Howard, T.R.M.

Impact on the world

As NMA president, Howard led the landmark 1957 Imhotep National Conference on Hospital Integration; he personally led the on-the-ground investigation into the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, turning his Mississippi home into a security compound for witnesses, and mentored Medgar Evers and other future civil rights leaders.

Life & background

A surgeon who became chief surgeon at a hospital in the all-Black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Howard built substantial wealth as an entrepreneur while becoming a leading civil rights figure, founding the Regional Council of Negro Leadership in 1951. After Emmett Till's murder in 1955, Howard personally helped locate and protect witnesses, brought Till's mother to testify at his own expense, and delivered some of the earliest national denunciations of the killing — a speech he gave in Montgomery, Alabama is credited with directly influencing Rosa Parks days before her bus protest. He served as president of the National Medical Association in 1955-56, using the position to expose discriminatory healthcare practices, before relocating to Chicago after death threats and founding the Friendship Medical Center, one of the largest privately-owned Black clinics in the city.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; Mississippi Today