To the Editor:
I was saddened to read that the University of Alabama at Birmingham had canceled the scholarship for Black medical students created by the family of the late Herschell Lee Hamilton (“A Scholarship for Black Medical Students Honored His Father’s Legacy. The University Canceled It.,” May 29).
Dr. Hamilton was the city’s first Black board-certified surgeon, having come to Alabama in 1959 at a time when there were only 27 African American doctors practicing in the greater Birmingham area, then home to 220,000 Black residents. Just 12 of these doctors were under the age of 50, reflecting an on-going flight from the state as younger practitioners, barred from the state’s county medical societies and unable to pursue specialty training in the hospitals, left to practice in the cities of the North and Midwest. The resulting void in Black health care was precisely what attracted Hamilton: “This is where God sent me,” he told a reporter in 2000, “I was attracted to Birmingham like a magnet.”
There is a tragic irony in UAB’s decision, given the good efforts that the School of Medicine has made over the last few years in attracting African Americans, some of whom need help in paying the high costs of medical training.
Most important, cancellation of the scholarship represents a lost opportunity for UAB to celebrate the contributions of African American physicians in a state where they make up just 5.8 percent of its doctors while accounting for 26.4 percent of its population. The reasons are not hard to find. Before the 1960s, Black students were routinely rejected for medical study at UAB and had to pursue their dreams elsewhere, usually at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, which trained two-thirds of Alabama’s Black doctors before 1970. That was the year that UAB finally produced its first Black physicians — two in all.
This is the unvarnished truth of our past, despite efforts of the Trump administration to purge references to race and other “divisive topics” in American institutions. Though current threats to cancel federal funding for schools like UAB are being carried out under the banner of anti-racism, they mask an ideology as old as the sun — namely, white supremacy.
Jack D. Ellis
Huntsville, Alabama
