Examining the AMA’s racist history and its overdue reckoning – PBS NewsHour

Aletha Maybank:

There's just a tremendous still lack of diversity, of having Black physicians and Latinx physicians, as well as Native American physicians, who have been completely excluded still from the medical profession.

We're the ones, as AMA, who commissioned Abraham Flexner. We valued this model of significant scientific rigor and really evaluated schools across the country in the early 1900s and said, if you didn't have that, if you didn't have those types of resources, we didn't think you were a good enough school to stay open, basically.

And so that impacted, as you can imagine, many Black med schools that aren't going to be resourced. And so five were recommended to shut down. And, in addition, the part that really I think really speaks to the impact at that time, AMA was also excluding Black physicians.

And so, back then, in order to get licensed to hospitals, you actually had to be a member of theMD-IN medical society within your local community, which was an AMA, or American Medical Association, affiliate. So, if you couldn't gain membership to an AMA medical affiliate, you couldn't gain a license to work at the local hospital.

So, now you have Black physicians who also can't find hospitals to work at, which impacts in our communities. We have to take a look at that entirety of the history and its impacts.

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Examining the AMA's racist history and its overdue reckoning - PBS NewsHour