The American Medical Association (AMA) is a professional association and lobbying group of physicians and medical students. Founded in 1847, it is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Membership was approximately 240,000 in 2016.
The AMA’s stated mission is “to promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health.” It’s founder, Nathan Smith Davis (1817-1904) was adamant on maintaining the AMA as a national organization, but also insisted on explicitly excluding women and Black physicians from joining the organization, to appease state and local medical societies that barred all but white men from their membership. The AMA faced a fork in the road in 1869, four years after the Civil War ended, when the nation was trying to sort out places in a new society for both emancipated Blacks and angry, defeated rebels. The three Black physicians from Washington DC were found eligible to join but were denied membership in the Medical Society of the District of Columbia, an all-white AMA affiliate dominated by former Confederates.
The Black doctors, along with faculty members from Howard and Georgetown Universities, attempted to persuade the U.S. Congress to revoke the medical society’s charter. When that failed, they sent an alternative interracial group to the AMA annual meeting in Washington in 1870.
After several days of debate, Davis wrote the report that persuaded the AMA House of Delegates not to seat the Black delegates on technical grounds — not because of their race. The reason given by the AMA was, “We did not seat you (Black physicians) because you come from groups and schools that admit women and that admit irregular practitioners.” There were representatives from other groups in the AMA that included these kinds of irregular practitioners in their fold, but Davis only castigated the black physicians.
And after refusing the Black physicians admission, in 1871, the AMA went on to pass an addendum to their code of ethics indicating that they don’t practice racial discrimination, and that their only basis for excluding people was scientific accuracy and practice codes. In this addendum, the AMA not only discriminated against the black physicians, but then they exonerated themselves for having done so.
In 1910, the AMA commissioned a report of all medical schools. They were very interested in lowering the number of physicians. They wanted to raise the professional stature of physicians, and they wanted to do that by exclusion.
They commissioned Abraham Flexner to go to every medical school in the U.S. and Canada and make an assessment — basically which medical schools should and should not be encouraged to continue.
When Flexner did this, he deemed every black medical school substandard and recommended they all be closed, except for two, Howard and Meharry.
Flexner also went beyond this report to stipulate that black physicians should only treat black patients, and that black physicians should have their roles curtailed. And he warned that an essentially untrained Negro bearing an MD label is dangerous. Flexner looked on all black physicians with a negative, racist eye.
His recommendations were prophetic. All the black medical schools except for Howard and Meharry were closed. They could not attract funding any longer because of the AMA damning indictment of them. And black physicians were indeed kept from specialties like surgery. They were also kept from research.
This report was singlehandedly responsible for not only drastically lowering the number of black MDs but also for an extremely negative image of black MDs in the eyes of not only the white population in the U.S. but also the black population of the U.S.
Finally, during the civil rights era, things came to a head. Black physicians picketed AMA meetings. Black physicians wanted Medicare and Medicaid passed, but AMA was against this legislation and fought to get it annulled. White physicians and the AMA argued that Medicaid and Medicare were “socialized medicine”, alluding to Socialism and Communism (sounds familiar?). The AMA took out advertisements in newspapers, radio and television against government health insurance, and established the American Medical Political Action Committee, which was separate from AMA though the Association nominated its board of directors. The AMA’s efforts to defeat Medicare legislation was called Operation Coffee Cup and included secretive meetings in which the vinyl LP “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine” was played. The AMA created an “Eldercare” proposal rather than hospital insurance through Social Security.
Black doctors who attended an AMA meeting in Atlanta in 1961 were arrested by the police because the AMA luncheon was being held in a segregated cafeteria. When the AMA was asked for comment, the AMA did not defend them…they simply stressed the importance of adhering to the laws of the land. Segregation, of course, was the law of the land at that time.
It wasn’t until 2005, when John Nelson, then-president of the AMA, gave a speech while visiting the National Medical Association [which represents African-American physicians, and was founded in 1895 because of the AMA’s racist policies against Black physicians], and during that speech, he apologized personally on behalf of the AMA. The AMA then hired independent experts to look into their history, and in 2008, the American Medical Association, as an organization, formally apologized for its history of discrimination against African-American physicians. The apology came after the report published by a panel of independent experts, which among other things detailed how the AMA worked to close down almost all African-American medical schools. One of the paper’s authors was Harriet A. Washington, who had won the National Book Critics Circle Award for “Medical Apartheid,” a history of medical experimentation on black Americans.
Note: In 2008, at the time of the AMA’s formal apology, less than 2% of its members were Black. Black physicians still account for only 5% of all physicians even as African Americans make up 13% of the U.S. population.
The Historical Memory Recovery Channel 