Nashville, Tennessee · Founded 1876
“A 150-year-old Nashville medical school born from a freedman's act of kindness, still training the doctors, dentists, and scientists who serve the underserved.”
The full origin-to-present story in one film — the Samuel Meharry gift, the church-basement classes, and 150 years of training Black physicians.
Nashville PBS documentary tracing how Civil War hospital medicine in Nashville led to the founding of Meharry Medical College.
How the 1910 Flexner Report closed most Black medical schools — and how Meharry and Howard survived it.
In 1946 Meharry dentistry faculty created a new denture gum shade for Black patients — a small, telling story of culturally responsive medicine.
Meharry students demonstrate the impact of their research on the community; produced with United Methodist Communications for the Black College Fund.
Sandra Parham, executive director of Meharry's Library and Archives, on safeguarding the school's 150-year legacy of students, stories, and sacrifices.
News coverage of Meharry's historic artifacts and photographs exhibited across Nashville for Black History Month.
Short-form tribute to Meharry's place in Black Tennessee history — from the freedmen's gift to 150 years of Black doctors.
Full commencement ceremony — the third-Saturday-of-May tradition where Meharry's newest doctors, dentists, and scientists graduate.
The school's 150th graduation exercises — a milestone commencement in the sesquicentennial era.
Why the count runs ahead of the years: Meharry held two commencement ceremonies in one academic year during World War II.
The 2025 White Coat Ceremony — first-year medical students don the white coat in Meharry's defining rite of passage.
First female surgeon of African-American ancestry in the Southeastern United States, and the first African American woman to serve in the Tennessee General Assembly.
Physician, newspaper publisher, and civil rights leader who owned and published Black newspapers in Northern California while maintaining his medical practice.
Founded the 'Medical and Surgical Observer,' the first medical journal published by an African American, and established the University of West Tennessee College of Medicine and Surgery.
Opened the first successful private general hospital for African Americans in Atlanta, plus the city's first obstetrical hospital for Black women.
Internist and psychiatrist who did his residency at St. Paul's Hospital, the first hospital in Dallas to grant privileges to Black doctors.
Meharry's first female medical graduate (1893); conducted early epidemiological studies in Liberia on anemia and dropsy among the Kru people of Monrovia.
Former Assistant Surgeon General and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health who went on to become president of Spelman College.
Psychiatrist, international researcher, author, and professor of psychiatry known for community-based mental health work.
Detroit physician and founder of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, one of the world's largest institutions devoted to the African American experience.
The first Black woman transplant surgeon in the United States, a pioneer in organ transplantation.
Expert in tropical diseases whose public-health work took him across the developing world.
Known as the 'Dean of Negro Surgeons,' a towering figure in Black surgery in the early 20th century.
Physician who became chairman of Meharry's Board of Trustees and presided over the appointment of President Hildreth.
Cardiac surgeon who implanted the first automatic defibrillator in a human patient in 1980. A Tennessee State graduate, he received an honorary degree from Meharry in 1989, and the TSU/Meharry accelerated physician-dentist pipeline is named the Dr. Levi Watkins Jr. Institute in his honor. Included here for his deep institutional ties, not as a graduate.
The school's origin is an act of kindness repaid. Years earlier, young Scots-Irish salt trader Samuel Meharry had his wagon stuck in the Tennessee backcountry and was rescued by an unnamed family of freedmen, who fed and sheltered him overnight. When he had nothing to give them then, he told the formerly enslaved family he would do something for their race when he could. In 1875, after students at Central Tennessee College asked president John Braden about starting a medical department, Braden approached Meharry, who joined with his four brothers to donate $15,000. The Freedman's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church added its support, and the Meharry Medical Department was born.
George W. Hubbard and Braden opened the Medical Department of Central Tennessee College in 1876 with a starting class of nine students, meeting in the basement of the Clark Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church. The first regular year of classes began in October 1876 with eleven students and white physician William J. Sneed as their instructor. The medical program was initially just two years long, with a third year added in 1879 and a fourth in 1893. It was the first medical school for African Americans in the South, founded when freedmen were shut out of nearly every segregated hospital and medical school.
The first student graduated in 1877, just a year after the school opened its doors, and the second class held its commencement in 1878 with three graduates. In 1879, founding president George W. Hubbard completed his own medical degree at Vanderbilt University, the white institution across town that would become both neighbor and rival. Hubbard would lead the school for 45 years, from its founding until his retirement in 1921. The program's steady lengthening from two years to four showed how fast the school was professionalizing.
The Dental Department was founded in 1886, followed by a Pharmacy Department in 1889, and the Dental and Pharmaceutical Building was dedicated on October 20, 1889. This made Meharry one of the first places in America where Black students could train as dentists and pharmacists, not just physicians. The dental school would go on to produce generations of Black dentists for communities across the South that white dentists refused to serve. The school also became an early innovator in culturally responsive care: in 1946, Meharry dentistry faculty developed a new denture gum shade for African American patients, still known as the 'Meharry Shade.'
Georgianna Esther Patton became Meharry's first female medical graduate in 1893, an extraordinary milestone for a Black woman in the 19th-century South. She went on to conduct early epidemiological studies in Liberia, identifying anemia and dropsy as prevalent health issues among the Kru people of Monrovia. Meharry kept graduating women physicians at a rate remarkable for the era: 39 women had earned MDs there by 1920. That pipeline of Black women doctors was nearly unheard of anywhere else in American medical education at the time.
By 1896, half of all 'regularly educated physicians then practicing in the South' had graduated from Meharry, according to contemporary accounts. Twenty years after opening in a church basement, the school had become the single largest producer of Black doctors in the former Confederacy. Those graduates fanned out into towns where no Black physician had ever practiced, often building their own clinics and hospitals. Meharry's alumni network became, in effect, the backbone of Black healthcare across the segregated South.
In 1900, Central Tennessee College changed its name to Walden University, the parent institution Meharry would stay tied to until 1915. A nurse-training school opened in the 1900-1901 school year with eight students, and a training hospital, Mercy Hospital, was built during 1901-1902 so students could get clinical experience. In 1904 the school built Meharry Auditorium with a 1,000-person capacity, giving the growing campus its first real gathering hall. The campus was taking physical shape as a self-contained Black medical world in Jim Crow Nashville.
In 1910, Meharry absorbed medical students from Flint Medical College when that Black school closed, consolidating its role as a survivor. The era was brutal for medical education: Abraham Flexner's 1910 report for the Rockefeller-backed General Education Board shuttered most of America's Black medical schools, and in 1914 Meharry itself was dropped to Class B status. Flexner personally provided advice and funding to help Meharry rebuild rather than close. In 1923, under president John J. Mullowney, the school regained its rating as a 'grade-A institution' from the American Medical Association, one of only two Black medical schools to survive the Flexner era.
In 1915, the medical department faculty of Walden University received a separate charter to operate independently as Meharry Medical College, and the school has been independent ever since. The college stayed in its original buildings while Walden University moved to another campus in Nashville in 1922, severing the last institutional tie. Meharry remained privately funded, affiliated with the United Methodist Church, and has famously never been segregated. The 1915 charter is why Meharry stands apart from the undergraduate HBCUs: it was born as, and remains, a graduate health-sciences institution.
Mercy Hospital was replaced in 1916 by a new training hospital named the George W. Hubbard Hospital, honoring the founding president who was still in office. The hospital gave Meharry students their own clinical home at a time when Nashville's white hospitals barred Black patients and Black doctors alike. It would anchor the campus for nearly eighty years. When it finally closed in 1994, the renovated building became the new home of Metropolitan Nashville General Hospital, keeping a hospital on the Meharry campus to this day.
George W. Hubbard retired in 1921 after 45 years as founding president, and John J. Mullowney succeeded him for a seventeen-year run. Mullowney tightened and strictly enforced admission requirements, installed a superintendent at the hospital, and expanded the faculty, research facilities, and hospital facilities. Those reforms were what won back the AMA's Grade-A rating in 1923 and put Meharry on a modern academic footing. He also presided over a school that was quietly graduating women physicians in numbers no other medical school approached.
The School of Graduate Studies and Research was founded in 1938, extending Meharry beyond professional degrees into biomedical research training. In 1947 the school established its first master's program, a Master of Science in Public Health, and in 1968 it added a Ph.D. in basic sciences. The graduate school made Meharry the country's leading producer of African Americans with Ph.D.s in the biomedical sciences, a distinction it still holds. Research at Meharry has always been tied to its mission: studying the diseases and conditions that hit Black and underserved communities hardest.
Harold D. West became president in 1952, the school's first African-American president, ending 76 years of white leadership. He pulled off a successful $20 million fund drive, an enormous sum for a Black institution in the 1950s, and spent it decisively: a new wing for Hubbard Hospital, an end to the nursing and dental technology programs so Meharry could concentrate on its core strengths in medicine and dentistry, and land purchases adjacent to campus for expansion. The Harold D. West Basic Sciences Center still carries his name. His fourteen-year tenure modernized the campus and the curriculum in equal measure.
School president Lloyd Charles Elam, himself a psychiatrist, established the department of Psychiatry in 1961. In 1968 Meharry created the Matthew Walker Health Center to deliver health services directly to the surrounding community, and added the Ph.D. degree in basic sciences. The Lloyd C. Elam Community Mental Health Center followed, embedding mental health care in the school's mission. In 1972 the school founded its Sickle Cell Center, one of the first ten in the United States, serving newborns with inherited blood disorders across forty Middle Tennessee counties.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, 83 percent of all African American physicians had been trained at Meharry Medical College and Howard University School of Medicine, just two schools carrying nearly the entire profession. In 1970, more than 60 percent of Black medical students worked as residents at these two colleges. The federal government recognized the fragility of that concentration: in 1972 Meharry began receiving federal distress grants for medical schools with operating deficits and accreditation problems. By 1976 the campus covered 65 acres, and the decade brought a building boom from the early 1970s through the late 1970s.
In 1981 the AMA's accrediting body put Meharry on probation because Hubbard Hospital did not have enough patients for the students and the student-to-teacher ratio was too high. It was an existential threat to a school that had survived Flexner. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan allowed Meharry students to train at nearby veterans' hospitals and the Blanchfield Army Community Hospital, and the college regained full accreditation. The episode showed how much the school's fate depended on clinical access, a lesson that would shape every hospital partnership Meharry made afterward. By 1986, around 46 percent of all Black faculty members in American medical schools had graduated from Meharry.
Hubbard Hospital closed in 1994, and new president John E. Maupin Jr. launched a wave of campus renovations while staring at a $49 million deficit and low morale. The lifeline was Nashville General Hospital's lease money: the renovated Hubbard building reopened in November 1997 as the new site of Metropolitan Nashville General Hospital, keeping a working hospital on campus. By June 1995 the school's finances had stabilized. In 1999 the college formed an alliance with the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, the white institution across town that had once been out of reach, cementing Meharry's clinical future.
In 2005 Meharry was censured by the American Association of University Professors for not observing generally recognized principles of academic freedom and tenure. The censure was a public black mark during a period of administrative strain. It underscored how hard it was for a small, mission-driven, under-resourced Black institution to keep pace with the governance norms of wealthier schools. The school spent the following years rebuilding its academic governance under new leadership.
On November 9, 2017, Meharry under president James E.K. Hildreth signed a memorandum of agreement with Hospital Corporation of America, America's largest for-profit hospital operator. Under the deal, Meharry's medical students would gain clinical training at HCA's TriStar Southern Hills Medical Center in Nashville, diversifying beyond Nashville General Hospital, where students had trained since it moved on campus in the 1990s. The announcement was a surprise: a board member resigned over it, and the withdrawal of the Meharry alliance threatened inpatient care at Nashville General. It was the most controversial business decision in the school's modern history.
In September 2020, Michael Bloomberg donated $34 million to lower student debt at Meharry, then the largest gift in the school's history. Two months later, President Hildreth emailed students a video message just before Thanksgiving that sounded too good to be true: 'We'll gift each of you $10,000 in cash. You heard me right.' The money, about $10 million of the school's CARES Act funding, went to all 956 students by direct deposit or check, no strings attached, asking only that they be 'good stewards.' Meharry's students had already been staffing Nashville's mass COVID testing and vaccination sites, and Hildreth framed the windfall as an investment in Black students facing the steepest financial climb into medicine.
In 2021 Meharry launched Meharry Medical College Ventures to turn healthcare research into breakthroughs and reduce health disparities through partnerships with medical facilities across the country. Dean and senior vice president of health affairs Veronica Mallett was its inaugural president and CEO, serving until 2023, when Reginald Holt succeeded her. Around the same time the school stood up the School of Applied Computational Sciences, pushing into genomics, bioinformatics, and AI-driven precision medicine. Federal funding followed: Rep. Jim Cooper secured funding for a supercomputer cluster to support genomics research at the new school.
In March 2022, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott donated $20 million to Meharry, one of the largest unrestricted gifts in the school's history. The same period brought a new strategic direction: Meharry announced a Global Health Equity Institute, the first piece of a planned School of Global Health, tapping Daniel E. Dawes, former executive director of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine, to lead it. The institute would study structural discrimination in public health in Tennessee, the U.S., and globally. Meharry was positioning itself as a health-equity think tank, not just a medical school.
In the fall of 2023 Meharry opened its Living and Learning Center, a six-story, 156,360-square-foot residence hall on the corner of Morena Street and 21st Avenue with 126 affordable one-bedroom apartments, a fitness center, and teaching and learning spaces. Designed with the architecture firm Moody Nolan, it was built to ease the financial burden of students in Nashville's punishing housing market while keeping them in a supportive academic community. It was the school's biggest student-life investment in decades and a visible symbol of the Hildreth-era expansion. Students arrived to find a campus finally building for growth again.
In 2024 Meharry received a $175 million gift from Bloomberg Philanthropies to support its endowment, the largest gift in the school's history and the largest ever received by any HBCU. It was part of a $600 million Greenwood Initiative investment across the nation's four historically Black medical schools: Howard, Morehouse, and Meharry each received $175 million, Charles R. Drew University $75 million, plus seed funding for the new Xavier Ochsner College of Medicine. The gift more than doubled Meharry's endowment, which stood at $193.9 million in 2024. Hildreth called it 'a testament to Meharry's legacy and to the promise of Meharrians to transform the future of health care.'
On June 9, 2025, Meharry announced it was opening a training facility in Memphis through a partnership with Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church, part of the church's $310 million redevelopment of 23 acres in Midtown and the Memphis Medical District. The new presence aims to address Memphis health disparities including high rates of HIV/AIDS, obesity, and diabetes, and is a step toward Meharry's long-term goal of a branch campus, keeping more medical trainees in Tennessee. 'Meharry is now officially a Memphis institution, and we are here to stay,' Hildreth told a crowd of nearly 200. Native Memphian Dr. Stephanie Sweet, Meharry's assistant vice president, is leading the Memphis campus.
In 2026 Meharry celebrates its sesquicentennial, 150 years since the church-basement classes of 1876, under the banner 'Celebrating the past. Inspiring the future. Serving mankind.' The 150th-anniversary commencement weekend lands May 15-16, 2026, with hooding ceremonies at the Cal Turner Family Center for Student Education and commencement at the Grand Ole Opry. Back in 2015, Hildreth had joked that he wanted 'a front row seat' for the 150th birthday party; a decade later, he gets it. The milestone caps a decade that took Meharry from financial fragility to the best-funded it has ever been.
Meharry fields no varsity sports teams and holds no athletic conference membership, so it has no rivalries in the sports sense. Its closest collegiate neighbors are fellow Nashville HBCUs Fisk University and Tennessee State University, plus Vanderbilt University across town — institutions it partners with (the TSU/Meharry pipeline, the Vanderbilt alliance) rather than competes against. In medicine, its historic peer and counterpart is Howard University College of Medicine: together the two schools trained 83 percent of all African American physicians by the early 1970s, and both survived the Flexner era when every other Black medical school closed.
Meharry Medical College has no marching band and no band program. It is a graduate health-sciences institution with roughly 950 medical, dental, and graduate students and no undergraduate campus, no athletics, and no band tradition. Do not invent a band name or directors for this school.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
No Greek-letter social organizations. Morehouse School of Medicine's student life runs through professional and honor societies instead: the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society chapter (installed May 12, 1989), the Student National Medical Association, AMSA, AMA's Medical Student Section, and AMWA per the official 2014-15 Student Handbook. As a graduate/professional health-sciences school rather than a four-year undergraduate college, it does not run the Divine Nine chapter scene of an undergrad HBCU. (Not to be confused with Morehouse College, which has an active NPHC scene.)
Still digging this up — check back soon.
Dedicated October 20, 1889, to house the new Dental Department (1886) and Pharmacy Department (1889). It gave Meharry's expanding programs their first purpose-built home beyond borrowed church and classroom space.
A training hospital built during the 1901-1902 school year, giving students clinical experience in their own facility at a time when Nashville's white hospitals barred Black patients and Black physicians. It was the school's first hospital building.
Built with a 1,000-person capacity, the campus's first large gathering hall for convocations, ceremonies, and community events. It anchored campus life in the early 20th century.
Replaced Mercy Hospital and was named for the founding president. It served as Meharry's teaching hospital for nearly 80 years until its 1994 closure, then was renovated into the new home of Metropolitan Nashville General Hospital.
Created to provide health services directly to the surrounding North Nashville community, extending the campus's mission beyond its walls. The Lloyd C. Elam Community Mental Health Center followed, embedding mental health care in the school's footprint.
A period of heavy construction from the early to late 1970s expanded the campus to 65 acres by 1976. Meharry officials later described it as the school's last great building era before a three-decade construction drought.
The renovated Hubbard Hospital reopened in November 1997 as Metropolitan Nashville General Hospital, keeping a working hospital on the Meharry campus. The lease revenue from the deal helped pull the school out of its $49 million deficit by 1995, and students have trained there ever since.
A three-story, 80,000-square-foot, $25 million complex named for former Dollar General CEO Cal Turner Jr., the first major construction on campus in 30 years. It houses classrooms, an auditorium, a banquet hall, a food court, and administrative offices, and now hosts hooding ceremonies and convocations.
Federal community-project funding secured by Rep. Jim Cooper paid for a supercomputer cluster supporting student and faculty genomics research at the new School of Applied Computational Sciences. It gave Meharry its first serious high-performance computing infrastructure.
A six-story, 156,360-square-foot residence hall at Morena Street and 21st Avenue with 126 affordable one-bedroom apartments, a fitness center, and teaching spaces, designed by Moody Nolan. Opened fall 2023 to shield students from Nashville's housing market and keep them in a learning community.
The Global Health Equity Institute, launched under Daniel E. Dawes, became the foundation of a new School of Global Health. The school studies structural discrimination in public health and trains leaders for health equity work in Tennessee, the U.S., and globally.
Meharry's first ongoing presence outside Nashville: a training facility at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis, part of a $310 million, 23-acre redevelopment in Midtown and the Memphis Medical District. Aimed at Memphis health disparities in HIV/AIDS, obesity, and diabetes, it is a step toward a full branch campus, led by Dr. Stephanie Sweet.
Meharry's leadership reflects its mission: physicians and researchers, not career administrators. Former faculty include Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice, who directed the nation's first research center devoted to women of color's health at Meharry before becoming president of Morehouse School of Medicine. Presidents David Satcher (later U.S. Surgeon General) and A. Cherrie Epps (first woman to lead a major independent U.S. medical college) give the school a leadership lineage few medical schools can match.
12th president, in office since July 1, 2015. Infectious-disease expert who led Nashville's COVID-19 response and shifted the school's research toward precision medicine, genomics, and AI.
Secured the 2019 partnership with Detroit Medical Center expanding clinical placements for Meharry students. Ran the school's commercialization arm, Meharry Ventures, for its first two years.
Succeeded Veronica Mallett in 2023 to lead the school's vehicle for healthcare breakthroughs and disparity-reducing partnerships.
Former executive director of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine. Tapped to build Meharry's health-equity think tank studying structural discrimination in public health.
Guardian of the school's 150-year archive of photographs, artifacts, and records. Curated the 2022 Black History Month exhibit at the Tennessee State Library & Archives.
A native Memphian leading Meharry's Memphis expansion at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church, the school's first ongoing presence outside Nashville.
Oversees student and faculty affairs and the school's health-policy research center. Announced the first full-tuition Presidential Student Leadership Scholarships at the 139th Convocation.
Meharry alumnus, Class of 1968, who chaired the board during the Hildreth appointment and presented him at his 2016 investiture.
Meharry feels less like a college campus and more like a calling. With around 950 graduate and professional students in North Nashville, the culture is mission-first: the motto 'Worship of God through Service to Mankind' is everywhere, and the school reports that around three-quarters of its graduates go on to treat people in underserved communities. Students staffed Nashville's mass COVID testing and vaccination sites during the pandemic. There is no undergraduate scene, no athletics, and no homecoming in the traditional HBCU sense; the social calendar runs on white coats, convocations, match days, and commencements. Sesquicentennial celebrations in 2026 ('Celebrating the past. Inspiring the future. Serving mankind') are the biggest community moment in the school's modern history.