Morehouse School of Medicine

History

Morehouse School of Medicine was established at the suggestion of Atlanta physicians who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, observed firsthand the health disparities and clinical outcomes facing Black patients in Georgia and concluded that the structural underproduction of Black physicians was a root cause. They approached Morehouse College president Hugh Gloster, who in 1970 commissioned a feasibility study chaired by Joseph N. Gayles Jr. The school opened in 1975 as a two-year program embedded in Morehouse College, with Louis W. Sullivan, M.D. — later U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services under President George H. W. Bush — serving as the founding dean. The first cohort of students was admitted in 1978 and transferred to other institutions to complete clinical training.

The institution became independent from Morehouse College in 1981, with Sullivan as president, and received full Liaison Committee on Medical Education accreditation to award the M.D. degree in 1985 — a transition from two-year program to four-year medical school that took barely a decade. The school subsequently added M.P.H., Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences, M.S.M.S., and physician assistant programs, building out a graduate health sciences ecosystem oriented around primary care, community medicine, and health policy.

In 2020, MSM announced a 10-year, $115 million partnership with CommonSpirit Health — branded as the More in Common Alliance — designed to roughly double M.D. enrollment from 110 to 225 per class through a network of regional clinical campuses across CommonSpirit's national hospital system. This expansion, if executed at scale, would represent the most substantial growth in a historically Black medical school in the modern era of American medical education.

In 2026, MSM signed its first clinical-education agreement with the Atlanta VA Health Care System — described as the first such partnership between a historically Black medical school and the Atlanta VA — and 100 of its 102 graduating students matched into residency programs, the majority entering primary care and core specialties.

In August 2024, Bloomberg Philanthropies committed $175 million to Morehouse School of Medicine as part of a $600 million gift divided among the nation’s four historically Black medical schools — the largest philanthropic gift ever made to historically Black colleges and universities — directed toward student scholarships and the institutions’ long-term financial stability. In March 2026, MSM announced $950,000 in federal funding, secured by U.S. Representative Nikema Williams, toward a new academic research building planned to house expanded classrooms, a clinical simulation space, and an enlarged animal-care facility.

Why MSM Exists

Black Americans are approximately 13 percent of the U.S. population but, in most recent reporting periods, account for roughly 5 to 6 percent of practicing physicians. The structural consequences of that gap — for patient trust, diagnostic accuracy in communities of color, and clinical outcomes — are documented in the medical literature.

MSM was founded as a direct response. Its mission statement explicitly names health equity. Its graduates are concentrated, by design, in primary care, in underserved urban and rural settings, and in academic medicine focused on health disparities. The institution does not behave like a typical medical school because it was never built to.

Notable Faculty & Alumni

A representative selection. Founding figures of MSM are concentrated at the highest levels of federal health policy.

Significance

MSM is one of four historically Black medical schools in the United States, alongside Howard University College of Medicine, Meharry Medical College, and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science. Together these four institutions produce a wildly disproportionate share of Black physicians relative to their size — a fact that is, in the context of American medical education, a structural rather than a coincidental achievement.

MSM also operates one of the most influential health policy institutes in the country focused specifically on equity: the Satcher Health Leadership Institute, founded by former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher. The institution's outsized role in federal health policy — across Sullivan, Satcher, Benjamin, and a generation of MSM-trained physician administrators — has shaped the trajectory of how the United States measures, frames, and addresses health disparities.

Source notes: This entry draws from the Morehouse School of Medicine institutional history (msm.edu); BlackPast.org's "Morehouse School of Medicine (1975-)"; the MSM/CommonSpirit Health More in Common Alliance public materials (2020–2024); and biographical records on Louis W. Sullivan, David Satcher, Regina Benjamin, and Valerie Montgomery Rice. Enrollment figure is an approximation across degree programs and may shift materially as the CommonSpirit Health expansion proceeds. Discrepancies noted in the corrections log.