By Katherine Mangan |chronicle.com
In 2013, the family of Herschell Lee Hamilton established an annual scholarship at the University of Alabama at Birmingham to support high-achieving, financially needy Black students who had been accepted to the university’s medical school.
On April 11, the university pulled the plug on the scholarship and sent the money back.
The family of Hamilton, a surgeon who died in 2003 after more than four decades immersed in Birmingham’s Civil Rights struggle, sees the decision as a slap to his legacy.
But the university faced the prospect of losing federal funds after the Trump administration warned in a February “Dear Colleague” letter that race-conscious scholarships were discriminatory and illegal. UAB is among several universities the Education Department specifically targeted for investigation.
Arriving in Birmingham in 1959, Hamilton patched and healed Civil Rights protesters and children whose run-ins with police dogs and fire hoses in the early 1960s gained national attention. And he played a crucial role in attracting young Black people to the medical profession, where they’d largely been unwelcome.
I spoke with his son, Herschell Lanier Hamilton, a Birmingham-based business executive, about his father’s legacy, why he thinks the scholarship is still needed, and how the university’s return of the contribution stung. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I understand your father was Birmingham’s first Black board-certified surgeon. How did his work intersect with the burgeoning Civil Rights movement?
My father was a World War II veteran. He felt the country owed him and other veterans and other Black people the rights he and others went and fought for. He couldn’t sit around passively and do nothing.
In the Deep South, in particular Birmingham, there were clashes among nonviolent Black Civil Rights protesters and members of the broader white community that opposed the movement. He had heard about what was going on in Birmingham and felt he needed to come and lend a hand.
When he got here, he recognized the health disparities that resulted from policies in the Jim Crow South, including health-care institutions that literally refused to accept Black patients.
His office was located in a historic home in Birmingham’s Civil Rights district. When you see pictures of firemen hosing people down in the park, dogs being unleashed on protesters, all of those things happened one-and-a-half blocks from his office.
He turned his office into a triage station, and as marchers were injured by dogs or water hoses, they would bring them around to his office and he would patch them up and send them back out into the streets to continue their protest.
What was the reception like in a predominantly white health-care community?
He had staff privileges at multiple hospitals around Birmingham. He would be making rounds with residents, back in the days when they had elevator operators, and the hospitals had policies that no Black people could be on elevators. His white residents could go on the elevator, but he had to take the steps.
Interacting with white physicians and nurses who had never engaged with a Black physician, my father let his work speak for him. As he scrubbed in with other physicians, people began to see his prowess and his skills. Over time, you’d chip away from this societally curated racism that existed. He established a reputation as an outstanding surgeon in the community broadly, not just in the Black community.
He was dedicated to recruiting other physicians to Birmingham and encouraging young people to look at medicine as a career.
How did the scholarship, which was given each year to an incoming student with at least a 3.0 GPA who was selected by the university, come about?
My father died in 2003. After his death, we had a number of conversations with the folks at UAB about establishing a scholarship in his name that would go to support African American students who had been accepted at and were entering UAB’s medical school.
The purpose of the scholarship was to honor and continue the advocacy my father promoted when he was alive. In a state like Alabama that has a disproportionately low number of African American physicians, it’s important to have more — and more diverse — physicians. Studies have shown that African American people have better health outcomes when they are tended to by African American physicians.
The UAB School of Medicine has really been committed to producing merit-based, ethnically diverse crops of physicians. I emphasize merit-based because any time people say DEI, somebody thinks that somebody is giving somebody something. That’s not the case. You take the MCAT. You have to have the grades. You go before a selection committee, and you are selected.
In February, the Trump administration issued the “Dear Colleague” letter declaring all race-conscious programs illegal and threatening to yank federal funds from any colleges that maintain them. Then, the Education Department announced that UAB was among the universities it was investigating for what it called “impermissible race-based scholarships.” [A university spokesperson declined to comment on the decision to return the Hamilton scholarship, citing the investigation. She said the university had reviewed its scholarships for compliance with federal law, “including the Title VI obligations clarified by the Supreme Court and recent guidance from the federal government.” She added that it’s “continuing to work with donors on any necessary adjustments.”]
How worried were you at that point about the future of the scholarship?
Universities have been grappling with issues around programs designated for ethnically diverse students since the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decision in 2023. It was no surprise that at some point we would have to have a conversation with the university about the program.
We had an initial conversation about the law passed in Alabama [in 2024] that didn’t allow for scholarships designated for ethnically diverse individuals. We thought about tweaking the program so it didn’t specifically state that it would go to Black students. It could go to underresourced students or students from poor regions of the state or students that may have attended historically Black colleges. We felt that there was a way to maintain the program.
Then maybe [six weeks] ago, we got a call from the university saying the administration had made a determination that for this, and other scholarship programs like it, they had decided to return those funds to the donors and end their participation in those scholarship programs.
We were disappointed because instead of pushing back or fighting, they’re caving in to policies that are so separated from the realities on the ground. Why would you end a program that focuses on the development and training of Black physicians who are more likely to set up practices in those communities that have the worst health outcomes?
These schools are trying to divorce themselves from these programs as if society self-corrects. It doesn’t. American society as it relates to race or inclusion or health outcomes has never self-corrected. You have to have intentional programs of inclusion in order to change the outcomes.
What do you think about having the scholarship described as discriminatory?
It’s an indication that the secretary of education is not a student of U.S. history or race relations and the construct of race in the United States. She doesn’t recognize that the disparities that exist are the result of historic practices, policies, and laws in generations past.
My level of frustration as an African American man in the United States is the fact that people who make policy decisions do not understand the implications. When Reagan was in office, he talked about trickle-down economics. What we’re having now is trickle-down carnage. It’s hurting people on the ground.
The medical school has been outstanding as it relates to working to administer the program and working to abide by the laws passed in the state of Alabama. Our heartburn relates to the university administration’s decision to just pull the plug on this scholarship program.
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, student success, and job training, as well as free speech and other topics in daily news. Follow her @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
