When most people discuss heroes in Black history, many remember names like Frederick Douglas, Mary McCleoud Bethune, Benjamin Banneker and Sojurner Truth. While all those names are great, many forget the ones who paved the way in the medical field, even during slavery times. Dr. James McCune Smith is one of those.
Dr. McCune was one of the most broadly accomplished black intellectuals and activists in America. Born in New York on April 18, 1813, to a mother who purchased her own freedom and a father who may have been a freed slave or a white merchant, Smith attended the African Free School in New York City.
In 1824, the retired Revolutionary War hero General Lafayette returned to America for a tour of the nation. While in New York he visited the African Free School and out of all the students, he chose James to write and deliver the welcoming address. Smith was only 11 years old.
Upon graduation from the African Free School, James McCune Smith sought, but was denied admission to several American colleges. He then managed to raise money to attend the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where, after completing bachelor’s and masters’ degrees, he completed a medical degree in 1837. Thus he became, as far as can be determined, the first African American to be awarded a degree in medicine.
After completing a medical internship in Paris, France, he returned to New York City, where he opened a medical office and a pharmacy at 93 West Broadway that attracted interracial clientele. Here he served both white and black patients in the front of the pharmacy. In the back, he met with fellow activists and conspired to end slavery in the South, to win the vote for blacks in New York, and to educate black youth. Together with abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, and John Brown, he helped found the Radical Abolitionist Party. His pharmacy was a place where many escaping slaves found help. Smith wrote about medicine, science, education, racism, and literature and quickly emerged as a powerful anti-slavery and anti-racism organizer, orator, and writer.
Smith died in 1865 at the age of 52—five months after the end of the Civil War and less than three weeks before the 13th Amendment abolished slavery—keenly aware that African Americans still faced a long, hard struggle for equality. The New York draft riots of July 1863, in which mobs attacked not only the city’s wealthy but also black New Yorkers, had made that clear to him.
After troops squashed the three-day draft riots, which were the culmination of frustration over the unfairness of new laws drafting men to fight in the Civil War, Dr. Smith moved his medical practice and his family from Manhattan to…
… Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He no longer felt safe in Manhattan’s lower 4th Ward, his life-long home. All across southern Manhattan, black neighborhoods like his were being attacked, and black-owned businesses, such as the pharmacy Dr. Smith had once owned and a boarding house owned by his childhood friend Albro Lyons, were being destroyed. His hard work for African American freedom and social equality, as well as the struggle to advance himself and his family, had suffered a violent blow.
The mob had nearly destroyed the drugstore of Philip White, who had been an apprentice of Dr. Smith, but luckily White’s reputation in the neighborhood drew a sympathetic army of protectors. Shocking to many New Yorkers was the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum, where Dr. Smith was acting physician. Luckily the children had escaped to safety by the time the rioters struck, largely due to the timely arrival of a military attachment from the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Not long before the riots, he had been offered a teaching position at Wilberforce College in Ohio, but he fell ill and felt the move would be too difficult. After the riots, he set up his new practice in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and lived there for two years until his death in 1865, seven months after President Lincoln’s assassination. In spite of his discouragement over the riots, Dr. Smith had seen significant advancement for African Americans and could take pride in his own role.
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