Progress Through Persistence: A 60 Year History of Yale School of Medicine’s Minority Organization for Retention and Expansion (MORE)
Wavering Diversity Commitments
As inspiring as early success stories were, Americans at large were divided as to whether racial equality was something to strive for; even YSM lacked consensus.
Within Academic Medicine
The field of academic medicine was starkly unintegrated, with only 2.5% of medical students in the 1970s being Black. Most then became private practitioners, feeling there was no place for them in academia. [1] When the AAMC made its 1968 proclamation that all medical schools should welcome students of color, it also asked that each school appoint a person in their administration to oversee and promote that activity. Unfortunately, as Dr. Forrester Lee explained, “Yale didn’t do it." [Its attitude was] "We don’t need an office of minority affairs- if there are black students who want to come, they know about us. We don’t need to have a specific call.” This attitude reflects the sentiment among some YSM administrators that the institution “was not culpable” in excluding minorities. [2]
The small group of minority medical students who were at YSM and other non-HBCUs were met with false narratives about being unqualified applicants admitted in fulfillment of an alleged affirmative action quota, as the result of the civil rights movement. These were not uncommon sentiments as they were perpetuated from the top by United States Vice President Spiro Agnew who discounted minority applicants as well as the quota system. Although ambassadorial professors of color like Comer of Yale and Albert Poussaint of Harvard were quick to rebut claims, Agnew's comments encapsulated the sentiment of much of the country. [3]
Agnew's Words Make New York Times Headlines, February 1970
Empty surgical ward in the New Haven Hospital
Within YSM
As the 1970s drew on, instances of racial conflict among faculty or students within YSM were still common. Blatant racism caused a series of incidents in which hospital staff mistook African American medical students and residents for intruders in the wards. [4] Other incidents were less public, such as medical students of color giving the same answers as white students on tests and receiving lower scores. [5] Comer was occasionally able to confront the biased professor and rectify the grading, but many mistreatments went undetected and unreported. Furthermore, aside from Comer, there were only a handful of senior faculty at YSM who were able to advocate for not just medical students, but also residents, fellows, and young faculty members of color. Minorities lacked mentors, and thus access to valuable advice on necessary steps to promotion.
Panthers Protest Makes Yale Daily News Front Page, November 1969
Within New Haven
Racial tensions bled out of YSM and into New Haven in the 1960s and 1970s, into student civil rights' protests and New Haven events such as the Black Panther trial. Yale administrators made superficial, even patronizing attempts to reach out to the New Haven community allthewhile undermining these with their financial decisions and buy-out of land and businesses. [6] Comer describes the relationship between YSM and New Haven in this era as rooted in “anger, distress, and disappointment,” with “distrust between people in the community and Yale," a way it would stay for some decades to come. [7]
Endnotes:
[1] Michael Byrd and Linda Clayton, "Introduction" of An American Health Dilemma: Race, Medicine, and Health Care in the United States, 1900-2000 New York: Routledge, 2002.
[2] Forrester Lee, interviewed by Sabrina Mellinghoff, June 17, 2023.
[3] Seth King, “Agnew Denounces University Quotas to Help Minorities.” The New York Times, February 13, 1970. ; “Minority Admissions: Deans Blast Agnew,” Yale Daily News, February 18, 1970.
[4] Comer interview, June 21, 2021; Désir interview, June 23, 2021.
[5] Comer interview, June 21, 2021.
[6] “How the 1960s Affected the School of Medicine,” Yale Medicine Magazine, 2011.
[7] Comer interview, June 21, 2021.