IIE IDEAL Podcast: Episode 9
IIE IDEAL Podcast: Episode 9
Reckoning with the Past: Racism and Health Care in Rochester
Guest Speaker: Wendy Gonaver, PhD
Recording Date: December 5th, 2024
[Announcer]
We acknowledge with respect The Seneca Nation, known as the Great Hill People and keepers of the western door of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. We take this opportunity to thank the people on whose ancestral lands The University of Rochester currently resides in Rochester, New York. To learn more about ancestral lands upon which we live and work, please check out native-land.ca
[Katelyn Gibson]
Hi, this is Kaitlin Gibson. I am an archivist at the Minor Library and recently joined the team to assist with planning for the med school's upcoming centennial. And so, I am very excited to be speaking with Wendy Gonaver today, someone who's really knowledgeable about really important aspects of our institution's history and the history of medicine broadly. So, Wendy, if you'd like to introduce yourself before we get started.
[Wendy Gonaver]
Oh, hi. Thank you for the invitation. I'm Wendy Gonaver and I'm a postdoctoral associate affiliated with both the Office of Equity and Inclusion and the Department of Health, Humanities, and Bioethics here at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yeah, great. So, I guess first, would you be able to discuss how your position at the Health Humanities and Bioethics department came to be?
[Wendy Gonaver]
Sure. I was hired in August of 2022 to write a history of the medical center focused on race and racism. And as I understand it, my position was created in response to students, staff, faculty, and members of White Coats for Black Lives who protested following the death of Daniel Prude. And for those who don't know, Daniel Prude was a 41-year-old black man who had come to Strong Memorial Hospital and was discharged in March of 2020 after a mental health evaluation. And he returned to the hospital later that day or the next morning, early in the morning after an encounter with the Rochester Police Department in which he was restrained and subsequently stopped breathing. And he was removed from life support once he was brought back to Strong Memorial Hospital on March 30th. Protesters, you know, the response was protest, if anybody can remember what 2020 and 2021 were like. And they demanded a kind of thorough and public accounting of the medical center's historical relationship with Rochester's Black community. And I think that's the origin of my position is interesting because as I've researched this history, it's apparent to me that public protest is central and an important through line to change.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yeah, that was something that was…Oh, sorry, go ahead.
[Wendy Gonaver]
Also, because the invitation, it's important that people know that I was invited to do this because it does mean that I was eventually granted access to records that haven't been viewed until now.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yeah, I was going to say something I really appreciated when I was listening to your health humanities grand rounds was how you really drew connections between like looking at the history of medical discrimination and institutions in really, not in collaboration with, but how they intersect with moments of protest and socio-political and economic factors so thinking about redlining and systemic police violence you know looking at a history of an institution really in context with what's happening around it is so important.
[Wendy Gonaver]
Thanks for listening to that. I'm glad you listened. Obviously, you listened really closely, so thank you. I'm flattered.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yeah, of course. Yeah, it was a really interesting listen, so I guess thinking more about your research, if you'd be able to sort of speak to what forms of racial discrimination have existed in the past and how it affected healthcare at URMC.
[Wendy Gonaver]
Yeah, and this is the central, the two questions that I kind of used to frame the research that I've been doing. And ultimately, as I did in the grand rounds that you watched. I want to let people know that we're looking at three intertwined institutions in answering this question. We're looking at the School of Medicine and Dentistry, which included at that time the Department of Nursing. It did not become an independent school until the early 1970s. And then we're looking at two hospitals. People don't always realize it's two hospitals. They're familiar with Strong Memorial Hospital, but for many years up until about 1963, Strong Memorial Hospital also included another hospital and that was Municipal Hospital and they were attached buildings that were adjacent to one another. So, in sort of breaking down what racial discrimination looked like in these three institutions and how it affected healthcare, I would start first with the School of Medicine and Dentistry, which very openly denied qualified black applicants from its opening in the 20s up through the first accepted black applicant, which was Edwin Robinson, who was accepted in 1939 and graduated in 1943. And after, which is not to say that his acceptance heralded a completely different approach, it went from overt exclusion to more covert discrimination. And the reason for the overt discrimination or as it was as it was justified by administrators and particularly the dean, Dean George Whipple, at the time when he you know sent replies to black applicants or to their professors who were writing on their behalf, he said it was the unanimous opinion of all the clinical heads of the department and the director of hospitals that they could not provide the clinical training to Black medical students. And in particular they were concerned about obstetrics and gynecology and public perception about Black medical students attending to women, particularly white women giving birth. Now, that didn't change because they had a change of, the administrators had a change of heart about that. It changed because of public pressure. So once, you know, once these applicants received these letters rejecting them on the grounds of race, it was brought to the attention of people like Dr. Charles Lunsford. And Dr. Lunsford was graduate of Howard University who moved to Rochester and opened a private practice. And he complained from the get-go and pressured the university to change its policies, but he wasn't able to really get any traction until after 1935. And in 1935, there was a street rebellion in Harlem after the arrest of a of a 14-year-old, I believe he was. But at any rate, it was not really about the arrest outside of a drugstore of a Black youth. It was really more about conditions during the Depression and unfair housing and discrimination and job discrimination. And so led to a street conflagration which resulted in the creation of a committee called the Temporary Commission on the Urban Colored Population. And that was created in 1935 and led by a man named Senator Jacob Schwartzwald of Brooklyn. And that commission investigated systemic racism across New York. And it was Dr. Lunsford in his position as the local head of the NAACP and as a member of the Race Relations Committee of the Federation of Churches of Rochester and Monroe County who ensured that the university was included. And it brought attention, public attention in newspaper stories to this issue about racial discrimination and admissions. And so, it led to a kind of change in policy. And one of the things that was interesting to me that I discovered in going through university archives presidential papers is that, the way that Dean Whipple had represented it as a unanimous decision not to admit qualified black applicants it turns out was not actually unanimous. It was him and one other man who kind of led that charge in the other the other faculty went along with it. And I know this because Dr. William McCann, who was the chair the Department of Medicine and a chief physician at both hospitals said so. And he said that he was in favor of admitting a superior qualified black applicant and had always been and that other physicians felt the same. And so that's what they ultimately did under public duress, and you know public gaze upon them. They admitted Edwin Robinson and they admitted thereafter essentially one black man every year. Now, in doing that, obviously it was a kind of show. And this is interesting too because also in the university archives, there's a letter from the president of the university who was in 1939, who was then Alan Valentine, to Dean Whipple in which he expressly says, and I'm going to quote here, “I do not think our fences need mending…” meaning public impression doesn't have to be repaired, “…but perhaps they might be window dressed. If I may mix the metaphor, I believe we should continue our present procedure…” meaning admit one black man a year, “…so long as you and others at the medical school and hospital believe it desirable. However, I think we might have our advisory board make some statement which would not alter our procedure, but which might clear the decks of any future charge of racial discrimination.” So overt to covert well into the 1960s. And so that's the medical school. And I can tell you more about the medical school, including, well, I should probably say one more thing. The fact that this became a kind of covert discrimination isn't just hinging on this one letter. There was also a state investigation of all medical schools in New York, in 1948. In response to the passage of the Fair Educational Practices Act. And that launched a three-year fact-finding investigation. Again, of all medical schools, not just University of Rochester. And it was led by a man named Frederick Hoeing, who was an alumni of the University of Rochester and his father was a dean. So he might not have been the most objective person to evaluate the university.
[Katelyn Gibson]
You can say that, yeah.
[Wendy Gonaver]
Ultimately that commission, it was not a punitive commission. It was fact-finding. Ultimately, they determined that the University of Rochester did appear to accept a disproportionate number of Protestant men with average academic records, over and above Italian, Catholic, and Jewish applicants with superior academic qualifications. But they didn't say this was discrimination because of personality being a factor in admissions. As for black applicants, as well as women of all racial backgrounds. They said there were not enough applicants to be statistically significant, so they didn't reach any conclusions at all. So that's, School of Medicine and Dentistry.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yeah, I do have one note on that. I've been sort of working my way through getting familiar with our archival collections at the Minor History of Medicine section. I was listening to an oral history with, I believe, Harriet Purdy, who worked in the dean's office at one point and was also, I think, involved in admissions. And I remember something that stood out to me was her talking about the experience of admissions and basically saying, I think a direct quote from her, Dr. Whipple was the admissions committee, essentially. So, sort of thinking about, I think we'll sort of touch on his role and his legacy a bit later in this but the power he held within that to make those decisions and to sit down with applicants and make those personality judgments was pretty outsized.
[Wendy Gonaver]
Yeah. And it's not to excuse the other faculty who could have stood up to him and who also expressed views of their own, you know. McCann himself in the very quote in which he's defending the idea of admitting a superiorly a single superior qualified Black man, applicant also went on to make some pretty anti-Semitic remarks. And especially anti-Catholic, anti-Italian Catholic remarks as well. So, these were views that were widely shared and in some of those same records in Minor Library, particularly the advisory council minutes. You can see the earlier prior to ‘35 when they got a little sensitive. These were word-for-word transcriptions for the most part of the conversations. And you can see them use racial epitaphs in discussions or openly discuss whether someone what their religion was or what their background was when they were considering hiring. You can see all of this in the early records anyway. Like I said, a lot more circumspect after it stated you know after 1930, ‘39, especially. And then again with the state investigation in ‘48. So. Yeah. As for the hospitals, Strong Memorial Hospital and Municipal Hospital, this was partly an arrangement with the city. Previously, any patient, any poor patient who couldn't afford to pay at least half of a medical bill, which was estimated to be estimated to be $5 a day at that time, they would go, at that time, would go to any of the six hospitals and then they would be reimbursed through the community chest, which is a philanthropic organization. But once the University of Rochester, you know, created its complex the medical school and the Strong Memorial Hospital, they worked out an arrangement with the city so that all indigent patients would go to municipal hospital no matter where they first came in and they would, they would be sent there. And this was going to both guarantee that medical students would have access to enough patients that they could have clinical training. And then provide a high level of care for indigent patients. But you can see in the creation of the contract, and also in the letters in which Whipple was rejecting qualified black applicants to the medical school that he explains that they conceived of Strong Memorial Hospital as for middle class patients only, and although he does not expressly say white, it is implicit within that all of the Black patients and you know at the time when the school opened in the 20s you know the black population in Rochester was close to less than 2% and closer to 1%. So, a small minority. But nevertheless, the assumption was that they would all be public patients, that they would all go to municipal hospital. And there were two areas where it becomes apparent that this has intentionally, this is not just a byproduct of class discrimination of insurance status discrimination or wealth. That this becomes intentional about race as well. And the first is that there are it's evident that there were black middle class patients who had private insurance once private insurance came into play, who would go to give birth, for example, at Strong Memorial Hospital and then would be rerouted to Municipal Hospital. So at least two instances of that occurring. And then there is also in the records at Miner, a letter and it was a letter sent to the mayor i believe from the head of the community chest that was then forwarded to Dean Whipple as they were working out the arrangement of how this would work because one of the early problems is that all the indigent patients were supposed to go to municipal, but there was no emergency transportation service. So how are they going to get there? And in the letter, you can see the notes that Whipple is writing alongside, and he uses the word in this discussion about emergency patients and where they would be accepted. He writes the word Ethiopian, which is a synonym at that time for Black Americans. And so, he is clearly thinking, even though it doesn't enter the official contract language in the margins, he is clearly thinking about race and its implications for how this arrangement will work. So that and the oral testimonies that we have, it's evident that in all departments and ironically for women giving birth, since they were so concerned about black medical students not attending to women who are giving birth, you know, that's where it's most evident that there's a sort of segregation in terms of the nurseries for babies. The only exception to that may have been the Department of Pediatrics because the Department of Pediatrics accepted, you know, there it was about age so you were on the ward for your age, not based on your insurance status.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yeah, one thing I am curious about, I'm not sure if you've come across any indication of this, but in the 60s after the Municipal Hospital ceased to exist, did you get a sense if there were any of those structures of discrimination sort of continued to exist when it just became Strong.
[Wendy Gonaver]
I don't, but remember that after ‘64, you've got the passage of Medicaid and Medicare and you also have federal legislation that prohibits racial discrimination and any one institution receiving money, which of course a medical center is, cannot have any discriminatory policies in place or they won't receive that federal money. So, at that point, it's no longer in the hands of, and Dean Whipple had retired by then, he was still around and a prominent figure but at that point, it's really up to federal policy to determine it. So, the closure of municipal hospital happens just at the same time that all this federal legislation is happening, which is going to make it foolhardy and impossible to continue.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yes, yeah.
[Wendy Gonaver]
Overt or open discrimination.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Again, that makes sense. So, I know, yeah, we just touched on sort of legislation that sort of rendered a lot of this impossible, overt or covert, but I was wondering if you could speak to any remedies for racial discrimination that were pursued.
[Wendy Gonaver]
Yeah. Well, and like I said, the Civil Rights Act of ‘64 and particularly Title VI is one of the biggest ones. That's the biggest for eliminating or attempting to uproot structural racism. The other thing that happens is, and this is part of the, you know, it's not unique to the medical center the University of Rochester, it's part of a national movement. And that is concern about parity with population and admissions to medical schools and to health careers in general. So, in January of ‘69, there was a group of medical students at the university who drafted and presented what they titled Blueprint for Minority Group Admissions to the members of the admissions committee and to the new dean, Dean Orbison, and they proposed that a third of the next entering class be minorities as a kind of compensation for this past history of discrimination. They didn't know all the details that I've just spelled out to you, but they understood they had eyes. They could see that there was a dearth of black physicians in our classes. And this recommendation, like I said, it didn't come out of nowhere. There had been at that point several years of activism by medical students nationally and particularly the creation in 1965, after the Watts Rebellion in California, as well as the ‘64, you know, July ‘64 rebellion here in Rochester, the creation of something called the Student Health Organization, which had 40 chapters by ‘68 or ‘69. And they were, they had conferences and they were the ones that sort of organized this launch to get medical schools, historically white medical schools, to admit about a third of every entering class, Black students. And so, following that submission by the students in January of ‘69, the next month, the dean, Dean Orbison, created a committee on minority students to study the responsibilities of the school and from this emerged a minority recruitment program that was overseen by him. And they asked Dr. Lionel Young, who was an African American radiologist and a graduate of Howard University, who had joined the pediatric department in ‘65 to head it up and he chaired this committee, and he mobilized a very small network of Black alumni as well as concerned students and a few faculty to sort of embark on this recruitment campaign. They visited something like 29 historically Black colleges and universities, and they tried to work out an arrangement with Howard, he was an alumnus of Howard, to get an exchange going for interns. And they worked very hard to sort of improve their numbers. They didn't have success right away. And that is in part because not everybody was on board, and it came down to sort of committed individuals working overtime doing service work to try to get this recruitment in. And that includes people who are on the admissions committee. And at this point, we're not talking Dean Whipple, who would interview students and make discriminatory remarks to their face. Present political litmus questions about what their political leanings were, and whether or not they believed in public protests and all of these things. So, it was rather had a kind of cooling effect on their prospects for recruitment, even though they were, you know, actively recruiting. And so that was one way that they tried to remedy it. And it was effective, but it was just not as effective as it could have been had they followed the recommendations that the committee ultimately made. Dr. Young, they cut it down from a third and they asked for 12 to 13% of the entering class to be minority and specifically African American. And they were told no over and over again about that, that that wouldn't have been possible. And I should tell you that they were told no before a Supreme Court decision in ‘77 that happened at the you know it was a case at the University of California Davis Medical School. In which it was ruled ultimately that holding specific spots for based on race was not constitutional. And so this is several years before, that decision is in ‘77. They're being told, no, that this is a quota and that they won't do it. You know, the thing is that at the time there was no law against it. And also, it was consistent with an announced plan to actually grow the admissions to the school, so the medical center had gotten a grant had several grants, but federal money from different sources, including a grant that required them to increase enrollment in order to receive it. So, the total enrollment at the medical center at the time that they got the grant was 265, which was about 68 to 70 medical students within that. And they were told that they would need to admit 90 students per class in order to qualify for this money. And so, the proposal for 12%, which was roughly the Black population in the United States, so it would be parity was consistent with the idea of growing the class in general, and yet there was still reluctance to pursue that. So those were really the two means the fact that the Civil Rights Act of ‘64 and then later affirmative action in the early 70s where they had to report, you know, what their population numbers were in aggregate for different positions to make sure that they were a fair and equitable institution, that was offering pathways for promotion and so forth. Federal money, federal legislation, and then this committee are really the remedies that were pursued in the late 60s and early 70s.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yeah, and it's really interesting to see too when you're looking at where pressure is coming from inside of the institution both then and more recently how much of it is coming from students and wanting the institution to be better for them and for others.
[Wendy Gonaver]
Yeah, absolutely. Completely coming from students. And of course, they find you know um faculty mentors and, you know, let us not forget to the community members who have a vested interest, you know. Dr. Lunsford, who continued to have a private practice until he was an old man. You know they also pressured the university from early on to change and to become equitable.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Alright, so I know that the School of Nursing has not always existed as its own unit, but the Department of Nursing existed. When the school came to be, I was wondering in your research how you saw the nursing institution's experience compared to the medical students?
[Wendy Gonaver]
Yeah. Actually, finding out about the School of Nursing has been one of the more challenging parts of this research project, because there is no sort of set library of records. What I have gotten is following the medical center advisory board's minutes, in which the Department of Nursing is represented and it's evident that the head of the department, and it changes over time, is often struggling to not feel like their participation is devalued. And so that's a part of that history. But in terms of racism, it's very similar. So, one of the members of the committee that Dr. Lionel Young chaired was a woman named Ruby Jefferson. And she was trying to do the same for recruiting to the medical school, well, the Department of Nursing and then the nursing school and she was an RN who had, she got her BA at Hunter. She got her nursing degree at Yale. She had a specialty in obstetrics. And she came to the Department of Nursing at the medical center in ‘69, you know, just a few years before it became independent and she was trying very hard to implement recruitment of minority students within the school and she wound up joining and leading an organization called Greater Opportunities in Nursing, which was a Monroe County organization. And they worked hard at both acquiring scholarships recruiting at area high schools, majority black area high schools, to bring those students into nursing. And they really met a lot of opposition at every turn. And so, when she appears in the minutes of the committee, it's often to express real disappointment and frustration that there isn't support for what she's doing at the University of Rochester. And so that was often thwarted. I think for if anyone's curious to know sort of about the history of nursing from the 19th century up until about 1950, I would recommend Darlene Clark Hine’s, Black Women in White, because the other thing that wound up happening is as nursing became more academic in an effort to kind of bolster the professionalism and the professional identity to get the recognition that nurses deserved. It often became more exclusionary. So, the professional recognition of nurses is more than just sort of, you know, saints doing the grunt work on the wards it sometimes came at a cost to the growth of Black nurses. And I would also mention that early on, Dr. Lunsford, one of the letters that the university has that he wrote to protest the discriminatory policy was specifically about a local black applicant to the Department of Nursing who ultimately went to Buffalo instead of getting her education here. So, there are great parallels. But then the people who are involved are slightly different. And they were trying to recruit the medical school was broader in its focus nationally in terms of who they were recruiting and even internationally with grants from places like the Rockefeller Institute, bringing scholars here. The nursing school tended to concentrate locally and surrounding counties, so that would be one difference, but the results were largely the same, which is that they had enormous trouble getting support and bringing and growing the number of minority nurses.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yeah, no, as I was looking through some of the records of admissions in the medical school, I think the term I kept seeing come across was cosmopolitan that they'd use quite often, which could be interpreted a number of ways and was interesting to see that repeated when they were sort of trying to talk about this ideal cohort they were looking for.
[Wendy Gonaver]
Yeah, one area though that I should mention, I would be remiss if I didn't mention it, is that you know in the 60s and with the kind of foment, it wasn't just about admissions and equitable admissions or fair admissions it was also, there were attempts to kind of rethink how healthcare was delivered and so one of the that the university did or specifically the Department of Pediatrics was heavily involved in the creation of a neighborhood health center. And this was going to be a different model of care delivery. They wanted to address both access as well as really dire maternal mortality rates, which had, you know, they still have, there's still a significant racial difference in mortality rates, but it was even worse then And so the neighborhood health center became a place that actually did successfully, at least for a few years before it became independent recruit more black women into healthcare as sort of nurses and LPNs and as community home health aides. So that was one small area of success. But really, again, it was Kind of like the Minority Admissions Committee was driven by just a few key individuals with a lot of energy and commitment. Same thing happened with the medical, the neighborhood health center.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yeah, so you're sort of switching focus a bit. I know that we mentioned we'd come back to Dean Whipple and his legacy. I was wondering if you could discuss the history and background of the decision to ultimately take down his museum and his office that existed in the medical school until recently.
[Wendy Gonaver]
Yeah, and of course this preceded my arrival here. But, you know, I think… students became aware of the presumably had access to the records in Minor Library, although not necessarily access to the records over at the university archives. And they became aware that he was a key figure in discriminatory racial discrimination in admissions that he, they may have been aware that he sometimes used racial epithets in meetings. And certainly they would have seen his letter of support that he wrote to George Eastman of Eastman Kodak supporting eugenics and specifically eugenics sterilization. So, you know, many white Protestants in the early 20th century supported some aspects of eugenics, mainly in terms of immigration restriction and oppose opposition to interracial marriage. That was widespread, but less widespread and definitely much more extreme was the idea of supporting eugenic sterilization, which is forcibly sterilizing people against their will, people who were deemed, who were basically marginalized, marginalized women overwhelmingly. And there is a letter, I believe it's stated from 1929 Which is well after New York State had outlawed eugenic sterilization, in which Whipple expresses great admiration for California and eugenic sterilization in California. He had been recruited from California, so he was familiar with the program there. And California sterilized more people than any other state, especially at that time. There's something like, you know, in writing in the late 20s, something like 5,300 people had already been sterilized and he was recommending this and feeling that other states should follow California's example. Now, that's not what happened, but the fact that he expressed this, is I would imagine part of why there was a reevaluation of his reputation. It takes nothing away from his scientific achievements or even his reputation as a teacher for those students for whom he felt an affinity. Although we know that he didn't feel affinity with students who weren't White, Protestant, and sporty. But that's probably why, you know, it just didn't feel like if you wanted to have a welcoming and representative space then there were better uses for that office than a kind of mausoleum.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yeah, and I guess sort of thinking about, I mean, you've talked a lot about the access that you've been able to have to records both here at Minor Library and over at the archives on River Campus. I was wondering if you could talk about how this sort of turned into the exhibit that you're able to work on and put together.
[Wendy Gonaver]
Yeah, you are referring to sort of 10 banners that were put up in last February and they will go up again this February, and I hope to add to them, including some more information about them that I've learned since I created those with the school.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Oh, cool.
[Wendy Gonaver]
About the School of Nursing rather. Yeah, so I was asked to sort of give some kind, you know, I've been in the records and part of this part of my job was about public accountability. So, sort of to create an exhibit, we also hope to store it online permanently, that tells this history. I put it up most recently at the Boundless Together conference last October, and it was gratifying for me to see people who in some cases are unaffiliated with the university at all reading it. And I walked past and one man who didn't know that I had written it just said, “Oh, I had no idea about this history. This is fascinating.” So, I worked on the text and there's a committee, an advisory committee that I use for feedback and most involved in giving me feedback were emeritus Professor Ted Brown, Professor Mical Raz and Lainie Friedman Ross in Health Humanities and Bioethics. And then I worked also with Emily Anderson in the Office of Equity and Inclusion, who is the one who did all, she's the one who did all of the arrangements of how they look like. Again, I'm going to be putting it up with some additions and at the end of my project, my position ends in August of 2025, I hope to actually have an exhibit of the actual materials, not just a holographic reproduction on a vinyl banner, which is nice because you can transport it and move it around, but I would like to have an exhibit in Minor Library with some of these papers, including materials from other institutions that have related work. So, for example, the Science Museum in Rochester has an interesting collection that is part of the Howard Coles archive there, the papers there. Harold Coles was a prominent black civil rights activist and also had a radio show for many years. And so, there's lots of papers that he has that are germane to both the 1939 investigation into discriminatory hiring and medical school admissions here, as well as other issues in the 1960s. So, I'd like to have a bigger exhibit at the very end. And I'd like for there to be publicity beyond the university community so that people in Rochester can know this history.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, it's great to know the story is one thing, but then to actually to see the records, to see the correspondence where things are laid out so plainly and overtly is… I'm speaking as someone who's spent a lot of time in the past month sort of digging through some of these papers. It's really striking. Adds a whole new level to understanding that story and how these people created this institution. Yeah, and I guess sort of thinking about moving outside of the university community, I was wondering if you have a sense of how the Med Center was typical compared to other institutions in relation to this discussion and in what ways it was unique.
[Wendy Gonaver]
Yeah, it's always important to put things in context, although I want to be very clear here, that I have been asked this question and sometimes it has come across as excuse making, like how different was the university really from other places? This is just the way things was done. So, I want to be very clear in saying context is not excuse.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yes.
[Wendy Gonaver]
But it is nevertheless important. There was a 1959 survey that was done on northern hospitals. So again, I'll talk about the medical school separately from the hospital complex. And at that time, it was estimated that 83% of Northern hospitals were racially integrated. So that's 1959. So, 83% is obviously a sizable majority but that's a pretty significant minority of hospitals in the North that are not racially integrated as late as 1959. And I don't know how the University of Rochester would have answered that question. Because again, you know, by all outward legal appearances in terms of the contract with the city for municipal, it would appear that they were not practicing racial discrimination and yet we know that they were. Same with the medical school admissions. We might even take that 83% with some skepticism. Now, in the South, at that time, less than 6%. So, most of the historical work that's been done has focused on the way in which federal legislation, the Civil Rights Act of ‘64, And then the legislation that followed with using federal money as a wedge to create integrated institutions that is focused on the southern institutions that were much more overt. So, in a sense, what I'm saying is the University of Rochester was typical of the North, but perhaps would have been a more extreme example specifically, especially in the medical school. You know, when… It came to light that not all the faculty at the medical school approved of the idea of excluding qualified black applicants. When it came to light in 39, Dr. McCann brought up his experience in medical school. He had graduated from Cornell in 1915 and he had a black classmate, Roscoe Conkling Giles, who had graduated in his class. And he said, why don't we be like Cornell and University of Pennsylvania, their first black candidate was like 1879, so there were historically white medical schools who accepted Black candidates earlier. Rochester's at the extreme for ‘39. However, accepting one, again, accepting one black applicant is not the same thing as actually, here and there, is not the same thing as being truly an integrated institution. And in fact, you know, Dr. McCann held up Cornell as an institution that University of Rochester could emulate, but Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot's biography of her mother, Baum and Juliet, her mother was Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence. She was the first African American woman to graduate from Cornell. In that biography, she tells the story of her mother being refused because they said that they'd once admitted a black man, Giles, and that it hadn't gone well. Whatever that meant. So, these institutions who were earlier than University of Rochester, but that doesn't mean they were progressive institutions necessarily. So, I would say that the University of Rochester was a more extreme example of what was within the realm of normal in terms of racial discrimination in the North. But most of the scholarship is really focused on the South.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yeah.
[Wendy Gonaver]
That assessment might be changing as more institutions delve into their history.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yeah, definitely. So, I guess sort of moving more to the present, I guess one thing I'm sort of curious about is what do you see that's different in this present moment and how has the information, the research that you've been doing, how do you think this will be useful for the present movement and this institution moving forward towards more equity?
[Wendy Gonaver]
This question is so hard to answer that I struggle with it. And I know this is an interview, but I kind of want to ask you what you think, even though I know you're new to the institution. Well, you know, it's really hard to get a read on the present moment. It's in flux. One of the things that I have been thinking of, you know, was it June 2023 where there was another Supreme Court decision about affirmative action and higher institutions of higher education? So, you know, what is legally permissible at this moment is no longer clear. There's widespread mistrust of public health in general. Some feel that exposing the history of racial discrimination in institutions is only going to further erode that trust and so as much as there is a desire for accountability, there's sometimes also a desire to not be too detailed in that accountability. But I find that this information is important to the present moment because even though the past is not a playbook for how to deal with iniquity in the present moment, we know there's an abundance of literature that is still talking about the role of structural racism in poor health outcomes and access problems, there's no question there. We also can look and see that you know in, I'm going to be giving a presentation this February, and I hope to invite a panel of experts to talk about and commemorate the 50th, what is going to be the 50th anniversary of a campaign that was launched by the National Medical Association, which was the black organization that was created after the American Medical Association refused to allow black doctor's admission. They launched a campaign, in the late 60s and early 70s to have, nationally, medical schools accept 12% of their incoming class be minority by 1975. So, you know, Dr. Lionel Young's 13, 12% proposal does not come out of nowhere as part of the national campaign. Very few medical schools, including the University of Rochester, are even close to achieving historically white medical schools, are even close to achieving that number now, 50 years later. I think University of Rochester is at 9% or something like that right now. But kind of an assessment of that moment of what are the obstacles beyond, you know, Supreme Court decisions about affirmative action and higher education. Understanding how activists in the past fought these battles for racial justice and equity can be useful for strategizing in the present moment, even though the particulars of the present moment are not the exact same. So that's where I'll find it most useful. Why reinvent the wheel? When you can see what worked previously. What the shortcomings were, you know,Dr. Young and members of the committee exhausted themselves because they didn't have buy-in from all areas of university administration. Okay, that's different now. Now we have an Office of Equity Inclusion, we don't, you know, we don't we buy-in from the university so it's not falling on the shoulders of the few minority faculty. So, it's different. Nevertheless, the strategies that they used, the importance of public protest. Like I said, that's a through line and we can learn something from it.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yeah, definitely. I think since you sort of turned the question back on me, I mean, it's something I've been thinking about a lot as someone who's come in to come in help with planning for a centennial, which is by and large a celebratory thing to look back at 100 years of history and see how far we've come and I've really been thinking about how this information, how this narrative is going to feature in that. And I think a lot of what I've been thinking about is looking at progress is progress does not just happen, again, as you were talking about the idea of window dressing of we are admitting a black student and that appears to be progress, but sort of digging deep and understanding that progress takes students, takes community pushing for better and understanding that sort of that layer of policy that admissions is only one step and is only a first step to sort of being better if we want to think about Meliora ever better has sort of been circling around my brain a lot but. Yeah, I think just understanding where we've come from and what's worked and what hasn't is sort of a very simple way to put it but yeah, I definitely agree with you that understanding yeah just how people have fought for change and for a better institution.
[Wendy Gonaver]
Yeah. And then, you know, beyond the taking practical strategies um from you know past actors. I think about the experience of the Truth and Reconciliation committees in South Africa, which is basically no reconciliation without truth. You have to know that you are operating from a shared understanding of what actually happened and what the impact of these generations of policies of exclusion and discrimination have had.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yeah, definitely. And I'm someone who's actually just coming from finishing up library school in a Canadian context where they have this national truth and reconciliation commission looking at specifically the legacy of colonialism and the legacy of Indian residential schools and sort of having that push at a larger level for for reckoning and for that truth is such a big part and a necessary first step. To move towards reconciliation, to move towards making those steps forward. But yeah, I guess our last question we've come to is that we ask each of our guest speakers to recommend a book or a film related to these topics or really anything that speaks to you and that you think more people should read or watch. So I'm curious. What you brought to recommend to us today.
[Wendy Gonaver]
Well, very apropos given what we were just saying, but the book I want to recommend is John Dittmer's The Good Doctors, the Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Healthcare, which looks at Civil rights agitation in the 60s in the South, in Mississippi, but basically it's describing the the the creation of this organization, the Medical Committee for Human Rights, MCHR, Which came together in the summer of ‘64, right? So, after the July ‘64 Rochester rebellion. It was mostly the members were mostly white, although not exclusively, and it was definitely northern, and they organized initially to provide care and support for civil rights activists who are going down for Freedom Summer into places like Mississippi to register black voters. But once they got there and saw the abominable healthcare condition for black Mississippians, they expanded their mission and eventually took on sort of the whole of United States healthcare system. Now, the organization no longer exists. It only existed for a few years, but they were really consequential in addressing the shortcomings of the healthcare system and in pushing, you know, the AMA was once opposed to any idea of any form of universal health care. And that's no longer the case. And they were critical in changing the conversation. And so, I recommend the good doctors Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice and Healthcare by Don Dittmer and also the book that preceded that, which is just about civil rights in Mississippi in general, called Local People. Which he looks at the student nonviolent coordinating committee and other organizations and talks, and I found it to be a very detailed and very interesting account of how grassroots change is effective.
[Katelyn Gibson]
Yeah, thank you so much for your recommendations. And also, yeah, thank you for your time and sharing your research and your thoughts. I really appreciated hearing what you're working on and sort of what you're working towards. And I guess thanks to everyone who listens as well. Thank you.
[Wendy Gonaver]
Can contact me at my email. Just look up Wendy Goniver at the University of Rochester Medical Center and Gonaver's G-O-N-A-V-E-R.
[Katelyn Gibson]
All right. Thanks so much.
[Wendy Gonaver]
Thank you.