Eliminating the Color Bar

For many of the nation's 7,000 Negro doctors, admission to the American Medical Association (216,000 members) has always been beyond reach. Almost all of the organization's Southern chapters have excluded them by means devious or direct. Black doctors have turned to the 5,600-member National Medical Association, founded in 1895 and now 95% Negro. Another result has been bitterness among black doctors, who are refused the right to practice in full-facility hospitals that require membership in A.M.A.-affiliated county medical societies. Last week the A.M.A. finally faced up to the problem by calling for changes in the association bylaws that would subject any affiliate that denies membership on the grounds of "color, creed, race, religion or ethnic origin," to dismissal.

Although the new A.M.A. resolution is a step in the right direction, it will probably be years before Negro physicians and surgeons achieve professional equality. "The conditions faced by black doctors--and patients--have improved in recent years," says Dr. Lionel Swan, a Detroit G.P. and president of the National Medical Association, who was a guest at the A.M.A. convention last week. But Swan points out that Negro doctors are still excluded from hospital-staff membership almost everywhere in the Deep South. In other regions, they are admitted only as token members. Negro specialists rarely receive referrals from white doctors. Black doctors who do manage to achieve staff status almost never move up into administrative positions. Those who practice privately must often arrange through white colleagues to have their patients admitted to a hospital. There, white doctors often take over--and collect the fee.

The A.M.A. amendments committee sought to shelve last week's resolution against the color bar, but the organization's 242 delegates passed the resolution almost unanimously. At the same time, the association installed a California gastroenterologist, Dwight Locke Wilbur, as president and elected a Manhattan insurance-company physician, Gerald Dale Dorman, to succeed Dr. Wilbur in 1969. Both men are unusually liberal, in medical terms; their selection holds promise of even broader reform of the once-mossbacked A.M.A.

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