Black History Month

Dr. Daniel Hale Williams

1856-1931

Daniel Hale Williams graduated from Northwesterrn University Medical School, Chicago Illinois in 1883. He pursued a pioneering career in medicine, setting up his own practice in Chicago’s South Side and taught anatomy at his alma mater. Black doctors, however, were not allowed to work in America's private hospitals. As a result, in 1891, Williams founded the Provident Hospital, which also provided a training residency for doctors and training school for nurses in Chicago. This was established mostly for the benefit of African-American residents, to increase their accessibility to health care, but its staff and patients were integrated from the start.

On July 10, 1893, Williams repaired the torn pericardium of a knife wound patient, James Cornish. Cornish, who was stabbed directly through the left fifth costal cartilage had been admitted the previous night. Williams decided to operate the next morning in response to continued bleeding, cough and "pronounced" symptoms of shock. He performed this surgery, without the benefit of penicillin or blood transfusion, at Provident Hospital, Chicago. It was not reported until 1897. However, DR. DANIEL HALE WILLIAMS WAS THE FIRST TO PERFORM A SUCCESSFUL OPEN HEART SURGERY.

In 1893, during the administration of President Grover Cleveland, Williams was appointed surgeon-in-chief of Freedman’s Hospital in Washington D.C., a post he held until 1898. That year he married Alice Johnson, who was born in the city and graduated from Howard University, and moved back to Chicago. In 1897, he was appointed to the Illinois Depart-ment of Public Health, , where he worked to raise medical and hospital standards. Williams was a Professor of Clinical Surgery at Meharry Medical College in Tennessee, and was an attending surgeon at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. He worked to create more hospi-tals that admitted African Americans, and in 1895 he co-founded the National Medical Association for African-American doctors. He died in relative obscurity.

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Bridget "Biddy" Mason

1818-1891

From Enslaved to Entrepreneur
Born enslaved in Georgia, Bridget "Biddy" Mason walked more than 2,000 miles through rugged terrain to California. Ma­son was forced to travel West with Robert and Rebecca Smith, slaveholders who had joined the Mormon migration to Utah. The Smiths eventually took Mason and her three children to San Bernardino, California. While California was supposedly a "free state," Smith continued to hold them captive. Mason and her children befriended free blacks who alerted the local sheriff when the Smiths made plans to take Biddy and her daughters to Texas with them. The sheriff took Mason and her family into protective custody. Judge Benjamin Hayes circumvented racist testimony laws that prevented blacks from testifying against whites by interviewing Mason in his chambers. There, she said that she did not want to go back to the South with the Smiths. As a result, in 1856, Hayes ruled that Mason and her children were "free forever."

Biddy Mason's emancipation led her to establish herself in Los Angeles where she worked as a midwife and nurse for Dr. John Strother Griffin. Making $2.50 per day, she would eventually deliver hundreds of babies in Los Angeles and tend to the wounds and illnesses of people who came to her for help. She was also noted for using her knowledge of herbal remedies to care for those affected by the smallpox epidemic in Los Angeles. She became a Spanish speaker, fostering her friendship with former Governor Pio Pico. Pico encouraged her to invest her money wisely and purchase property. In 1866, Biddy Mason purchased her first piece of property for $250 on Spring Street between Third and Fourth Street. She purchased a number of other properties around the downtown area as weII, but was known for her civic investment and overall generosi­ty. She allowed her home to be the first meeting place of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles. She later donated the land upon which the first church was built. When Mason passed away in 1891, she was as one of Los An­geles' great philanthropists and left her heirs a fortune estimated at $3 million.

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Dr. Keith L. Black, M.D.

Keith Black was born in Tuskegee, Alabama. Shortly thereafter his family moved to Auburn, Alabama, where his mother, Lillian, was a school teacher, and his father, Robert, was the principal of Boykin Street Elementary School. Though the Supreme Court had declared school segregation unconstitutional years before Keith Black was born, the state government of Alabama continued to mandate separate schools for black and white children. Robert did his best to circumvent the enforced segregation by employing an integrated faculty in his school, and encouraged his sons to swim in the “whites only” swimming pool. From an early age, Keith Black was fascinated by biology, and taught himself to dissect frogs. Encouraging his son’s interest, Robert bought a cow’s heart for his son to dissect.
After high school, Black enrolled at the University of Michigan, and after only two years of undergraduate study, he was accepted into medical school in 1978. Black earned his M.D. from the University of Michigan in 1981, where he had begun his intense research into the brain and the nature of human consciousness. This search led him down a spiritual path, where he began to study the religions of the world, and ultimately led him to working to cure brain tumors.

By 1987, Black was the head of the Comprehensive Brain Tumor Program at the UCLA Medical Center, where he remained for the next ten years. In 1997, he became the director of the division of neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he remains today, and in 1998, he became the chairman of the department of neurological surgery as well as a professor at the University of California, Irvine. Over the years, his work has found him publishing hundreds of papers over the years, and he discovered a natural body peptide that helps deliver drugs to the brain to fight tumors.

Esquire Magazine named him one of the “21 Most Important People of the 21st Century,” and in 2001, he was presented with an Essence Award. Black is also a devoted family man, despite performing 250 to 300 operations a year (the national average for brain surgeons is around 100). He reserves his weekends for spending time with his wife, fellow doctor Carol Bennett, and their children, Keith and Teal.

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UCLA Health Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Annual Health Syposium:

Confidence in Crisis: Strengthening Medical Trust within the Black Community During the Pandemic

UCLA Health hosted the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Annual Health Symposium on January 14, 2021. The recording, presenter information, and additional UCLA Health resources can be found below:

View the Symposium Recording

UCLA Health Resources

UCLA Health COVID-19 FAQs

UCLA Health Office of Health Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

Moderator and Presenter Information

• Dr. Mendell Briggs Malonson
• Dr. Vickie Mays, BRITE Center
• Dr. Nina Harawa, Center for HIV Prevention, Treatment, and Services
• Dr. Omai Garner
• Dr. Keith Norris
• Aziza Lucas Wright, M.Ed.

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Read to celebrate Black History Month!

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