'The Price of Exclusion' explores lasting impact of racial inequality in medicine

By — Geoff Bennett Geoff Bennett By — Stephanie Kotuby Stephanie Kotuby By — Alexa Gold Alexa Gold Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-price-of-exclusion-explores-lasting-impact-of-racial-inequality-in-medicine Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Audio A century ago, Black physicians built hospitals, clinics and medical schools across the South – only to see them dismantled by policy, segregation and an influential report. Investigative journalist Nicole Carr traces that history through her own family and found the consequences are still being felt today. Geoff Bennett spoke with Carr about her book, "The Price of Exclusion." Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. Amna Nawaz: A century ago, Black physicians built hospitals, clinics and medical schools across the South, only to see them dismantled by policy, segregation, and a single at the time influential report. Investigative journalist Nicole Carr traces that history through her own family and found the consequences are still being felt today. Geoff Bennett recently spoke with Carr about her book, "The Price of Exclusion: The Pursuit of Healthcare in a Segregated Nation." Geoff Bennett: Nicole Carr, welcome to the "News Hour." Nicole Carr, Author, "The Price of Exclusion: The Pursuit of Healthcare in a Segregated Nation": Thank you for having me. Geoff Bennett: You open this book with the story of your great-grandfather Dr. Lawrence St. Clair Ferguson. How did his story draw you into this project? Nicole Carr: Yes, so I wasn't planning on writing a book. I was working in local television in Atlanta during the height of the pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic. And I got off air one evening. We had three kids, two in virtual school. I was four months postpartum, feeling the pressures of everything we were covering at the time. And I just had a moment one evening and asked myself, how did they get through this 100 years ago? And I knew we had this ancestor who was a physician maybe during this time, but we didn't know a whole lot about him because of some family dramas, some issues in the family. But we carried a name, and I wanted to find him. I wanted to know how he lived during this time. And I went to Howard University archives to kick this off, because he'd completed medical school there and I thought maybe they'd have some answers. They had just digitized a new collection of archive material using a Mellon Foundation fund. And one of the new assets was his medical school yearbook, The Morgue from 1925. But I found out that he'd come to America from Jamaica during Red Summer after serving in the Great War and, during the pandemic, during the war coming here, during racial terror and strife, finishing premed during the week of the Tulsa Race Massacre, where one of the first casualties is a Black physician, a