James McCune Smith

McCune Smith received his medical doctorate from Glasgow University in 1837.[19] The university's medical school was one of the leading programmes in Europe. After his graduation, he was awarded a prestigious gynacological residency at Glasgow's Lock hospital for women. Based on his experience in the hospital, he published two articles in the London Medical Gazette. They are the first scientific articles known to have been published by an African American in a scientific journal. The articles exposed the unethical use of an experimental drug upon non-consenting female patients.[20]

When Smith returned to Manhattan in 1837 with his degrees, he was greeted as a hero by the black community. He said at a gathering, "I have striven to obtain education, at every sacrifice and every hazard, and to apply such education to the good of our common country."[21] He was the first university-trained African-American physician in the United States. During his practice of 25 years, he was also the first Black to have articles published in American medical journals, but he was never admitted to the American Medical Association or to local ones.

He established his practice in Lower Manhattan in general surgery and medicine, treating both black and white patients. He started a school in the evenings, teaching children. He established what has been called the first black-owned and operated pharmacy in the United States, located at 93 West Broadway (near present-day Foley Square). His friends and activists gathered in the back room of the pharmacy to discuss issues related to their work in abolitionism.[21]

In 1846, Smith was appointed as the only physician of the Colored Orphan Asylum (also known as the Free Negro Orphan Asylum), at Forty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue. (Before that time, the directors had depended on pro bono services of physicians.) He worked there for nearly 20 years. The asylum was founded in 1836 by Anna and Hannah Shotwell and Mary Murray, Quaker philanthropists in New York.[22] Trying to protect the children, Smith regularly gave vaccinations for smallpox. Leading causes of death were infectious diseases: measles (for which there was no vaccine), smallpox, and tuberculosis (for which there was no antibiotic at the time).[1] In addition to caring for orphans, the home sometimes boarded children temporarily when their parents were unable to support them, as jobs were scarce for free blacks in New York. Waves of immigration from Ireland and Germany in the 1840s and 1850s meant that many new immigrants were competing for work.[22]

Smith was always working for the asylum. In July 1852, he presented the trustees with 5,000 acres of land provided by his friend Gerrit Smith, a wealthy white abolitionist. The land was to be held in trust and later sold for benefit of the orphans.[23]

While in Scotland, Smith joined the Glasgow Emancipation Society and met people in the Scottish and English abolitionist movement.[6] In 1833, Great Britain abolished slavery in the British Empire (slavery in England had been abolished in 1107, but this was not finally confirmed in law until the Somerset v Stewart case in 1772. Scotland has a separate legal system and a similar case to Somerset confirmed the invalidity of slavery under Scottish law in 1778.) When Smith returned to New York, he quickly joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and worked for the cause in the United States. He worked effectively with both Black and white abolitionists, for instance maintaining a friendship and correspondence with Gerrit Smith that spanned the years from 1846 to 1865.[24]

Publishing lectures quickly brought him to the attention of the national abolitionist movement. His "Destiny of the People of Color", "Freedom and Slavery for Africans", and "A lecture on the Haitian Revolution; with a note on Toussaint L'Ouverture", established him as a new force in the field.[25] He directed the Colored People's Educational Movement (to the memory of Abraham Lincoln). In 1850, as a member of the Committee of Thirteen, Smith was one of the key organizers of resistance in Manhattan to the newly passed Fugitive Slave Act that required states to aid federal law enforcement in capturing escaped slaves. As did similar groups in Boston, his committee aided fugitive slaves to escape capture and helped connect them to people of the Underground Railroad and other escape routes.

During the mid-1850s, Smith worked with Frederick Douglass to establish the National Council of Colored People, one of the first permanent Black national organizations, beginning with a three-day convention in Rochester, New York.[4] At the convention in Rochester, he and Douglass emphasized the importance of education for their race and urged the founding of more schools for Black youth. Smith wanted choices available for both industrial and classical education.[26] Douglass valued his rational approach and said that Smith was "the single most important influence on his life".[2] Smith tempered the more radical people in the abolitionist movement and insisted on arguing from facts and analysis. He wrote a regular column in Douglass's paper, published under the pseudonym "Communipaw".[2]

Opposing the emigration of American free blacks to other countries, Smith believed that native-born Americans had the right to live in the United States and a claim by their labor and birth to their land. He gathered supporters to go to Albany to testify to the state legislature against proposed plans to support the American Colonization Society that had supported sending free Blacks to the colony of Liberia in Africa. He contributed money to revive the Weekly Anglo-African in 1861, as an anti-emigrationist newspaper.[27]

In the mid-1850s, Smith joined James W.C. Pennington and other black leaders in establishing the Legal Rights Association (LRA) in Manhattan. A pioneering minority-rights association, the LRA waged a nearly ten-year campaign against segregated public transportation in the city. This organization successfully defeated segregation in New York and served as a model for later rights organizations, including the National Equal Rights League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in the early twentieth century.[28]

In July 1863, during the draft riots in Manhattan, Irish rioters attacked Blacks throughout the city and burned down the orphan asylum. The children were saved by the staff and Union troops in the city. During its nearly 30 years, the orphan asylum had admitted 1310 children, and typically, had approximately 200 in residence at a time.[29]

After the riots, Smith moved his family and business out of Manhattan to Brooklyn, as did other prominent Blacks. Numerous buildings had been destroyed in their old neighborhoods, and estimates were that some 100 Blacks were killed in the rioting. No longer feeling safe in the lower Fourth Ward, the Smiths moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.[30]

Smith was a prolific writer and essayist. The historian John Stauffer of Harvard University says: "He was one of the leaders within the movement to abolish slavery, and he was one of the most original and innovative writers of his time."[17]

In 1839, he followed Samuel Cornish as editor of The Colored American, a New York weekly newspaper owned by Philip Alexander Bell. Among his notable writings was a debate with John Hughes, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, who was known as a racist and anti-abolitionist.[31]

In 1840, Smith wrote the earliest known case report by a Black physician, entitled "Case of Ptyalism with fatal termination" that his associate Dr. John Watson read at a meeting of the New York Medical and Surgical Society.[32] In 1844, Smith published an article entitled "On the Influence of Opium upon the Catamenial Functions" in the New York Journal of Medicine, the earliest known contribution to the medical literature by a Black physician.[32]

He drew from his medical training to discredit popular misconceptions about differences among the races.[33] In 1843, he gave a lecture series entitled Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of the Races to demonstrate the failings of phrenology, which was a so-called "scientific" practice of the time that was applied in a way to draw racist conclusions and attribute negative characteristics to ethnic Africans.[34] He rejected the practice of homeopathy, an alternative to the scientific medicine being taught in universities. Although he had a successful medical career, Smith was never admitted to the American Medical Association or local associations because of racial discrimination.[1]

In Glasgow, he was trained in the emerging science of statistics. He published numerous articles applying his statistical training. For example, he used statistics to refute the arguments of slave owners, who wrote that Blacks were inferior and that slaves were better off than were free Blacks or white urban laborers.[35] To do this, he drew up statistical tables of data derived from the census.

When John C. Calhoun, then U.S. Secretary of State claimed that freedom negatively affected Black Americans and that the 1840 U.S. Census showed that Blacks in the North had high rates of insanity and mortality, Smith responded with a masterful paper. In "A Dissertation on the Influence of Climate on Longevity" (1846), published in Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, Smith analyzed the census both to refute Calhoun's conclusions and to show the correct way to analyze data. He showed that Blacks in the North lived longer than slaves, attended church more, and were achieving scholastically at a rate similar to whites.[25][36] Based on Smith's findings, John Quincy Adams, acting in his capacity in the House of Representatives, called for an investigation of the census results. However, Calhoun responded by appointing a pro-slavery crony who determined that the census was flawless, and the 1840 census was never corrected.[37]

In 1847, the founding year of the New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM), Smith was nominated for resident fellowship by two founding members of the academy. Because of his race, Smith's nomination posed a challenge for the fledgling, but rapidly growing academy and its committee on admissions, who wished to avoid "agitation of the question". After discussions, correspondence, and procedural postponements throughout 1847, the committee on admissions eventually neither accepted nor rejected Smith, but instead implemented a rule to permit Smith to be regarded as "not nominated", a unique designation that effectively rejected his fellowship.[38]

As Smith started publishing, his work was quickly accepted by newer scientific organizations: in 1852 Smith was invited to be a founding member of the New York Statistics Institute. In 1854 he was elected as a member by the American Geographical Society (founded in New York in 1851 by top scientists as well as wealthy amateurs interested in exploration). The Society recognized him by giving him an award for one of his articles.[25][39] He joined the New-York Historical Society.[39]

Among numerous other works supporting abolitionism and dealing with issues related to race, Smith was known for his introduction to Frederick Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). It expressed the new independence in African-American accounts of slavery, compared to earlier works that had to seek approval for authentication from white abolitionists, as readers rejected some harsh accounts of conditions under slavery.

Smith wrote: "The worst of our institutions, in its worst aspect, cannot keep down energy, truthfulness, and earnest struggle for the right".[21]

In addition, during the 1850s Smith gained prominence with African-American readers and abolitionist readers of all ethnicities for his regularly published (often weekly) columns in Frederick Douglass Paper. Smith's commentaries on African-American culture, local and national politics, literature, and styles of dress made him one of the earliest Black public intellectuals to gain popularity in the U.S.[40]

In 1859, Smith published an article using scientific findings and analysis to refute the former president Thomas Jefferson's theories of race, as expressed in his well-known Notes on the State of Virginia (1785).[1] Dr. Vanessa Northington Gamble, a medical physician and historian at George Washington University, in 2010 noted: "As early as 1859, Dr. McCune Smith said that race was not biological but was a social category."[18] He commented on the positive ways that ethnic Africans would influence U.S. culture and society, in music, dance, food, and other elements. His collected essays, speeches, and letters have been published as The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist (2006), edited by John Stauffer.[24]

In 1863, Smith was appointed as professor of anthropology at Wilberforce College, the first African American-owned and operated college in the United States.[41] Smith was too ill to take the position.[42] He died two years later, on November 17, 1865, at the age of 52, from congestive heart failure. This was nineteen days before ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution that abolished slavery.[27] He was buried at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn. Smith was survived by his widow, Malvina, and five children.[43]

To escape racial discrimination and have more opportunities, his children passed into white society: the four surviving sons married white spouses; his unmarried daughter lived with a brother. They worked as teachers, a lawyer, and as business people. Smith's unique achievements as a pioneering African-American physician were rediscovered by twentieth-century historians. They were relearned by his descendants in the twenty-first century, who identified as white and did not know about him, when a great-great-great-granddaughter took a history class and found his name in her grandmother's family bible. In 2010, several Smith descendants commissioned a new tombstone for his grave in Brooklyn and gathered to honor him and their African-American ancestry.[44]

In November 2018, the New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM) posthumously inducted Smith as a fellow of the academy, 171 years after his nomination and 153 years after his death. At the 2018 Discourse and Awards ceremony, NYAM President Judith Salerno presented a replica certificate of fellowship to Professor Joanne Edey-Rhodes, who accepted on behalf of Smith's descendants.[38] In 2019, the academy also formally unveiled a portrait of Smith, commissioned by Academy Fellow Dr. Daniel Laroche and painted by artist Junior Jacques. It now is on display at the academy.[45]

The University of Glasgow, Smith's alma mater, has named its new Learning Hub building the James McCune Smith Learning Hub and it opened to students early in 2021.[46] The university has also established a scholarship and an annual lecture named after Smith.