Anderson Minority Health Month lecture cancelled 

Please note: Anderson Minority Health Month lecture cancelled

by Kirsten Brown

On Monday, April 17, William Anderson, D.O., returns to the college as Minority Health Month continues. Anderson, whose presence at the college during one period was so ubiquitous he might have been mistaken for a faculty member, has the unique distinction of having been the keynote speaker at all three major college ceremonies: graduation, White Coat Ceremony and Convocation. He will speak at 5 p.m. in Irvine Hall. Dinner will be served.

Anderson is a pioneer not only in the osteopathic profession but also the Civil Rights Movement. More on that momentarily.

Currently he is a clinical professor of osteopathic surgical specialties at Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine (MSUCOM). He also is the associate dean of the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine, where he is responsible for the development of medical education programs within the St. John Health System in Michigan. He was the first African American to be elected president of the American Osteopathic Association (AOA).

He has been awarded honorary doctorate degrees from several osteopathic medical schools. Among his other awards are the AOA’s Distinguished Service Award, the Physician of the Year Award from the Michigan Osteopathic Association and the Walter F. Patenge Medal of Public Service from MSUCOM.

Anderson, history shows, was at the focal point of one of the Civil Rights Movement’s pivotal battlegrounds in Albany, Georgia, during the fall of 1961. It was then that the Albany Movement was born, which was the first mass movement in the modern civil rights period to have as its aim the desegregation of a community. Anderson had moved his practice from Flint, Mich., after being reminded by his wife of a promise he had made to return to the South to help its underserved African American communities.

Returning to the South in 1957, he knew he would be barred from working in local hospitals. Ironically, in the so-called more liberal North, he had similar battles at Des Moines University College of Osteopathic Medicine and Flint Osteopathic Hospital, where he had to fight for the right to see white patients in clinic.

It was in Albany that he would be reunited with an old family friend, Martin Luther King Jr., as the Albany Movement took shape. Anderson was elected president and until the summer 1962 non-violent demonstrations, voter-registration drives, boycotts and mass arrests set the tone. Although at the end of the summer, the Albany Movement had not achieved its ostensible goals, nonetheless it was because of the lessons learned in Albany that King and the Southern Christian Leadership Council would later go on to Birmingham and beyond and begin to dismantle the South’s Jim Crow legacies.

Anderson says he has seen a great of progress over the last half century. But the job is not done, so he says the osteopathic professor is doing the right thing by supporting affirmative action policies, particularly in the area of admissions, which he says gives “people who have been historically denied the opportunity to compete, that opportunity.”

Osteopathic education institutions also have to compete more vigorously for minority applicants because they’re competing against larger, and more well funded, allopathic institutions, and the pool of such applicants is smaller, he says.

Anderson, says Norm Gevitz, Ph.D., chairman of social medicine and the reigning chronicler of all things osteopathic, is “a giant of the osteopathic profession.” Don’t miss this opportunity to hear him address issues of concern to all Americans during Minority Health Month.