Addressing Racial Disparities in Medical Education and Science: The Role of the Civil Rights Movement

A potential cause of persistent racial disparities in health outcomes in the US may be a lack of representation in medical personnel and medical research. This Award will fund a research project that will investigate the effects of the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) on the supply of Black doctors and the conduct of medical research. The research project will focus on two questions: (i) What effect did the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have on the representation of African Americans in medical education, and how did this affect the supply of Black physicians, especially in underserved communities? (ii) How did the CRM impact the focus of medical research on racial minorities? The researchers will build a large, detailed data set on historical racial composition of medical school admissions, racial composition of medical doctors, federal grants for medical research, and the racial composition of recruitment into biomedical research. This impressive data collection will allow the researchers to answer the questions they set out to investigate. The results of this innovative research will help policy makers design efficient policies to reduce racial health disparities in the US. This Award will fund a research project to answer two inter-related questions: The effects of the Civil Rights Movements on the supply of Black physicians and the inclusion of racial minorities in medical research. The PIs do so by building a novel dataset that combines historical: (i) student records from medical universities, (ii) physician directories, (iii) scientific publications, (iv) population health outcomes, and (v) federal funding for medical research. The core data on medical graduates between 1955 and 1980 will be collected from primary sources. The PIs will use a continuous difference-in-differences strategy to identify the impact of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on medical schools. The exogenous nature of this policy change will allow the PI’s to establish causality. This research will provide evidence of the lasting influence of the CRM on medical education, the supply of physicians to under-served groups, physician career trajectories, and medical research. The results of this innovative research will help policy makers design efficient policies to reduce racial health disparities in the US. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.