Meharry Medical College, founded in 1876, is the oldest historically Black medical school in the American South, and you are right beside it. Meharry was established by the Methodist Episcopal Church after Civil War veteran Samuel Meharry donated $30,000 — a story holds that Meharry made the gift to honor a Black family that had given him shelter and food during a difficult journey years earlier. The school's founding answered an urgent need: in the post-Civil War South, Black Americans were excluded from virtually all white medical institutions, yet the Black population desperately needed physicians, dentists, and nurses.
Meharry, alongside Howard University's medical school, essentially trained the entire African-American medical profession for decades. By some estimates, Meharry has produced more than forty percent of all Black physicians and dentists in the United States over the course of its history. The institution operates in partnership with the adjacent Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and its hospital — Hubbard Hospital — served as the primary healthcare provider for Nashville's Black community through the era of segregation.
Picture the more than forty percent of Black physicians and dentists in this country trained right here, keeping generations of Southern communities alive one graduate at a time.