Crooked Path Made Straight: The Rise and Fall of the Southern Governors’ Plan to Educate Black Physicians

In 1945, a wave of GI-Bill-supported African American students, qualified for admission to medical schools, returned from their service in World War II. The possibility that their acceptance would integrate all-white medical schools was a problem for the southern governors. The governors responded with a carefully considered plan to shunt these African American applicants to historically black medical colleges by joining in a Compact and attempting to purchase Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. This untold story of American medicine and its connection to our present shortage of African American physicians in the South needs to be remembered and passed on to future generations.

The Meeting at Wakulla Springs

A meeting of the Southern Governors’ Conference was called in Wakulla Springs, Florida on February 7, 1948.(1) Present were a powerhouse of white southern politicians including Jim Folsom of Alabama, Jimmie Davis of Louisiana, Millard Cauldwell of Florida, R. Gregg Cherry of North Carolina, and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, with their lieutenant governors and entourages. The governors were on an urgent mission to sign an agreement that had been years in the making. Now, the South would have its own medical school for African Americans: Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee (Figures 1, 2).(2)

Pressure and Planning

Only a decade earlier, the United States Supreme Court had opened the all-white University of Missouri Law School to African Americans on the grounds that the state-supported, out-of-state study they provided was not equivalent to that afforded white law students in-state.(3( This ruling threatened the existing segregation in state institutions of higher learning perpetuated by the “separate but equal” ruling in the 1896 US Supreme Court decision in Plessy v Ferguson.(4) And now, as African American troops returned home from World War II, and the financial support of the GI Bill became available, pressure for admission of blacks to attend segregated state universities was increasing.

Historically, many southern states had provided “scholarships” to traditionally black institutions for African American applicants to state professional schools in order to preserve segregation in their all-white institutions. For instance, the Committee of Southern Regional Studies and Education of the American Council of Education had an arrangement for “student exchange programs.” The governors knew the committee’s part-time executive secretary, Dr John E. Ivey, Jr.(1)

Medical education was an increasing concern, as there were few black medical professionals and fewer interested white ones to care for black patients. There were ongoing conversations among the governors of southern states about the use of Meharry Medical College in Nashville as a fee-for-service “regional center for Negro education.” Meharry, a Methodist-affiliated institution, was established and run by well-intentioned white businessmen to educate black medical professionals to care for black patients. Finances there were a chronic problem. As early as September 1943, then-Meharry President, Dr E. L. Turner, met with elected representatives from Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee about “scholarship” support as a revenue stream.(5) Meharry’s predominately white Board of Trustees approved ongoing discussions in October 1943 and noted that a scholarship arrangement was already in place with the State of Tennessee.(6) At the 1945 meeting of the Southern Governors’ Conference, Governors Chauncey Sparks of Alabama and Milliard Caldwell of Florida proposed a region-wide scholarship program to provide out-of-state medical training for African American professional students. Later, at a December 5, 1946 Southern Governor’s Conference meeting, Governors Sparks and Greg Cherry of North Carolina, leaders among the governors in the movement for “regional education,” noted that their states also had an active arrangement with Meharry for education of black medical students. Virginia had similar contracts with Meharry in the 1940s.(7) The most outspoken of the segregationist governors attending the 1945 meeting, Thurmond from South Carolina, was quick to support the 1945 motion to move forward on a regional plan.(1)

Exigency

The governors’ plans for “regional education” were threatened when they learned that Meharry’s dire financial status would force it to close at the end of the 1947-1948 academic year. A quick solution to prevent that closure would be of mutual benefit to the governors and to Meharry in their exigency.1 “Regional education,” as the governors saw it, would not only prevent desegregation of their state medical schools by sending blacks qualified for medical school out of state but would facilitate access for whites to professional education in dentistry, medicine, podiatry, optometry, and veterinary medicine not available in some states—and the second arrangement was good cover for the first one. A coordinated process would be easier to implement than the existing piecemeal state-by-state approach and provide a more predictable revenue stream for a participating black medical institution. Equally important, this cooperative plan could function as a much-needed work-around for the Gaines decision. Saving Meharry, a school that then provided half of the positions for African American medical students in the US, also would be a public relations bonus.

Because Meharry’s financial situation was so acute, a committee of the southern governors had visited the Meharry campus on January 17 and 18, 1948 to receive an astounding offer. Meharry’s leadership not only agreed to reserve seats in the medical school for students sponsored by the Southern Governors’ Conference, but offered to place the entire institution in the hands of the southern states.(1) Somehow, news of this offer leaked out, and by January 19, The New York Times published a story titled, “Medical College Offered to the South.”8 By February, Dr Don Clawson (Figure 3), Meharry’s white President, and the Executive Committee of Meharry Board of Trustees had reviewed and approved arrangements for a transfer of the property, endowment, and administration of Meharry to the Southern Governors acting through a “Board of Control for Southern Regional Education.”(9)

To read the rest of this article on the machinations of segregationists who wanted to tightly control medical education for African Americans and to see more historic photos, please visit our website.

– Richard D. deShazo, MDemail address, Keydron K. Guinn, PhD, Wayne J. Riley, MD, William Winter, JD

This article originally appeared in the July 2013 issue of The American Journal of Medicine.