This is an opinion column.
Some colleges across the country have tried to fight back against Trump administration edicts to kill programs that benefit minority students.
Not the University of Alabama at Birmingham. That school can’t roll over quick enough. It is literally sending checks back to donors, killing scholarships to high-performing Black students rather than risk wearing the scarlet letters of DEI.
An April 11 letter from the school’s Office of Advancement and Strategic Initiatives told donors to one scholarship – some of whom donated a dozen years ago – that “UAB has made the decision to discontinue awarding the scholarship(s) and to return the scholarship funds to you.”
The Herschell Lee Hamilton, M.D., Endowed Scholarship in Medicine was created in 2013 to provide medical school tuition for Black students who maintained a 3.0 GPA and demonstrated financial need. It started with donations from the Hamilton family and others, but UAB each year chose the recipients. Not anymore.
“So for years, I’ve viewed UAB as a leader, a leading institution in the state that had some level of integrity and moral standing,” said Herschell Lanier Hamilton, son of the scholarship’s namesake. “As it turns out, they have none.”
It’s unclear how many scholarships have been affected, as UAB and the University of Alabama System have not responded to requests for comment or records.
UAB is the largest employer in Alabama, with a vaunted medical school, in a particularly unhealthy state and a city that is two-thirds Black.
The purge, as some have called it, began in earnest on Valentine’s Day, when Donald Trump’s Education Department sent a so-called “dear colleague letter” to colleges and universities, in the ostensible name of anti-discrimination. The letter started with this sentence:
“Discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin is illegal and morally reprehensible.”
Which is of course true. But completely disingenuous.
Because that letter vaguely but forcefully demanded colleges kill programs that sought to make up for generations of truly reprehensible discrimination, lest those efforts be considered DEI.
Some colleges across the country fought the purge in court – with success so far in courts in Maine and Maryland. Just not at UAB, part of that university system infamous for blocking the door to education for Black people.
UAB, in its letter to donors, said it decided to return the money after the February Dear Colleague Letter, when it “determined that the criteria for the scholarship could not be amended to comply” with the law and the scholarship’s intent.
Hamilton can translate that.
“They’re just another parrot parroting the same misguided racial nonsense and tropes and policies at the expense of deserving Black medical students, in this instance,” he said. “It literally is ridiculous and it’s unconscionable that you require an institution to divorce itself from a student scholarship that honors the work of somebody like my father, who wasn’t a controversial figure.”
That’s the awful irony of it. You’d be hard pressed to find a better example than Dr. Hamilton of what America’s supposed to stand for. Written and oral histories and family and friends paint a picture of diligence and excellence and plain old decency.
Dr. Hamilton arrived in Birmingham in 1959, when city codes made it illegal for Black and white people to even socialize. Medicine was separate like everything else, and far from equal. That year Birmingham made national news when on a freezing night a pregnant Black woman was denied entry at Hillman Hospital and delivered her baby on the lawn “like an animal,” as the newspaper put it.
Dr. Hamilton became the city’s first Black general surgeon to be certified by the American Medical Association, but it didn’t guarantee respect. When he was eventually given privileges to work at white hospitals he found nurses who would not believe he was a physician, and elevator operators who would not allow him in to ride to operating rooms.
Talk about morally reprehensible.
Hamilton would earn that respect over a four-decade career. He was part of Birmingham history, and civil rights history. His office – known as the Ballard House – was near Kelly Ingram Park and Sixteenth Street Baptist Church downtown. He became known as “The Dog Bite Doctor” during the Children’s Crusade in 1963 as he treated men and women and children, when Birmingham Police Commissioner Bull Connor brought out police dogs and fire hoses to break up peaceful protests.
A policeman uses a police dog to control a civil rights demonstrator in Birmingham, Ala., May 3, 1963. (Birmingham News) AP
Hamilton would later say the dogs weren’t even the worst of it.
“Those people pinned against the wall of the building were the ones who were most seriously injured,” Hamilton said before he died in 2003. “They were brought to my office in severe pain and crying and screaming and yelling.”
Dr. Hamilton treated people during a Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965, too. Treating people was his life’s work.
“He treated everybody,” said Rachel Kersey, his oldest daughter. “He treated patients regardless of their ability to pay. People would pay him with cakes, with collard greens from their garden. He would never turn anybody down.”
Every one of Hamilton’s children graduated Howard University and went on to earn advanced degrees. They excelled in medicine, law and business.
(Left to right) Rachel Hamilton Kersey, Herschell Lanier Hamilton, Yvonne Hamilton, Jacqueline Hamilton, Sharon Hamilton BroachHamilton family
It’s hard not to see UAB’s kowtowing as an affront to that family.
What’s morally reprehensible is that a scholarship in that man’s name, created and funded by private donations and meant to help worthy people, is deemed reprehensible.
If history doesn’t move you, maybe the future should.
Dr. Brian Stone is chief of staff at Walker Baptist Hospital in Jasper. He administers another medical school scholarship, for Black students from Alabama. He fears it is under threat, and is aware of others that have been cut. He worries how cuts will affect not just minority students, but Alabama’s health, and its ability to keep doctors.
“There are large swaths of the state that are health care deserts,” he said. “A lot of the rural hospitals have closed. A lot of the health care centers have closed. So the only way that we’re going to fix this is we’ve got to recruit kids from the state from all social backgrounds into medicine.”
Dr. Hamilton’s daughter Sharon Hamiliton Broach sees UAB’s “disappointing capitulation” as a missed opportunity for capable and deserving students, and for the people of Alabama, particularly in rural areas.
“What we know is that … physicians that look like the communities are able to help those communities better. That’s just a fact,” she said. “And it’s more likely that those that look like the community will go there and serve the community.”
The thing is, UAB knows that.
UAB has been a driving force in trying to change that, to redeem the state and improve the health of Alabamians. But it seemingly weighed the potential loss of a fortune in NIH and other grants and it did what Alabama’s most powerful institutions have done for generations in the face of genuine, morally reprehensible discrimination:
Not a damn thing.
John Archibald is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
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