Creating a Segregated Medical Profession: African American Physicians and Organized Medicine, 1846-1910

A second watershed involved AMA-promoted educational reforms, including the 1910 Flexner report. Straightforwardly applied, the report's population-based criterion for determining the need for physicians would have recommended increased training of African American physicians to serve the approximately 9 million African Americans in the segregated south. Instead, the report recommended closing all but 2 African American medical schools, helping to cement in place an African American educational system that was separate, unequal, and destined to be insufficient to the needs of African Americans nationwide.