The story of Texas’ first Black medical school graduate
Texas Standard, February 22, 2023
Five years before Brown v. Board of Education desegregated public schools in the south, the first Black student was accepted into a Texas medical school. Dr. Herman Barnett applied to the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in 1949, in direct challenge to the state’s segregation laws at the time. Barnett attended UTMB on the condition that he’d later transfer to a separate medical school for Black students that the university planned to build. But that school was never built, and Barnett ended up making history.