Progress Through Persistence: A 60 Year History of Yale School of Medicine’s Minority Organization for Retention and Expansion (MORE)

Comer's Web

The earliest phase of MORE’s history occurred during a time when faculty of color were few and even farther between. It is best characterized as a time of individuals blazing trails through an unrepresentative and at times downright unfriendly institution. These early faculty of color, chief among them Dr. James P. Comer, laid the roots for a minority community at YSM, forging and fusing connections into an ever-strengthening web.

James Comer, MD, in 1969, one year after his hire to YSM faculty

Comer to Yale

The gradual movement towards the creation of MORE begins with the story of James Pierpont Comer, a child psychiatrist who was the first African American to become a full professor with tenure at YSM. Comer was born and raised in Indiana and matriculated to Indiana University for his BA in 1952, then pursued his medical studies at Howard University. This move to a historically Black institution was in response to adverse attitudes he encountered at IU, and in line with the fact that the vast majority of Black medical students were educated at HBCUs before the 1960s. [1]

At Howard, Comer became involved with the Hospitality House, an organization which cared for the children of impoverished families and inspired him to specialize in child psychiatry. At the time, major developments in this field were coming out of Yale School of Medicine. Comer’s interest was specifically piqued by a study about social class and mental illness published by Yale sociologist August Hollingshead with social psychiatrist Fritz Redlich, who happened to be the Dean of Yale School of Medicine. Comer reached out to Redlich, the two connected, and Comer was convinced to pursue his research as well as his medical residency at Yale in 1964. [2]

YSM Department of Psychiatry, 1959; Front row: Dean Redlich fourth from right, Dr. Solnit second from right 

First Footholds

Striving to find his place at the medical school, Comer understood the importance of building a support network and finding a mentor. He recounts finding “unusual success” in this process when through a seminar he took his first year of residency, he met Dr. Albert J. Solnit of Yale’s Child Study Center. Despite Solnit’s seniority, Comer says he quickly became a “mentor, supporter, guide, friend, who bore sensitivity to my special interests and needs.” [3] The two were a well-aligned mentor-mentee pair because Solnit was a social activist interested in improving education for urban minority children. He recommended that Comer join the Yale Child Study Center, a place where he later developed his Comer School Development Program. This program improves educational and emotional outcomes among school children and is now nationally implemented. 

An Institutional Pillar

Comer's work in childhood educational development transformed him into a true pillar of the Psychiatry department and the School of Medicine at large, where he stayed for a remarkable 6 decades. The depth and longevity of his relationship with the institution allowed him to establish the connections and roots needed to grow and eventually foster a minority community. To this day, Comer attributes much of his institutional success to the mentorship channels and strong community he forged.

Comer Makes Headlines

A selection of Comer's many features in the Yale Daily News over the decades

Comer pictured with Claudewell Thomas, MD (above) and Curtis Patton, PhD (below) at a 2011 event honoring Black YSM graduates

“A Veritable Shock” 

Though he found much institutional success, qualitatively Comer describes coming from Howard to the environment of Yale School of Medicine as “a veritable shock.” [4] Although there were many people of color in New Haven, there were very few around the halls of YSM, and most were in positions such as janitor or technician rather than as professor or administrator. Comer was not the school’s first faculty of color; Dr. Claudewell Sydney Thomas was hired at YSM in 1965 as a psychiatrist and biobehavioral scientist. In 1969 Dr. Augustus White was hired in orthopedic surgery and in 1970 Curtis Patton was hired in epidemiology, a department housed in the School of Public Health. [5]

This brief momentum proved short-lived, as Thomas and White left Yale after only a handful of years to pursue their careers at other institutions. Comer was left as the lone faculty of color in the School of Medicine; Patton remained in the School of Public Health. 

Endnotes: 

[1] Michael Byrd and Linda Clayton, "Race, Medicine, and Health Care in the United States: A Historical Survey," Journal of the National Medical Association vol. 93 (2001).

[2] James Comer, interviewed by Sabrina Mellinghoff, June 21, 2021.

[3] Comer interview, June 21, 2021.

[4] Comer interview, June 21, 2021.

[5] "Alumni News," Yale Medicine: Alumni Bulletin of the School of Medicine, Winter 1970.  https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yale_med_alumni_newsletters/4