates completing an internship has continued to lower. Instead, most new doctors complete a residency in their chosen field. Residency programs exist in a broad range of specialties including everything from neurosurgery to family medicine.

    For more information on medical schools, visit the Association of American Medical Colleges website.

  • Internal medicine

    Internal medicine is the branch of medicine that deals with the diagnosis and nonsurgical treatment of diseases affecting adults.  Internists provide a wide-range of preventive, diagnostic, and treatment services to adults.  They are able to recognize and control risk factors which lead to conditions, such as high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol levels. Internists do not treat children, deliver babies, or perform operations.

    Subspecialties of internal medicine include allergy and immunology, cardiology (heart), endocrinology (hormone disorders), hematology (blood disorders), infectious diseases, gastroenterology, nephrology (kidney), oncology (cancer), pulmonology (lung), and rheumatology (arthritis and musculoskeletal disorders)

  • Jefferson Davis Hospital

    On December 2, 1924, the city of Houston dedicated the Jefferson Davis Hospital as a charity facility.  The city chose the name to placate relatives of confederate veterans buried in the cemetery that previously occupied the site. Jefferson Davis was the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

    From 1925 to 1938, the hospital remained open at Elder Street. When the original facility became overcrowded, a second Jefferson Davis hospital was built on Allen Parkway. 

    The city created Jefferson Davis Hospital (“Jeff Davis”) to serve the needs of the indigent Houstonians, including poor African American.  Although the hospital treated black patients, it refused to extend privileges to African-American doctors. 

    In 1948 Baylor College of Medicine began an association with Houston’s Veterans Administration hospital and Jefferson Davis Hospital.  When Baylor accepted Dr. John Madison and later Dr. Edith Irby Jones for residencies in medicine, however, the segregation policies at Jefferson Davis Hospital prevented these African-American physicians from treating patients there. Instead, Dr. Jones recalled, she completed her residency at the VA Hospital. President Truman’s 1948 executive order desegregating the military also had applied to veterans’ facilities.
     
    Jefferson Davis Hospital closed in 1989.

  • Jim Crow

    Jim Crow laws helped create a racial caste system in the American South where social customs limited educational, political, legal, and economic opportunities for blacks and dictated how they needed to conduct themselves in society. If an African American violated such customs, he or she risked jail, violence, and even death.

    Jim Crow laws required that public schools, public facilities, and public transportation maintain separate facilities for whites and blacks. Many southern states passed laws that effectively precluded African Americans from voting or serving on juries, which were among the most basic rights of citizenships. For example, poll taxes or literacy tests were applied unfairly to black residents.

    Most historians agree that the name Jim Crow is derived from a minstrel show character. The Jim Crow Era finally drew to a close with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, although social, political, and economic inequities persist.

  • Julius Rosenwald Fund

    The Julius Rosenwald Fund was established in 1917 by Julius Rosenwald and his family for "the well-being of mankind."

    Julius Rosenwald, an an American businessman, became part-owner of Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1895, and eventually served as its president from 1908 to 1922, and chairman of its Board of Directors until his death in 1932. He became interested in social issues, especially education for African Americans, and provided funding through Dr. Booker T. Washington prior to founding the fund.

    Unlike other endowed foundations, which were designed to fund themselves in perpetuity, The Rosenwald Fund was intended to use all of its funds for philanthropic purposes. It donated over 70 million dollars to public schools, colleges and universities, museums, Jewish charities and black institutions before funds were completely depleted in 1948.

    The school building program was one of the largest programs administered by the Rosenwald Fund. Over four million dollars were spent to build over five thousand one-room schools (and larger ones), as well as shops and teachers' homes in the south. These schools became known as "Rosenwald Schools." In some communities, surviving structures have been preserved for their historical character.

    The Rosenwald Fund was also one of the original backers of what later became the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Study. With support from the Rosenwald Fund, an ambitious program was begun to improve the health of African-Americans in US southern states in 1928. When the Great Depression began a year later, the Rosenwald Fund was forced to remove its support. The subsequent search by the U.S. Public Health Service for financial support led the doctors to Tuskegee Institute. With this change from a treatment program to a medical experiment, the Tuskegee Experiments had begun.

  • Lone Star Medical Association

    The Lone Star Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Association began in 1886 with an inaugural meeting in Galveston.  The association began when a group of black practitioners approached the white Texas Medical Association (TMA) and were refused membership.  The Lone Star Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Association was created to support African-American health care professionals in Texas. 

    After a sporadic beginning, the organization, which was later renamed the Lone Star Medical Association (LSMA), gained new life in 1901 and thereafter grew steadily in membership and influence.  Although it continued to refuse to admit black members, the TMA officially endorsed LSMA in 1939, giving the latter organization greater legitimacy. 

    The LSMA held its annual meeting in Houston in 1940. 

    In 1955, the TMA ended its segregationist policies and opened its membership to African-American physicians. The LSMA remained active, but initially saw its membership numbers decline from 250 in 1959 to eighty in 1985 when the state’s black pharmacists and dentists decided to form their own professional organizations.

    In the past two decades, however, the LSMA has gained members as more African Americans have attended medical school. As the LSMA entered the twenty-first century, its membership exceeded 1,200. The LSMA remains active today, promoting the health care needs of African-Americans and providing support to black doctors.

  • Medicare

    Medicare is the U.S. government’s health insurance program for aged and disabled persons.  Initiated in 1965, Medicare was a part of the Great Society, a reform program created by President Lyndon B. Johnson.  In order to receive Medicare funds, a hospital had to comply with the provisions of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964that prohibited discriminatory practices in federally funded programs. Eager to receive Medicare funds, hospitals across the South quickly and quietly integrated their facilities and began to extend privileges to African-American physicians. 

  • Medicaid
    Medicaid is a health insurance program for individuals and families with low income and few resources.  Unlike Medicare, which is federally funded, Medicaid is jointly funded by the individual states and the federal government.
  • Meharry Medical College

    In 1876, the Freedman’s Aid Society of the United Methodist Episcopal Church created the Medical Department of Central Tennessee College of Nashville to train African-American men and women interested in becoming physicians.  In 1900, this college became Walden University. 

    By 1915, Meharry Medical College had become a separate entity from the university. Meharry and the Howard University College of Medicine were the only predominantly black medical schools to survive the implications of the Flexner Report in 1910.

    Before 1960, medical schools in the American South, with very few exceptions, remained closed to African Americans. Medical schools in other parts of the country often maintained a limited number of seats for blacks. Consequently, Meharry and Howard graduated the overwhelming majority of African-American physicians before 1960. Meharry graduates in Houston, including:

    • Franklin Robey, 1883
    • John Edward Perry, 1895
    • Benjamin Jesse Covington, 1900
    • Henry F. Lee, 1902
    • George Washington Antoine, 1906
    • George Patrick Alfonso Forde, 1913
    • Rupert A. Roett, 1915
    • Thomas Shadowens, 1917
    • Charles Whittaker Pemberton, 1923
    • Dogan Pemberton, 1929
    • Robert Bacon, 1948
    • Carl Mark Carroll, 1951
    • Hargrove Wooten, 1951
    • Clarence Higgins, 1953
    • John Stone, 1956
    • Blanchard Hollins, 1953
    • Paris Bransford, 1963
    • Natalie Carroll, 1974
    • Faith Stone, 1983
    • Enid Stone, 1985

    Visit the Meharry Medical College website for more information.

  • Microsurgery
    The specialized surgical technique of observing through a compound microscope when operating on minute structures of the human body.
  • National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
    An interracial American organization created to work for the abolition of segregation and discrimination in housing, education, employment, voting, and transportation; to oppose racism; and to ensure African Americans their constitutional rights.
  • National Medical Association

    African-Americans physicians created the National Medical Association (NMA) in 1895.  During this post-Reconstruction era, African Americans were denied access to many white facilities and organizations. “Jim Crow” laws and customs segregated people on the basis of their race in housing, employment, transportation, education, recreation, and medicine. 

    The NMA began when groups of African-American physicians were denied access to predominantly white medical societies on the local level, and thus also were denied membership in the American Medical Association.  From the NMA’s beginning, NMA members focused on serving African Americans and underprivileged individuals who frequently received inadequate medical care.

    In 1909, the NMA published the first issue of the Journal of the National Medical Association.  It reported on treatment, management, care, and prevention of disease and illnesses, and continues in press to this day.  This journal was particularly important in the first half of the twentieth century when other medical journals often refused to published articles by African-American physicians.

    As the fight for civil rights intensified, the NMA recognized the need for its members to actively promote social change.  In 1957, the association joined other prominent African-American organizations, such as the NAACP, to sponsor a conference on the racial integration of hospitals.  In the 1960s, the NMA lobbied for the passage of civil rights legislation, and successfully supported the Medicaid and Medicare programs initiated by President Lyndon Johnson. 

    Today the NMA still represents 25,000 African-American medical professionals. The organization recruits African Americans of all classes to become physicians, assists its members in maintaining a high level of expertise, and promotes health and wellness within black communities.

    To learn more visit the National Medical Association website.

  • Ophthalmology
    Ophthalmology is the branch of medicine which deals with the diseases and surgery of the visual pathways, including the eye, brain, and areas surrounding the eye, such as the lacrimal system and eyelids.
  • Obstetrics
    Obstetrics is the surgical specialty dealing with the care of a woman and her offspring during pregnancy, childbirth and the puerperium (the period shortly after birth). Most obstetricians are also gynaecologists.
  • Otolaryngology
    Otolaryngology is the branch of medicine that specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of ear, nose, throat, and head & neck disorders.
  • Orthopedics
    Orthopedics is the branch of medicine that deals with the prevention or correction of injuries or disorders of the skeletal system and associated muscles, joints, and ligaments.
  • Pathology
    Pathology is the study and diagnosis of disease through examination of organs, tissues, cells and bodily fluids. The term encompasses both the medical specialty which uses tissues and body fluids to obtain clinically useful information, as well as the related scientific study of disease processes.
  • Patent medicines

    Patent medicines were various compounds sold to any purchaser for relatively low prices in both general and drug stores in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their manufacturers often claimed these compounds cured a long list of ailments, but without any regulation, the medicines did not even include a list of the ingredients. Many of the medicines contained alcohol, cocaine, and opiates, and thus patients often felt much better due to the high narcotics that numbed the pain and allowed them to rest. As long as the medicine produced some reaction, whether temporary pain relief or the induction of vomiting, many consumers were satisfied. 

    In 1906, the federal government passed the Pure Food and Drug Act that forbade the manufacture and sale of poisonous patent medicines.  Subsequent laws regulated the ingredients and claims that the manufacturers of patent medicines could make in an effort to safeguard consumers. Most patent medicines disappeared by the 1930s as a result of stricter regulations.

  • Pathologist
    Pathology is the study and diagnosis of disease through examination of organs, tissues, cells and bodily fluids. The term encompasses both the medical specialty which uses tissues and body fluids to obtain clinically useful information, as well as the related scientific study of disease processes.
  • Pediatrics
    Pediatrics is the branch of medicine that deals with the medical care of infants, children, and adolescents.
  • Pediatrician
    Pediatrician is term used to describe a physician who practices pediatric medicine. Pediatrics is the branch of medicine that deals with the medical care of infants, children, and adolescents.
  • Penicillin

    Penicillin, perhaps the best known antibiotic, is used to treat infections caused by bacteria and other microorganisms.  Penicillin is named for the fungal mold, penicillum mototum from which the drug is derived.  Penicillin acts by destroying the cell wall of bacteria.

    The discovery of penicillin often has been called one of the greatest medical discoveries in history.  A Scottish biologist and pharmacologist, Alexander Fleming, discovered the penicillin mold accidentally in 1928, but it took years for other scientists to transform the mold into an antibiotic that could be mass produced and was commercially viable.

    In the early 1940s, British pharmacologist Howard Florey and German-born biochemist Ernest Chain used Fleming’s findings in their search for an effective treatment for infection. They first tested the drug successfully on mice, and subsequent clinical trials with humans proved its effectiveness. 

    The race was on to make penicillin available for use in World War II.   In order to mass-produce the medicine, Florey and Chain enlisted the help of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and soon three pharmaceutical companies began to produce penicillin. By D-Day, June 6, 1944 there was enough penicillin produced to treat allied servicemen wounded in battle. Historically, soldiers were more likely to die from infections than in fighting.

    Chain had migrated to England in the early 1930s to conduct research but also to escape the persecution he faced as a Jew. His mother and sister perished during the war. In 1945, Chain, Florey, and Fleming shared the Noble Prize for Physiology and Medicine.  All three were knighted. Penicillin has been hailed by commentators as one of the greatest discovery of the past millennium.

  • Philanthropist
    A philanthropist is someone who donates his or her time, money, and/or reputation to charitable causes. The term may apply to any volunteer or to anyone who makes a donation, but the label is most often applied to those who donate large sums of money or who make a major impact through their volunteering, such as a trustee who manages a philanthropic organization.
  • Plessy v. Ferguson

    Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537 (1896)) was a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld the constitutionality of segregated facilities in public transportation. The court created a “separate but equal” doctrine that was extended to other public institutions.

    In 1890, the state of Louisiana passed a law requiring separate accommodations for blacks and whites on railroads. This statute was typical of Jim Crow laws in the American South following Reconstruction.

    Attempting to challenge both the constitutionality of this law and the absence of a clear definition of race in science, civil rights activists recruited Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth black and seven-eighths white. Under Louisiana law, Plessy was classified as black and required to ride in the “colored” car. On June 7, 1892, Plessy refused to leave the “white” car and move to the “colored” car. He was arrested.

    Plessy argued that the railroad violated his constitutional rights under the 13th and 14th amendments to the U.S. constitution. He was convicted and then pursued a variety of appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court.

    In one of the most famous decisions in the history of American jurisprudence, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 7-1 decision in favor of the railroad and against Plessy. The court dismissed the argument that the Louisiana law requiring segregation implied any inferiority of African Americans. The court concluded that the presence of separate but equal facilities did not constitute a violation of the equal protection clause in the 14th amendment.

    In subsequent cases, the court ignored the fact that separate facilities were rarely of the same quality. The Plessy decision legitimized Jim Crow practices in the South.           

    While a variety of cases chipped away at the Plessy doctrine in the 1940s, the case was explicitly overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) in which the court held that separate facilities were inherently unequal.

    In the Plessy decision, Justice Marshall Harlan issued the sole dissenting vote. Harlan was born in 1833 to a slave-owning family in Kentucky. He graduated from the law school at Transylvania University. Although he continued to believe in slavery, Harlan also believed in the sanctity of the Union and thus enlisted in the Union Army when the Civil War began in 1861, eventually rising to the rank of colonel. President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1877.

    On the court, Harlan earned the nickname “the Great Dissenter” because he dissented in a series of cases when the majority moved away from interpreting the Reconstruction Era-amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th) to protect the civil liberties of African Americans. Although a former slave owner, the excesses of the Ku Klux Klan in the years following the Civil War had converted Harlan into a defender of African-American rights.

    In his dissenting opinion in Plessy, Harlan concluded that the majority’s decision in Plessy would become as infamous as the Court’s earlier decision in the Dred Scott v. Sanford (1856) that prohibited African Americans from ever becoming citizens and that Congress had no authority to halt the extension of slavery into federal territories. The 13th and 14th amendments explicitly overturned the Dred Scott case.

    In his dissenting opinion in Plessy, Harlan wrote, “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” In making his argument, Harlan referred to the fact that under federal law, the Chinese were treated as a distinct race, denied citizenship, and in most cases, excluded from the United States, but they were still permitted to ride in the “white” car. It is unfortunate that in championing African-American rights, Harlan embodied much of the prejudice against Asians in the late nineteenth century.

    Harlan died in 1911. His son, James, became chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission. His grandson, John Marshall Harlan II, was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1955. As a member of the court from 1955 to 1971, Harlan was in the majority of a number of decisions that supported the expansion of civil rights for minorities.

  • Polio

    Polio stands for poliomyelitis, and historically was often called infantile paralysis. Polio is a viral infection which attacks the nervous system of the infected person. It can cause high fever, pain in the neck and legs, and temporary paralysis that becomes permanent in some patients. Some polio victims die from the infection.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, polio infected children in increasing numbers around the world, generally spreading during the hot summer months.

    Within the United States, public health campaigns raised money, built awareness, and funded research for cures and vaccines. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, for example, supported research through a campaign called the March of Dimes. In particular, in the 1950s, this foundation sought researchers to develop a vaccine. They enlisted the help of Dr. Jonas Salk of the University of Pittsburgh. Salk reported a successful test on a “killed virus” vaccine in 1953. At the same time, Dr. Albert Sabin of the University of Cincinnati worked on developing a “live virus” vaccine. 

    In 1955, Dr. Salk’s vaccine was tested on two million children and pronounced safe. A license was granted soon after to begin vaccinating children.  “Probably no event in American history testifies more graphically to public acceptance of scientific methods than the voluntary participation of millions of American families in the 1954 trials of the Dr. Salk vaccine.” 1  

    However, controversy surrounded Dr. Salk’s vaccine due to its killed virus content.  Many scientists feared that a killed virus vaccine did not provide lifetime immunity. Moreover, this vaccine required four separate shots.

    Dr. Sabin’s “live virus” vaccine was tested by the World Health Organization in the late 1950s. In 1961, the U.S. Public Health Service approved its use in the United States. By the end of the decade Dr. Sabin’s oral vaccine had replaced Dr. Salk’s injected vaccine as the preferred dominant preventive method and was administered to all children in the United States./p>

    By the 1990s, polio was virtually wiped out in the United States. Partly because of this fact, Dr. Salk’s “killed virus” vaccine has been recommended for use in this nation since 2000.

    Citations

    1. Paul Starr The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Roots Inc., 1982)
  • Preferred Provider Organizations

    A Preferred Provider Organization (PPO) is a health care organization composed of physicians, hospitals, or other health care providers that offer services at a reduced rate. PPOs began in the last quarter of the twentieth century as part of managed care.

    Managed care aims to provide customers with affordable and convenient healthcare by controlling the rising medical costs. PPO and other managed care programs, such as HMOs, emphasized early detection and continuity of care, and hoped to lower the cost of medical care by cutting back on the number of tests, surgeries, hospitalizations, and procedures done. PPO was also designed to cut out the middle man, making insurance programs more convenient, more efficient, and less expansive.

    Most people get coverage from a PPO through their work. The customer pays for coverage and when a doctor is needed, but the PPO pays a percentage of the cost. Unlike other managed care programs, clients choose from a network of health care providers, but they are limited to the designated practitioners.

  • Progressive Era

    Historians generally refer to the years between 1890 and 1920 as the Progressive Era. During this period, American men and women of all races and classes sought a wide variety of reforms, through private action and government intervention, most frequently to address the ills associated with industrialization.

    Reformers addressed a variety of real and perceived problems. Some reformers were motivated by a Social Gospel movement that emphasized salvation through attention to one’s neighbors. They tried, for example, to improve working conditions in factories, address the unsanitary and overcrowded urban slums, or halt what they perceived to be a rise in juvenile delinquency. Other reformers, particularly many white elites, wanted to impose new social controls to check the behavior of other community members. They tried to end corruption in government and introduce efficiency by imposing new municipal structures or turning to college-educated experts. On a national level, such reformers tried to halt the influx of immigrants from parts of the world that they deemed undesirable.

    Among other reforms, physicians and other professionals, such as pharmacists, engineers, and lawyers, hoped both to improve the quality of their services and to limit the number of competitors in their fields. Physicians trained in the nation’s medical colleges pushed for new licensure laws that limited, to graduates of those colleges, who could practice licensed medicine. They also worked to improve the quality of medical training by establishing standards for those colleges.

  • Psychiatry
    Psychiatry is the branch of medicine that deals with the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental illnesses and substance use disorders. It takes many years of education and training to become a psychiatrist. He or she must complete four years of residency training. Many psychiatrists undergo additional training so that they can further specialize in such areas as child and adolescent psychiatry, geriatric psychiatry, forensic psychiatry, psychopharmacology, and/or psychoanalysis. This extensive medical training enables the psychiatrist to understand the body's functions and the complex relationship between emotional illness and other medical illnesses. The psychiatrist is thus the mental health professional and physician best qualified to distinguish between physical and psychological causes of both mental and physical distress.
  • Residency

    Residency is the period during which a physician gets specialized medical training. Hospitals around the country offer residency positions in various fields. Through these residencies, physicians interact more closely with patients in a hospital setting while supervised by more senior physicians. 

    For the first half of the twentieth century most doctors completed an internship after medical school and became general practitioners. However, with the increase in medical knowledge and the availability of new technologies, medicine became increasingly specialized. 

    Hospitals provided the places for specialized training, but before 1960, many hospitals residency programs were reserved for whites only.  This segregation caused the majority of African-American doctors to become general practitioners. Although before 1950, the vast majority of the country’s physicians were general practitioners, African-American physicians faced a particular burden. Fewer of them became specialists because they were denied access to residencies.

    With the passage of the Hill-Burton Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Medicare Act in 1965, hospitals in the United States began to integrate, increasing their services for black patients and increasingly granting staff privileges to African American physician. These openings allowed African Americans to purse specialized training as well.

    In the last fifty years, medical specialization has increased. Since the 1970s, most medical school graduates have moved onto residency programs rather then internships. Residency programs exist in a broad range of specialties, including everything from neurosurgery to family medicine.

    For more information on medical schools and medical training, visit the Association of American Medical Colleges website.

  • Sickle cell anemia

    Sickle cell anemia is a hereditary blood disease which causes red blood cells to change shape. The distinctively reshaped cells cannot pass through the body’s blood vessels, and cause low blood counts, painful swelling, tissue damage, anemia, and other medical problems. The gene that causes the disease is found in people of African descent and some people of Mediterranean descent. For the disease to occur, the gene must be inherited from both parents. There is no cure for sickle cell disease which causes a lifetime of pain and complications.  Specialists who work with sickle cell anemia are hematologists. Hematology is the branch of medicine that deals with blood and blood-producing organs. 

    For many years sickle cell anemia remained unknown, as its telling symptoms were often mistaken for other ailments.  Finally, in 1910, Dr. James Bryan Herrick of Chicago noticed unusually shaped red blood cells in some blood samples underneath his microscope.  However, it was not until 1929 when a pathologist named Dr. Lemuel W. Diggs came to Memphis to study at the University of Tennessee Medical Center that another doctor tried to understand the disease.  Dr. Diggs struggled financially to complete his research and to promote the information that he gathered about the disease and its treatment. 

    Despite the efforts of Dr. Diggs, negative and untruthful perceptions about the disease, the carriers, and the patients persisted for years. However, as African Americans worked to change the political, economic, and social systems, they also brought new and more favorable attention to sickle cell anemia.  In 1971, President Richard Nixon initiated government funding to research cancer and sickle cell anemia.

    In 2002 the National Institute of Health created a Sickle Cell Anemia Center which operates several clinics specializing in sickle cell anemia care.  Some of the treatments available include blood transfusions, daily antibiotics for children under the age of 5, drug therapies of Hydroxyuren Droxia Hydrea, and bone marrow transplants for the most severe cases.

  • Spanish Influenza

    In 1918 the world experienced an influenza pandemic that killed between 20 and 40 million people across the globe. A pandemic is an epidemic that reaches over a wide geographic area and affects a large populace. World War I did not cause the influenza, but the movement of troops and other disruptions caused by the war quickened its spread.

    Usually referred to as flu, influenza is a highly infectious respiratory disease caused by a virus.  Flu is often a mild, albeit unpleasant disease; however when secondary infections occur, such as pneumonia, influenza can be deadly. 

    In 1918, the variation of influenza known as the Spanish flu caused a high fever, headaches, joint aches, coughing, a drippy nose, and a sore throat.  Within a few days complications arose causing nosebleeds, pneumonia, or other potentially deadly infections.  With their breathing obstructed, some patients became cyanotic, meaning their skim developed a bluish tint, and many died.  When doctors performed autopsies they found that hemorrhaging (excessive bleeding) filled the victims’ lungs with a thin bloody fluid. The victims effected “drowned” in this fluid. 

    The flu was first observed at Fort Riley in Kansas in spring 1918, although its potential scope and seriousness were not then appreciated.  American troops transported to Europe to fight in World War I probably brought the flu with them. Within four months the disease crossed Europe making it a pandemic. It reached across Asia and Africa within months. 

    The flu soon returned to the United States in September 1918, first appearing at Camp Devens, an army base near Boston. By the end of the month, it infected thousands. The disease spread quickly, moving from port cities in the East to railroad hubs and along the Great Lakes in the Midwest, and across the country to the west coast. 

    The flue arrived in the city of Houston and the nearby army base, Camp Logan, in October. Camp Logan established quarantine to separate the infected from the healthy and requested more nurses to care of the sick. The disease made its way into the city, causing schools and public places to close for several weeks. An estimated 34,000 people died in October 1918 in the Houston region; there are no figures regarding subsequent waves of the flu.

    Many victims were between the age 25 and 35 years old, although influenza epidemics traditionally affected juvenile, elderly, or otherwise weakened patients rather than healthy adults.  The flu lasted into the winter and spring of 1919. Subsequent studies have tried to determine the origin of the disease, the reason it was so virulent, and the reason it affected young adults in such high numbers. Examples can be found on the Emerging Infectious Diseases page of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website.

    Some estimates suggest that the Spanish Influenza infected 28 percent of all Americans, while some 675,000 succumbed to the disease. The flu killed an estimated 43,000 servicemen.

    While the name “Spanish Influenza” suggested the disease originated in Spain, the moniker is more likely the result of wartime politics. Spanish cities, such as Madrid and Seville, experienced outbreaks in May 1918. However, because Spain was a neutral nation during World War I, its press was not subject to the wartime censorship. Thus, in Spain, unlike other nations, the full scope of the disaster was reported, giving some commentators the mistaken impression that the disease began there.

    Close Spanish Influenza information^

  • Sulfa drugs

    Sulfa drugs are synthetic organic compounds derived chiefly from sulfanilamide. These drugs are capable of inhibiting bacterial growth. 

    In the early twentieth century, doctors struggled to cure infections that often led to death. They searched for a way to clean the body of the bacteria that caused disease, illness, and infection. A German physician and research, Gerhard Domagk, performed the necessary animal testing to prove the ability of sulfa to fight some infections. His daughter was the first human to receive sulfa drugs when he treated her streptococcal infection. Packaged commercially in 1935, his sulfa-based drug was known as Prontisil. Dr. Domagk received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1939, but Adolf Hitler refused to allow him to receive because the Nobel committee had presented its peace prize to an anti-Nazi activist a few years earlier.

    Sulfa drugs proved the most effective against streptococcal infections such as scarlet fever and strep throat but were not as effective against other virulent infections. Many patients complained about nausea, vomiting, and dizziness while taking the medicine. The drugs also proved to be hard on the kidneys and liver, even causing death in rare cases.  Sulfa-resistant bacteria also emerged over time.

    Despite these facts, sulfa drugs offered the best alternative to fight infection before World War II. Sulfa drugs continue to be used for certain infections today, particularly urinary tract infections.

  • St. Elizabeth Hospital for Negroes

    In the 1940s, the population of Houston's African-American community soared to more than 100,000. However, the number of hospital beds available to them in the city was less than 200. Father John Rocah, the director of Catholic Charities of the Galveston Diocese (now the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston), launched a program to address this critical situation.

    Originally, Father Rocah recruited the Missionary Sisters of the Incarnate World Healthcare Society to build a $10,000 clinic. This religious order had other hospitals in Latin America. The Sisters concluded that Houston's Fifth Ward needed a hospital. A successful fundraising campaign brought in $400,000. St. Elizabeth Hospital for Negroes was dedicated on May 18, 1947. Run by a bi-racial staff, which included black nurses, white nuns, black and white physicians, and black and white board members, St. Elizabeth Hospital added 60 beds for the underserved African-American community.

    Following the integration of hospitals in the 1960s, difficulties plagued St. Elizabeth. The hospital eventually closed in 1989 when the sisters decided that it was not financially and administratively possible to continue their mission. The building remained vacant until 1991, but in 1996 Riverside Hospital purchased the St. Elizabeth facility and established its drug treatment program there. Today, the Vocational Guidance Services Inc. operates it as a Houston Recovery Campus, a multi-program drug rehabilitation center.

  • The Board of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke

    In 1973 and 1974, Allen Bakke applied for admission to medical school at the University of California, Davis. Following on-campus interviews, he was denied admission both times. In 1973, for example, he had a benchmark score of 468 out of 500. No regular applicant with a score lower than 470 was admitted in that year. In 1974, one faculty member was particularly critical of Bakke’s approach to the medical program.

    The University of California also had created a special admissions program to encourage minority applicants, opening 16 slots in each medical school class. In both years, some minority applicants were accepted who had lower scores than Bakke

    Integration of institutions of higher education had offered African Americans more opportunities over the preceding decade, but the number of minority students in the nation’s medical schools remained low.  In order to remedy the situation schools began to initiate quotas to increase the number of minority students admitted each year.

    Bakke, a white man, filed suit, seeking an injunction to allow him into medical school. He claimed that the university had discriminated against him on the basis of his race and thus had violated his rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and under the California Constitution.

    After the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bakke, the University appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1978, in a divided opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial quotas were unconstitutional, but a majority of the justices also concluded that race could be one factor in the admission process and that other forms of affirmative action were constitutional, such as the active recruitment of minority students.

    The Court subsequently reaffirmed the appropriateness of affirmative action admissions programs in Grutter v. Bolinger (2003), a case involving the University of Michigan Law School.

  • Third Ward

    Houston’s Third Ward was established in the nineteenth century when the city divided into four political subdivisions. The boundaries extend east of Main Street and south of Congress.

    When freed slaves began to move into the city of Houston after the Civil War, they were forced to live in separate areas of the city.  At first, many of the freed slaves settled in the Fourth Ward, and it became the center of Houston’s African-American community.  Therefore, many black businesses and institutions were located in the Fourth Ward. 

    By World War II, many African-Americans had settled in the Third Ward and other surrounding areas.  By the 1950s the African-American population of the Third Ward exceeded 20,000, and soon Dowling Street housed many of Houston’s black businesses.

    When the black physicians of Houston pooled their resources together to build a new hospital, they decided to place it in the midst of the growing Third Ward.  In 1926 the Houston Negro Hospital was built on the corner of Ennis and Elgin Street.

    The Third Ward also became the location of academic institutions in Houston.  In 1927 the University of Houston was established. The Texas Southern University opened in 1947.  The second African-American high school, Jack Yates, was built in 1926 on Elgin.

    Many parks were also erected in the Third Ward.  In 1872 Emancipation Park was built in order to provide a place for African-Americans to celebrate Juneteenth on June 19, the day in 1865 that Texas slaves learned about their freedom.

    As Houston began to integrate in the 1960s and 1970s, African-American families spread across Houston into neighborhood from they were excluded previously. Over the last thirty years, the Third Ward experienced many changes in its physical landscape. Several groups have tried to preserve the history of the Third Ward with projects such as Eye on Third Ward, Project Row House and Mapping the Third Ward.

  • The Red Book of Houston

    Published in 1915, this document bears the name The Red Book of Houston: A Compendium of Social, Professional, Religious, Education and Industrial Interests of Houston’s Colored Population.  It consists of a series of articles written by Houston’s black leaders about their community with details about housing, health, and education.  The articles also addressed how African Americans might improve their lives and the condition of their community through education and improved health care.

    Many people contributed articles to the book, including Houston physician Dr. Henry E. Lee.  Another contributor was Emmett J. Scott, a writer who also worked as Booker T. Washington’s personal secretary.  During World War I he worked with the Secretary of War and advocating for a greater role for African Americans.

  • Tuberculosis
    Also called TB, this is a disease that is caused by a bacterium of the genus Mycobacterium. It affects especially the lungs but may spread to other areas of the body. TB is characterized by fever, cough and difficulty in breathing.
  • Typhoid Fever
    A bacterial infection usually ingested in food or water, multiplies in the intestinal wall and then enters the bloodstream. It is characterized by diarrhea, systemic disease, and a rash - most commonly caused by the bacteria Salmonella typhi.
  • Tuskegee Airmen

    The Tuskegee Airmen was the popular name of a group of African American pilots who flew with distinction during World War II as the 332nd Fighter Group of the US Army Air Corps.

    Prior to the Tuskegee Airmen, no US military pilots had been African American. However, a series of legislative moves by the United States Congress in 1941 forced the Army Air Corps to form an all-black combat unit, much to the War Department's chagrin. In an effort to eliminate the unit before it could begin, the War Department set up a system to accept only those with a level of flight experience or higher education that they expected would be hard to fill. This policy backfired when the Air Corps received numerous applications from men who qualified even under these restrictions.

  • Texas Medical Center

    The Texas Medical Center (TMC) is a collection of 46 not-for-profit institutions dedicated to the highest standards of patient care, research, and education.  Today these institutions include thirteen hospitals and two specialty institutions, two medical schools, four nursing schools, and schools of dentistry, public health, pharmacy and virtually all health-related careers.  Many of its facilities are recognized as the best in the country and in the world.

    The Texas State legislature provided a grant of $500,000 to the University of Texas to build a cancer research center somewhere in Texas.  In 1941, the M.D. Anderson Foundation, an endowment funded by the philanthropist, banker and cotton entrepreneur Monroe Dunaway Anderson (1873-1939), agreed to match those funds. The Foundation also agreed to donate 134 acres adjacent to Hermann Hospital if the new entity was built in Houston.  

    TMC began with such institutions as Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children’s Hospital, St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital, Methodist Hospital, and the Arabia Temple Crippled Children’s Clinic.  In the years following the center’s creation, more facilities were built, including the Texas Research Institute for Mental Sciences in 1960 and Ben Taub Hospital in 1963, which became the county hospital.  By the turn of the twenty-first century, the TMC’s 46 institutions spread across 675 acres.

    For more information, visit the Texas Medical Center website.
  • Texas Southern University

    In 1947, Herman Sweatt, a black man, applied for admission to the University of Texas School of Law. In an effort to thwart Sweat’s lawsuit while it was still within the Texas court system, the state legislature established in the City of Houston the Texas State University for Negroes as a “separate but equal” institution of higher education.

    To create the new university, the state legislature purchased the Houston College for Negroes from the Houston Independent School District. At a cost of $2,000,000, the state also established a law school as part of the new university.

    In 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Sweatt’s favor, concluding that the newly created separate school was inadequate because of quantitative differences in the facilities and intangible factors such as from most of the future lawyers with whom graduates would interact. The decision in Sweatt v. Painter (339 U.S. 629 (1950)) represented a successful challenge to the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

    The Texas State University for Negroes was renamed Texas Southern University in 1951. Twenty-five years later, its law school was renamed for Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s lead lawyer who argued Sweatt’s case and later became a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

    During the 1960s, Texas Southern University students vigorously protested Houston’s racial policies, staging peaceful sit-ins at segregated facilities across the city. In May 1967, following the arrest of a Texas Southern University student but also as a result of ongoing racial tension, students staged a night-long protest. The Houston police attempted to brutally repress the demonstration. In the ensuing riot, a police officer dies, two officers and two students were wounded, and some 500 students were arrested.

    Today, some 9,000 students, faculty, and staff make up the Texas Southern University community, with a mix of ethnicities represented. Located on 145 acres in Houston’s Third Ward, Texas Southern University attract students because of its legacy of empowerment and its important research centers as the Mickey Leland Center on World Hunger and Peace, the Minority Cancer Education Center, and the Center for Transportation Training and Research.

    For more information visit the Texas Southern University website.

  • Third Ward

    Houston’s Third Ward was established in the nineteenth century when the city divided into four political subdivisions. The boundaries extend east of Main Street and south of Congress.

    When freed slaves began to move into the city of Houston after the Civil War, they were forced to live in separate areas of the city.  At first, many of the freed slaves settled in the Fourth Ward, and it became the center of Houston’s African-American community.  Therefore, many black businesses and institutions were located in the Fourth Ward. 

    By World War II, many African-Americans had settled in the Third Ward and other surrounding areas.  By the 1950s the African-American population of the Third Ward exceeded 20,000, and soon Dowling Street housed many of Houston’s black businesses.

    When the black physicians of Houston pooled their resources together to build a new hospital, they decided to place it in the midst of the growing Third Ward.  In 1926 the Houston Negro Hospital was built on the corner of Ennis and Elgin Street. 

    The Third Ward also became the location of academic institutions in Houston.  In 1927 the University of Houston was established. The Texas Southern University opened in 1947.  The second African-American high school, Jack Yates, was built in 1926 on Elgin. 

    Many parks were also erected in the Third Ward.  In 1872 Emancipation Park was built in order to provide a place for African-Americans to celebrate Juneteenth on June 19, the day in 1865 that Texas slaves learned about their freedom.

    As Houston began to integrate in the 1960s and 1970s, African-American families spread across Houston into neighborhood from they were excluded previously. Over the last thirty years, the Third Ward experienced many changes in its physical landscape. Several groups have tried to preserve the history of the Third Ward with projects such as Eye on Third Ward, Project Row House and Mapping the Third Ward.

  • The University of Houston

    The University of Houston is the premier metropolitan research and teaching institution in Texas.  The UH main campus enrolls more than 35,000 students per year and is now home to the nation’s most diverse student population.  Students from all backgrounds can study at the universities’ forty research centers and institutes, and can earn a wide range of undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, and special professional degrees.

    The University of Houston, established in 1927 through monetary and land donations by wealthy Houston businessmen, relocated to its current location in southeast Houston in 1934. In 1963, the University of Houston became a state institution.

    The University of Houston admitted its first African-American student in 1961, and over the course of the following decade established innovative programs designed to attract minority students and to expand knowledge in general, such as the Afro-American Studies program, the Mexican-American Studies program, and a bilingual education program. 

    Since its inception, the University of Houston has served the children of Houston’s working class, even as the background of those students has changed over the past 80 years. University centers, such as The Center for Public History (established in 1984) conduct research exploring the history of the Houston community.

    Visit the University of Houston website for more information.

  • Union Hospital

    As part of Jim Crow segregation in the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many local Houston hospitals granted privileges to white doctors only. At the same time, these institutions cared for only small number of black patients primarily in segregated charity wards.     

    In 1918, five aspiring black physicians – Dr. Rupert Roett, Dr. Charles Jackson, Dr. Benjamin Covington, Dr. Henry E. Lee, and Dr. F. F. Stone – recognized a vital need to improve the basic health care afforded to Houston’s black community.  Unable to practice or to treat their patients in white hospitals, these men combined their financial resources and established Houston’s first black hospital in 1919. 

    The hospital began in a remodeled house with limited space and sparse equipment.  Union Hospital, as it was first called, was a charitable hospital for blacks located in the Fourth Ward on the corner of Howard and Nash Streets. It consisted of six beds and one operating room.

    Union soon became overcrowded. The administering physicians moved their facility to an unused building at Genesee and Andrew Street in 1923. They named the new hospital Union-Jeremiah Hospital to honor the black preacher-healer, Mr. Jeremiah, who had once occupied the facility.

    Several years later the hospital became overcrowded again prompting the founders to create another hospital to serve the black community called Houston Negro Hospital. Houston Negro Hospital, which opened in 1927, was later renamed Riverside General Hospital.

  • Urology

    Urology is the study of the urinary tract in women and men and the study of the male reproductive system.  An urologist is trained in treating diseases and maintaining the health of the kidneys, bladder, urethra, ureters, vans deferens, testes, epididymis, prostate, seminal vesicles, and the penis.  The urologist also possesses knowledge of internal medicine, pediatrics, and gynecology.

    The urologist most frequently utilizes a cystoscope (a tubular instrument with a light which is used to examine the interior of the urethra, ureter, and bladder) and a resectoscope (a thin, hollow, flexible surgical instrument inserted through the urethra or vagina for use in the biopsy of tissue or the removal of lesions from the prostate gland, bladder, or uterus). In the past two decades, changes in medicine have reduced the number of major surgical procedures performed by urologists as many conditions can now be treated by drugs or through less invasive procedures involving these scopes.

  • University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston

    In 1891, the Medical Department of the University of Texas opened in Galveston, Texas.  By 1900, six women and 259 men had graduated from the school, and in 1919 the state renamed the center the University of Texas Medical Branch.  The school proceeded to establish a medical base around it, which included the Children’s Hospital, the Negro Hospital, the Women’s Hospital, the John Sealy Hospital, the Shriners Burns Institute, the Jennie Sealy Hospital, and an emergency trauma center, among others.  By 1991, more than 9,000 physicians had received their degrees from UTMB, and by the year 2000, UTMB was the third largest employer in the Houston-Galveston area with some 13,000 employees.

    Galveston’s Negro Hospital, established in 1902, served African Americans from Galveston and the surrounding area.

    In 1949, UTMB admitted its first African-American student, Herman Aladdin Barnett III.  He graduated magna cum laude in 1953 and then began his surgical residency at the UTMB medical facilities. Following Dr. Barnett’s success, the school continued to admit minority students in growing numbers.

    For more information visit the UTMB website.

  • Vaccines

    A vaccine is the preparation of a weakened or killed pathogen.  A pathogen is the agent of disease, such as a bacterium or virus, but in vaccine form is incapable of causing a severe infection.  Instead, when injected, the vaccine stimulates the human body to produce antibodies that help make a person immune to the disease should the person be exposed to a stronger pathogen. An anti-toxin involves an antibody capable of destroying microorganisms such as viruses and bacteria, but it is generally administered after a person has been exposed to a disease.

    Vaccines are a prophylactic measure designed to prevent epidemics. Today infants and children routinely are given series of vaccines in order to protect them with immunity to once deadly and dreaded diseases, such as measles, chicken pox, and pertussis. As a result, infant and childhood mortality figures have plummeted throughout the twentieth century in the United States and most industrialized nations.

    Edward Jenner developed the first vaccine in the late eighteenth century from cow pox in order to protect people from small pox, a disfiguring and often fatal disease. The development of other vaccines started slowly, but by World War II, vaccines and anti-toxins had been developed for tetanus, rabies, and typhoid, among others.

    Perhaps no vaccine was more important than the one developed to fight diphtheria. It is one of the oldest vaccines and remains one of the safest.

    Diphtheria is a potentially fatal, contagious disease that usually involves the nose, throat, and air passages, but may also infect the skin. Its most striking feature is the formation of a grayish membrane covering the tonsils and upper part of the throat. Like many other upper respiratory diseases, diphtheria is most likely to break out during the winter months. At one time it was a major childhood killer.

    The treatment of diphtheria and the search for a prevention and cure for diphtheria was at the forefront of academic medicine. The first effective antitoxin was developed in the 1890s, but many people still died from the disease, including more than 200,000 in the United States as late as 1920. The first successful vaccine for diphtheria was developed in 1921, but it wasn’t widely used until the 1930s. In the 1940s, the diphtheria toxoid was combined with the pertussis vaccine and tetanus toxoid to make the combination DTP vaccine.

    Diphtheria is now rare in developed countries because of widespread immunization. Since 1988, all confirmed cases in the United States have involved visitors or immigrants. In countries that do not have routine immunization against this infection, the mortality rate varies from 1.5 to 2.0 percent.

  • Veterans Administration Hospital

    Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals are operated and administered by the Veterans Administration for the care of veterans of U.S. wars and retired military persons. Houston’s VA Hospital is part of the Texas Medical Center.  By executive order President Harry Truman ended segregation in the military in 1948.  The order required that any facility operated and used by military had to be integrated, and thus provided another place for African-American physicians to practice medicine in Houston and other cities

  • Voting Rights Act of 1965

    On March 7, 1965, some 525 people began a fifty-four mile march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, Alabama, the state capital.  They marched to protest the legal obstructions the state of Alabama and local governments employed to deprive African Americans of their right to vote. The marchers also hoped to shed light on the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, whom state troopers had shot while he defended his mother during a peaceful civil rights demonstration.  John Lewis headed the voter registration campaign through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He organized and led the march.

     As the marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, local deputies and state troopers violently attacked the peaceful group with tear gas, billy clubs, and bullwhips.  Journalists and television cameras documented the entire event, sending a powerful message to America—neither the end of the Civil War nor the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 had insured that African Americans were treated as equals. 

    On March 25, 1965, after a federal judge ruled in favor of the SCLC and against the state’s request for an injunction to block the marchers, some 25,000 protestors reached the state capital where Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed the audience.

    This violent episode helped force the American public and politicians to recognize the South’s continuing denial of African-American rights.  Civil rights activists worked with Congress and the President to quickly pass new legislation that expanded the protection of African-Americans’ voting rights.  On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

    The Voting Rights Act prohibited the denial of the right to vote based on literacy tests.  The Act also subjected to federal examination counties suspected of defrauding voters of their rights.  Furthermore, these counties could not implement any changes to their voting laws until the federal government approved these changes. 

    While the Voting Rights Act did not stop whites’ intimidation of African-Americans at the polls, it did put in place legal steps for African Americans to protest the denial of their rights and sanctions for those who denied those rights.

Center for Public History | Office: 524 Agnes Arnold Hall | (713) 743-3120