By the late nineteenth century, African Americans had gained entry into predominantly white health professions schools as well as established training schools for people of color. These few Black graduates of white institutions became leaders in their fields.  At the same time, widespread discrimination reflected in Jim Crow racial codes and social conditions created great barriers for professional training among Blacks. African American health professionals responded with determination to create more opportunities for Blacks to become doctors, dentists, nurses, and pharmacists, and thus, established hospitals, as well as medical schools, dental schools, nursing schools, and pharmacy schools that would admit people of color who were qualified based on widely accepted admissions criteria. In many communities, especially the South, lay midwives continued as birthing attendants and in doing so, preserved a healing tradition that would become more professionalized in the early decades of the 20^th century. These early Black leaders and early Black graduates of formal health professions schools laid the foundation for the history of African Americans in the health professions.

Objectives

1. Name the earliest black graduates in nursing
2. Name the earliest black graduates in dentistry
3. Name the earliest black graduates in medicine
4. Discuss the origins of the granny midwife and efforts to reform training lay midwives in the early 20^th century
5. List the early black medical schools, dental schools and nursing schools
6. List the number of nursing, dental and medical schools that accepted blacks as applicants at the turn of the century and first decades of the 20^th century
7. Discuss the impact of segregation and discriminatory admission policies on the training of black health professionals, especially in the South