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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.
- 30 -
News for
the week of
April
10
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the week of
April 3
– April 8
News for
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March 27
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