Kate Scannell: The AMA’s apology to African American physicians (Contra Costa Times)
THIS WEEK, THE NATION’S largest organization of physicians — the American Medical Association, or AMA, — formally apologized for its history of racial transgressions against African-American physicians.
In its related publication in the July 16 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the AMA acknowledged its discrimination against black physicians well into the era of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. The association hopes that by “confronting the past we can embrace the future.”
The association’s transgressions against African-American doctors were severe. For example, the AMA had allowed its state and local subsidiaries to exclude black physicians from membership, effectively banning them from its politically powerful national group. As recently as 1954, it refused membership to a local medical society made up of black physicians in North Carolina.
