The first African-America elected as President of the American Public Health Association in 1968
(1906 -2002)
Civil Rights Leader and Public Health Pioneer
He was the first African American medical student elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha honor society at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, the first African American public health student to earn a doctorate in public health at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, the first African American elected president of the pro-National Health Insurance Physician’s Forum, the first African American to chair the Medical Care Section of the American Public Health Association (APHA), and the first African American to be elected president of the APHA.1 Most impressively, Cornely achieved these firsts without a trace of reticence about his strongly held and powerfully expressed beliefs.
Cornely was born on March 9, 1906, on Guadeloupe in the French West Indies but grew up mostly in Detroit, Michigan.1 He received his BA from the University of Michigan in 1928, his MD there in 1931, and his DrPH in 1934. After an internship at Lincoln Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, he accepted a job as assistant professor in the Department of Bacteriology, Preventive Medicine, and Public Health at Howard University’s College of Medicine in Washington, DC. He began a productive career as a teacher, researcher, and advocate, and in 1942 he was appointed chair of the department. In 1947, Cornely was also made medical director of Howard’s Freedmen’s Hospital and was later named chief of Freedmen’s Division of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. He produced a considerable number of scientific articles during this period, several of them published in the Journal.2In the 1950s Cornely became highly visible as a civil rights leader, focusing on the desegregation of the nation’s health facilities. With his Howard colleague Montague Cobb, in 1956 he founded Imhotep National Conference, which through its meetings focused on using legal and political strategies to open them to African American patients and physicians.3 He strongly supported the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and in the summer of 1963 he was the local medical coordinator for the August 28 March on Washington.4 Cornely also sponsored the Medical Committee on Human Rights3 and strongly supported the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s efforts to desegregate hospitals through strict enforcement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.5 From 1966 to 1968 he served as a member of APHA’s Committee on Integration in Health Services and in March 1967 he was an active participant in the first nationwide conference on the health status of the “Negro.” He was asked by APHA to summarize the conference, and that summary, published in April 1968, is excerpted here.
Cornely was honored by the APHA with his election as president in 1969 and receipt of the Sedgwick Medal in 1972. He contributed actively to APHA in many capacities for several additional decades, and was still reviewing papers for the Journal in his nineties. He received many honors and awards throughout his career but was probably proudest of the University of Michigan School of Public Health’s decision to create the Cornely Postdoctoral Program “for PhD level scholars who are conducting research on the clarification, reduction, and elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities.”6 Cornely died in 2002 at the age of 96 years.
Dr. Cornely was a founder of the National Student Health Association in 1939, president of the Physician’s Forum in 1954, and founder and first president of the District of Columbia Public Health Association in 1962. Dr. Cornely was also the first African-America elected as President of the American Public Health Association in 1968. Dr. Cornely’s professional work focused on the development of public health initiatives aimed at reducing healthcare disparities among the chronically underserved. He also made significant contributions in the civil right movements through his efforts to desegregate health facilities across the U.S. Additionally, Dr. Cornely conducted research studies in tuberculosis, venereal diseases and scarlet fever; utilization of physicians’ extenders and its effect on the cost and quality of health care; and the effects of social and cultural factors on health and health care utilization. He published over 100 scientific and popular articles. Dr. Cornely retired in 1973 as Professor Emeritus in the Department of Community Health and Family Practice of Howard University College of Medicine. Dr. Cornely passed away on February 9, 2002.
1. Epps CH, Johnson DG, Vaughan AL, African-American Medical Pioneers (Rockville, MD: Betz Publishing Company, 1994): 47–51 [Google Scholar]
2. See for example, Cornely PB, “Morbidity and Mortality from Scarlet Fever in the Negro,” American Journal of Public Health 29 no. 9, (1939): 999–1005 [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
3. Dittmer J, The Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2009). [Google Scholar]
4. Fee E, Brown TM, Lear WJ, Lazarus J, Theerman P, “The March on Washington,” American Journal of Public Health 92 no. 2, (2002): 195. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
5. Reynolds PP, “The Federal Government’s Use of Title VI and Medicare to Racially Integrate Hospitals in the United States, 1963 through 1967,” Am American Journal of Public Health 87 no. 11, (1997): 1850–1858 [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
6. Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture and Health Web page, http://www.crech.org/joomla15 (accessed April 1, 2011)
