MSM President Emeritus and Founding Dean Dr. Louis Sullivan Named 2024 Georgia Trustee
Dr. Louis Sullivan has been a trailblazer his entire life. But he never forgot those who helped guide his steps along the way.
By Kenna Simmons, Georgia Trend
Nearly 300 years ago, England’s King George II charged the first Georgia Trustees with establishing the new colony of Georgia. Their motives for serving were to be strictly humanitarian, with the motto, “Not for self, but for others.”
The Georgia Historical Society and the governor’s office reestablished the Trustees in 2008 – appointing two people annually whose accomplishments reflect that motto. To be named a Trustee is now the highest honor the state can confer.
This year’s Georgia Trustees are Dr. Louis Sullivan, 17th US Secretary of Health and Human Services and founding Dean of Morehouse School of Medicine, and Carol Tomé, CEO of UPS. The two will formally accept the state’s highest honor on April 27 at the Trustees Gala in Savannah.
Like the Trustees of the past 15 years, Tomé and Sullivan’s accomplishments reflect the ideals of those original Trustees. Both share a strong work ethic and an enthusiasm for serving others, and both acknowledge family members who came before them, whose humble roots helped them stay grounded even as they reached for the stars.
The Model of a Morehouse Man
Dr. Louis Sullivan has been a trailblazer his entire life. But he never forgot those who helped guide his steps along the way.
Academic, intellectual, and professional success – that’s a given. But there’s more to being a Morehouse Man than that. As the school says of its graduates, “they seek to continuously improve themselves and their communities.” If that sounds similar to the Georgia Trustees’ motto – “Not for self, but for others” – well, by either definition, Dr. Louis Sullivan is the role model.
Sullivan, an Atlanta native (born at Grady Hospital in 1933) who graduated from Morehouse College, was accustomed to being a pioneer: the first Morehouse College graduate and only Black student in his Boston University School of Medicine class, the first Black intern at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, the founding president and dean of Morehouse School of Medicine, and secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from 1989-1993.
He recalls a series of role models who influenced his life’s path, from his parents to his professors to a particular doctor in rural, segregated Southwest Georgia. Sullivan’s father owned the Black funeral home in Blakely, in Early County, and was “considered a troublemaker,” Sullivan says, because he spoke out against the “white primary” that prevented Black citizens from voting. “He also formed a chapter of the NAACP in Blakely,” Sullivan says. “And he started an annual Emancipation Day celebration to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation.” In retaliation, he says Early County wouldn’t hire his mother, a schoolteacher with a master’s degree in education, forcing her to teach in schools in the surrounding area.
Sullivan experienced the discrimination that segregated schools and Jim Crow laws fostered. “The white high school had a library where the Black school didn’t,” he says. “When the white school got new textbooks, we would get the old textbooks.” And he witnessed it in health care, too. Black residents in Blakely who needed a doctor’s care preferred to travel some 40 miles to Bainbridge, the closest town with a Black physician, Dr. Joseph Griffin. Sullivan’s father, who split his time as an undertaker and ambulance driver, was the one to take them there, and Sullivan sometimes accompanied them.
“In those years of segregation, if you were African American you waited in the separate waiting room in the white doctor’s office, usually having to go around to the side or back of the building and waiting until the doctor had seen all his white patients. And then he would see you,” Sullivan says. “And of course, I noted that Blacks were never addressed as Mr. or Mrs. It was always John or Mary… Whereas when they went to see Dr. Griffin, they would be Mrs. Jones or Mr. Johnson. So their experience with Dr. Griffin was quite different.”
Sullivan also noticed that Griffin was respected and knew how to help people, which led him to decide at age 5 that he wanted to be a doctor, too. He remembers his mother immediately encouraging him, saying, “That’s great, Louis – you’ll be a great doctor.”
His parents – his earliest role models – helped make that possible by sending him and his brother to Atlanta to go to school, when he was in the fifth grade. “My parents were very strongly committed to the two of us getting the best education we could,” Sullivan says. They both graduated from Booker T. Washington High School, the only Black public high school in the city at the time. Living in Atlanta was a formative experience for the aspiring physician. “Being in Atlanta exposed my brother and me to a community of Blacks who had achieved, who were doctors, lawyers, businessmen – [with Black-owned] companies like Atlanta Life Insurance Company, Yates and Milton Drug Store, both on Auburn Avenue… Pascal’s restaurant and a whole range of Black businesses as well as the Atlanta University Center,” Sullivan recalls. “With that environment and the fact that we were both quite curious individuals, we were taking full advantage of being in Atlanta with the many role models that existed.”
At Morehouse as a pre-med undergrad, Sullivan encountered another role model in Benjamin Mays, the renowned president of the college and father of the Civil Rights Movement. “He spoke about living a life with strong purpose, with service and commitment to others, to roll back the restrictions from segregation,” Sullivan says. Mays challenged students to excel in their field of work – whether medicine, business, engineering, or the arts – so that they could never be turned down for a position because they weren’t qualified. “He would often use the phrase, ‘Chance favors the prepared mind,’” Sullivan says. “He was telling us, ‘Always be prepared.’”
Beyond academics, Morehouse taught Sullivan “to have a life of purpose, or service to others, to make the community better and to live our lives with integrity and honesty,” he says. “I’m convinced the relative success of graduates of Morehouse College is not only the academic experience, but the cultural enrichment and the personal challenge and stimulus to lead a life of service that has influenced students there.”
A Second Chance to Serve
Sullivan graduated in 1954 – the year the US Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education – and started medical school in Boston. It was his first time living in a non-segregated environment, and he wasn’t sure exactly what would happen. “I was well accepted,” he says. “I was quite surprised. My classmates accepted me… The faculty was also open and very receptive.” At the end of that first year, he was elected class president.
After completing medical school in 1958, he was accepted as the first Black intern at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. “I was more relaxed because I’d had four years of very positive interactions at Boston University,” Sullivan says. “But I was aware of the fact that there had not been an African American intern there before.” The chair of medicine – a Southerner from Vanderbilt University – assured Sullivan that he would do everything to help him have a good experience. He was as good as his word. Only once did Sullivan encounter a patient who refused to be treated by a Black doctor, and the chair of medicine had the patient discharged from the hospital as a result.
By 1973, Sullivan was firmly ensconced in the Northeast, both professionally as co-director of hematology at Boston University Medical Center and founder of the Boston University Hematology Service at Boston City Hospital, and personally, with a family. “I was quite pleased and happy with the career I had,” he says. “My wife was from Massachusetts; my three children were all born in Boston. They grew up ice skating and skiing, and we would go down to Cape Cod for the summers. So I had really pretty much become a New Englander.”
Then Morehouse called. Sullivan’s alma mater was creating a new medical school – the first predominately Black medical school to be established in the 20th century. It was another chance to make history, but that wasn’t what drew Sullivan home in 1975. He recalled his original plan when he went to medical school – to provide healthcare to Georgians who needed it, with dignity and respect.
“I had not really been interested in administrative positions because at that time, [I thought] administrators were really the people who made the organization work. They were not the people developing new knowledge [in medical research],” he says. “But this was Morehouse College. This was the potential for the life of service we had been taught to seek… and fundamentally, this was a second chance [to do] what I thought I would be doing when I went to medical school. I wouldn’t be doing it directly, but we would be doing it through our graduates.”
Sullivan devoted himself to that task for the next 10 years, first as founding dean and director of the Medical Education Program at Morehouse College and eventually as the first president of Morehouse School of Medicine (which became independent from Morehouse College in 1981).
Improving the Health of the Nation
With a notable exception, Sullivan served as MSM’s president for two decades. That exception came in 1989, when Sullivan accepted the job of HHS secretary. But it started – where else? – at Morehouse, where Sullivan initially met then-Vice President Bush who spoke at the dedication of the first medical school building.
Sullivan accompanied Bush on a trip to Africa in 1982, where he met Barbara Bush and invited her to join MSM’s board of trustees. “When Bush decided to run for president in 1988, I’d gotten to know them very well,” Sullivan says. When Bush asked him to become HHS secretary, Sullivan told him that if he accepted, he would “be doing everything I could to increase the number and percentage of Blacks in medicine and other health fields.” When Bush said he supported that work, Sullivan said yes.
During his tenure as secretary, Sullivan had a major impact on increasing diversity at the highest levels of healthcare, overseeing the creation of the Office of Minority Health, now the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. He also oversaw the appointment of the first Hispanic and female Surgeon General and the first female chief of staff at HHS.
In 1993 he returned to Morehouse School of Medicine, becoming president emeritus after his retirement in 2002. But he remains committed to improving minority health and has kept working to increase diversity in the healthcare field and address health disparities – something he sees as essential to American strength. “So many people don’t realize that a healthy population is tied in with being a strong and productive nation,” Sullivan says. “When we fall short, we have an impact not only on individual citizens but on the nation as a whole.”
Ever the Morehouse Man, Sullivan sees his selection as a Georgia Trustee as an honor but also a responsibility, “to improve the lives of Georgians as I go along. If I can do that, and build upon what people like Dr. Griffin did, and the doctors I met here in Atlanta as I came along [did], then I will feel gratified,” he says. “I’m grateful for this recognition, and also see this as a sign that we are making progress as a society. I see this as a challenge for all Georgians, for us to work together to improve the lives of all our citizens. Because if that happens, we all benefit.”