AMA formally apologizes to black physicians for discriminatory policies

CHICAGO - Transplant surgeon Clive Callender has hurtful memories of being the only black doctor at medical meetings in the 1970s and being met with stark silence when he pleaded for better access to transplant organs for blacks.

So when the American Medical Association formally apologized yesterday for more than a century of policies that excluded blacks from a group long considered the voice of American doctors, it was belated, but still welcome.

"My attitude is not one of bitterness, but one of gratefulness that finally they have seen the error of their ways," said Callender, now 71 and a leader at Howard University Hospital in Washington, D.C.

It wasn't until the 1960s that AMA delegates took a strong stance against policies that barred blacks from some state and local medical societies. Until then, AMA delegates had resisted pleas to speak out forcefully against discrimination or to condemn the smaller medical groups, which historically have had a big role in shaping AMA policy.

While the AMA itself didn't have a formal policy barring black doctors, physicians were required to be members of the local groups to participate in the AMA, said Dr. Ronald Davis, the group's immediate past president.

It is conceivable that patient care suffered "to the extent that our practices may have impeded the ability of African-American physicians to interact collegially with white physicians," Davis said yesterday.

In a statement on its website, the AMA apologized for its "history of racial inequality toward African-American physicians, and shares its current efforts to increase the ranks of minority physicians and their participation in the AMA."

The apology is among the initiatives the nation's largest doctors' group is pursuing to reduce racial disparities in medicine and to recruit more blacks to become doctors and to join the AMA.

AMA data suggest that less than 2 percent of its members are black and that less than 3 percent of the nation's 1 million medical students and physicians are black.

It is not the first time the AMA has apologized for its discriminatory history. In 2005, then-president Dr. John Nelson offered a similar apology at a meeting on improving healthcare and eliminating disparities.

That apology came a year after the AMA joined the National Medical Association, a black doctors' group, and other minority doctors' groups in forming the Commission to End Health Care Disparities.