Fewer Black men entered medical school in 2014 than in 1978.
In 2017, Dr. Cedrek McFadden and I started #BlackMenInMedicine to make Black male physicians visible — and to ask, out loud, why there weren’t more of them.
Decades of progress elsewhere. Almost none here.
A gap that was built
In 1910, the Flexner Report reshaped American medical education. It recommended that only two of the nation’s historically Black medical schools — Howard and Meharry — remain open, and the others closed in the years that followed. For decades, those two schools trained most of the country’s Black physicians.
The cost compounds. A 2020 study estimated that if just five of the closed schools had survived, they could have trained 35,315 more graduates by 2019 — a 29% increase in African American physicians graduating in 2019 alone.
So when people ask why so few Black men become doctors, the honest answer starts here: not with what Black men lack, but with what was taken away.
Making Black men in medicine visible
#ILookLikeASurgeon showed what happens when people who don’t fit the stereotype show up together, in public, at scale. #BlackMenInMedicine applied that lesson to a specific gap: celebrating Black male physicians and trainees, and showing young Black men a future in medicine they could see themselves in.
Dr. McFadden and I wrote about why we started it — and why making up less than 2 percent of a graduating class shouldn’t be the norm for Black men in medicine.
In their own words
Memoirs and history from Black surgeons, physicians, and medical pioneers — Vivien Thomas, LaSalle Leffall, Claude Organ, Augustus White, Damon Tweedy, Dale Okorodudu, and more.
This page is part of my advocacy work, alongside #ILookLikeASurgeon.