DR. BESSIE HOUSE SOREMEKUN
PRESIDENT/CHAIRPERSON

To follow up on the Spring Web information on the pivotal role that Health Legacy of Cleveland Inc. has played in highlighting Health care disparities between African American community and other communities in the United States. I am posting a copy of an important video. While you are making your way through the LONG HOT SUMMER….Take a cool down break…And look at the video clip prepared by Dr. Charles Modlin,. Vice- President of Health Legacy of Cleveland Inc.

Since only 5.5 percent of medical doctors in the United States are African-American it is important that all doctors have the skills and knowledge to help minorities to achieve the same outcomes as other groups of patience. Dr. Charles Modlin, Vice-President of Health Legacy of Cleveland Inc. video link below shares the importance of everyone being culturally competent to meet the complex set of variables including lack of primary care, often having less opportunities for healthy nutrition and a higher propensity for high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and other serious medical conditions.

Learn how being culturally competent will positively impact social determinants (where you live/schools available/economic stability) implicit bias (unconscious beliefs/attitudes) and racial concordance (match between patients and doctors).

• Drink water regularly to avoid dehydration and heat strokes. You can check online to see the exact amount of water you need for your gender, age, lifestyle and environment.
• Wear light colors and lightweight clothing to help your body regulate better in elevated summer temperatures. Also, avoid exercising during the warmest portions of the day.
• Use sunscreen appropriate for your skin type to avoid sunburns and long term skin damage.
• Protect against bugs and insects by using insect repellents with active ingredients DEET or picaridin (according to the 10 Tips to Prevent Mosquito Bites. Also, regularly check skin for ticks etc.when in heavily wooded areas.
• A major caution would be to follow safety guidelines for activities like swimming, biking, and boating.

Click on the (Cleveland Clinic) logo link below to access the 12 Summer Health Risks.

There is nothing better than for me to know that I’ve had a positive impact in a young person’s life. That’s why I’ve dedicated my life also to mentorship and helping open doors and facilitate the successes of the younger generation who aspire to achieve their success goals and who are willing to work hard and sacrifice to achieve their goals. That’s also why I wrote my success navigation book, entitled “Yes, you can succeed. It isn’t difficult to do it if you know how to do it.”

Just a few days ago I was ecstatic to have received this photo and message from my student mentee, Lovette Azap, who thanked me for inspiring her to become a surgeon. She just matched at my beloved Cleveland Clinic in the General Surgery Residency Program. Thank you Lovette for your message. You are already a great success and we are looking forward to seeing your continued successes.

“Hello, Dr. Modlin! I wanted to circle back to update you that I matched at the very place I fell in love with surgery under your guidance, Cleveland Clinic for General Surgery residency! Thank you so much for all your help!”

Lovette Azap

Health Legacy of Cleveland Ohio, Inc. was so happy to hear that Jasmine Shawntel Williams has received a Match. She has been awarded scholarships from Health Legacy for the past 3 years. Jasmine is enrolled in Meharry Medical College.

Below is the communication sharing where she will be placed after graduating from medical school. She has been matched for her residency with Emergency Medicine at Case Western/University Hospitals in Cleveland.

Give to Support Minority Future Physicians and Dentists Practicing in the Greater Cleveland Area

NOW IS THE TIME FOR YOU TO GIVE!!!

We look to our community for support now more than ever. Last year, on May 11, 2023, the federal government declared an end to the public health emergency for Covid-19. Looking at the impact that Covid 19 had on minorities, it illuminated what Health Legacy has known for years. Minorities are disproportionately impacted by higher rates of diseases and disorders such asthma, diabetes, cancer and infant mortality. Also, by having these preexisting conditions, minorities are at much greater risk for having bad medical outcomes with Covid-19.

In 2024 Health Legacy is launching a different approach to planning, developing and implementing programs to address the Health Disparities facing minorities in Cleveland, Ohio and beyond. We are now partnering with Business Volunteers Unlimited (BVU) to bring more information about Health Legacy to the Greater Cleveland Community. Again, we need your help so we will be able to support more minority physicians and dentists to come to Cleveland to help a city that is in a medical crisis.

Our Health Legacy Board is in the process of increasing our board member size by over 50%. Also, stay tuned to hear more about the HLC’s important September 2025 important post-pandemic event.

HEALTH LEGACY OF CLEVELAND INC. BOARD MEMBERS FOR 2024

ANNUALLY BOARD MEMBERS RAISE AND GIVE FUNDS TO HEALTH LEGACY

 Health Legacy of Cleveland – Executive Officers 2024

PRESIDENT/CHAIRPERSON:  DR. BESSIE HOUSE SOREMEKUN (3^rd from the left in picture)

Please remember the important pivotal role Health Legacy of Cleveland, Inc. has played in highlighting health care disparities between the African American community and other communities in the United States and has also provided ongoing scholarship support to ensure that more minorities attend medical and dental schools so that the pipeline of minority physicians and dentists is secure.

This effort will be accomplished by connecting the medical expertise of our Board Members to the ongoing health care challenges that are being experienced by the Black community during this post pandemic area and beyond.  Additionally, this year we are welcoming three (3) new Board of Members to carry the mission and traditions of Health Legacy into the future.

Health Legacy of Cleveland, Inc. is honored by your past generosity and appreciates your ongoing support of our fundraising efforts to close the health disparity gap for minorities in Cleveland.

IMMEDIATE PAST PRESIDENT/CHAIRPERSON: DR. LATEEF SAFFORE
VICE PRESIDENT/VICE CHAIRPERSON:  CORDELIA HARRIS, PhD
TREASURER:  RODERICK ADAMS JR, DDS
SECRETARY:  KAREN ASHBY, MD

Additional Health Legacy Board Members 2024
BILLY BROWN, MD
ANDRE MICKEL, DDS, MSD
CHARLES MODLIN, MD
MAPOSURE T. MILLER, DDS
MAURICE SOREMEKUN, MD
GIESELE ROBINSON GREENE,MD-BOARD MEMBER EMERITUS

PAST HEALTH LEGACY OF CLEVELAND INITIATIVES

The Saturday Academy

The Saturday Academy was a collaborative initiative between Cleveland Clinic and Health Legacy of Cleveland, Inc., that supported underrepresented high school students, by providing participants with career information and critical skill sets to support their matriculation through higher education, medical/dental school and beyond.

Students engaged with health care professionals to learn of the various aspects associated with the fields of medicine, science, and dentistry. Hands-on activities; talks, tours; mentoring sessions with health care professionals and the implementation of a public health project were all part of this intensive program

This program was a collaboration between Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine, Health Legacy of Cleveland, Forest City Dental Society and the Student National Dental Association. It was designed to increase the pool of competitive under-represented minority Dental School Applicants from the greater Cleveland area.

SPONSORS – THE JEFFERSON J JONES, DMD, HEALTH LEGACY OF CLEVELAND PRE-DENTAL MENTORING & RESEARCH PROGRAM A CASE WESTERN RESERVE HLC COLLABORATION

WEST POINT STEM CAMP

West Point, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Metropolitan School District & Health Legacy of Cleveland collaborated on the WEST POINT STEM CAMP…. It supported high school students in the development of the critical skills necessary for a career in healthcare as a physician or scientist. Identified students evidence aptitude for science and math proficiency as well as those emotional factors that would support successful matriculation through medical school or higher education.

As part of the Urban Leadership Initiative, dozens of middle school students participated in a program and build robots, use computers to design airplanes and treat simulated patients at Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine.

Health Legacy of Cleveland was approached by West Point Academy’s Urban Leadership Initiative to provide 40 seventh and eighth graders in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District’s STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) program with a one-day camp to harness their interest in the sciences and to keep them on a path toward further STEM-related education and careers.

BLACK HISTORY AS IT RELATES TO MEDICINE

BLACKS WERE NOT ALLOWED TO JOIN THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION UNTIL RECENTLY.  BLACKS HAD TO FORM THEIR OWN SOCIETY…WHICH WAS CALLED THE NATIONAL MEDICAL ASSOCIATION.  In 2008, the American Medical Association concluded a three-year study on the racial divide in organized medicine and publicly apologized for their organization’s past discrimination practices.

Source-“Reckoning with medicine’s history of racism” Feb. 17, 2021-James L. Madara, MD, CEO and Executive Vice-President -AMA

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

APOLOGY SHINES LIGHT ON RACIAL SCHISIM IN MEDICINE

Organized medicine has long reflected that most American of obsessions: race. For well over a century, the American Medical Association has been the nation’s largest and most powerful physicians’ group — and an overwhelmingly white one. Black physicians have their own, lesser-known group, the National Medical Association.

In 2008, The A.M.A. made a rare public address to the N.M.A. to deliver an even rarer message: an apology to the nation’s black physicians, citing a century of “past wrongs.”What wrongs, exactly? Dr. W. Montague Cobb could have answered that question at length. Dr. Cobb (pictured below) — physician, physical anthropologist, civil rights activist, president of the National Medical Association in the 1960s — knew that the organization owed its very formation to racial barriers. It was founded in 1895 after the A.M.A. refused to seat three African-American delegates at its annual meetings in 1870 and 1872. He also knew that black patients and doctors were often relegated to subterranean “colored” or charity wards or banned from hospitals altogether; they had responded with their own hospitals and medical schools, at least seven of which existed in 1909.

Dr. W. Montague Cabb (Photo Courtesy of Howard University)

That year, the A.M.A. commissioned a well-known educator, Abraham Flexner, to visit and evaluate each North American medical school. His 1910 report, “Medical Education in the United States and Canada,” raised a further hurdle for black doctors: it recommended that all but two black medical schools — Howard and Meharry — be closed. Unable to attract financing, the others did close, and the number of black physicians predictably fell.

By 1938, the situation had grown so dire that Dr. Louis T. Wright of Harlem Hospital declared, “The A.M.A. has demonstrated as much interest in the health of the Negro as Hitler has in the health of the Jew.”

In 1963, when Dr. Cobb became president of the N.M.A., the United States had 5,000 black doctors out of 227,027 total. Although A.M.A. membership was often important to hospital practice, specialty training and professional achievement, many chapters and “constituent societies” — medical groups that were the gatekeepers to the larger organization — were closed to blacks.

And the A.M.A. repeatedly refused to force its constituent societies to admit blacks. In 1952, Dr. Martha Mendell, a white member of the Physicians Forum, a multiracial doctors group in New York, argued: “The claim of the A.M.A. that it is powerless to correct this practice because of the ‘autonomy’ of its component societies is an evasion of its responsibility. Surely, if the Southern medical societies decided to admit chiropractors to membership, the A.M.A. would quickly find the means of redefining this autonomy.”

AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY IN MEDICINE

Prior to the Civil War medical education was not open to people of color in the United States, due to enslavement. The Post Civil War era provided scarce opportunities for education and treatment for African-Americans. Separate institutions were built since integration was not an option, including the founding of the NMA (National Medical Association) in 1895, since Black doctors were not recognized in the AMA (American Medical Association).

This and other Black organizations helped immensely, but segregation continued into the 20th century. Although some black students were admitted into white medical schools and hospitals, they faced blatant racism, ostracism, and prejudice. Even now in the 21st century, there is still an alarming lack of diversity in the education system and health care as illustrated in Dr. Tweedy’s recent article in the NYT.

Health Legacy of Cleveland, Inc. is a part of the positive groups founded to eradicate that lacking. We assist minority medical & dental students in succeeding and achieving their goals. We offer formidable scholarships and provide reputable student programs for them, throughout their education and career. That mentoring ultimately helps to bridge the gap in health care disparities in Ohio, and across our nation.