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Dr. Falls might have added the cultural factor. He had the advantage of sound family background and a college-graduate mother. Admission tests are written with a white, middle-class bias, complains Dr. Hiawatha Harris, a black Los Angeles psychiatrist. He cites a young Negro candidate who went through two-thirds of the questions before he came to a subject that he knew anything about. That was science. The other questions were cultural, covering (among other things) yachting jargon and French expressionist painting. "Medical schools have been judging black applicants on an equal basis with whites in an effort to be fair," says Harris, "but we are going to have to recognize differences because black students have not come up in the same cultural environment."
A number of Eastern medical schools have recognized the justice of Harris' complaint. They are now accepting Negro and Puerto Rican applicants whose admission-test scores would have been considered too low for other candidates, and plan to give them special tutoring to help them catch up. Albert Einstein College of Medicine in The Bronx is giving free make-up courses between undergraduate college and med school. New York Medical College has set up a Medstart Committee to recruit interested Negroes and Puerto Ricans. New York University found itself this summer, for the first time in 30 years, with no Negroes in its entering class of 131, so it recruited four who may need tutoring in science. Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, with a class of 132, accepted four Negroes on the strength of routine tests, then added a fifth who had a substandard school record but showed unusual motivation.
Paid to Go Away. Even the most liberal Northern and Western schools have far fewer than the 11% black students that would match the proportion of Negroes in the population. Many have had "quota" systems for Negroes and also Jews. Most Southern med schools accept only token admissions to stay within the law governing federal support funds. Thus the vast majority of the nation's Negro doctors have been trained in two century-old medical schools created especially for them: Howard University's in Washington, and Meharry in Nashville.
At these two, not only is admission easier because an applicant is expected to be black, but subsistence is usually provided. In addition to student grants and privately endowed scholarships, there are scholarships financed by segregationist state governments.
This was the road that Dr. Robert Smith, 30, followed from a Mississippi hamlet to Howard. It led him back almost to where he had started. One of twelve children, Smith graduated from all-Negro Tougaloo College in 1953. The state then subsidized Smith at Howard by paying the school $1,500 a year for his tuition and making him a loan of $5,000, "forgivable" at the rate of $1,000 for each year he spends practicing in the state. Says Smith: "Mississippi would rather underwrite the education of Negroes out of state than let them into its own schools."