Morgan State, Xavier are the newest HBCUs with medical schools

Scoot over Howard and Morehouse — two more universities will soon join the list of HBCUs with medical schools.

The programs, to be located at Xavier University in New Orleans and Morgan State University in Baltimore aim to create a pipeline of Black doctors. Planners say these physicians will be vital to filling in health-care gaps in communities of color and stemming the tide against a long historic legacy of white supremacy in the medical field.

Medical racism isn’t dead; it takes place daily, meaning the basic and compassionate health care Black folks deserve is often non-existent, but research shows that Black doctors, many of whom are HBCU graduates, have the ability to impact the care their communities receive.

Read HBCU stories more from Reckon.

Four HBCUs have been producing half of the Black doctors in the country since 2019, according to the Center for Education Consumers Insights: Howard University in Washington, D.C., Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, Meharry Medical College in Nashville and Morehouse College in Atlanta.

Since 2019, HBCUs have continued producing a multitude of Black doctors, graduating almost 10 percent of Black medical school graduates in the country, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. And Morgan State University (MSU), in Baltimore will add to those graduates with their new College of Osteopathic Medicine in 2024, eventually educating more than 700 students at a time.

“If you want to be a doctor there, you’re going to be a doctor there. That’s the whole important aspect of it. You see it, you dream it and you do it,” Dr. John Sealey, founding dean of the proposed College of Osteopathic Medicine told CBS Baltimore.

According to a report published in August, HBCUs offer Black students in medical school something that more than 150 predominantly white institutions can’t: representation, a sense of belonging and confidence in their scholastic abilities.

“Our findings suggest that Black medical students in PWI schools may experience greater everyday discrimination relative to their HBCU peers that lead to reduced perceptions of their ability to succeed within medical school,” said Dr. Sylvia Perry, the study’s senior researcher and an associate professor of psychology at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University.

The impact of HBCU medical schools has created a pipeline of education where some of the highest numbers of Black pre-med students in the country graduate from Xavier, whose program will launch in 2025, adding them to the list of HBCUs with medical schools.

“Specifically, when it comes to African Americans, we have historically been very underrepresented in medical education. I see programs like Xavier helping bridge that gap,” Lawrence Cresswell, a graduate of Xavier’s pre-med program told Nola.com.