The most prominent of Du Bois’s intellectual influences was James McCune Smith. Brilliant and uncompromising, Smith was a public intellectual with the distinction of being the United States’ first university-trained Black doctor. In 1846, in a stinging and exhaustively researched rebuttal, he showed how John Calhoun’s racist analysis was spurious. Using the relatively new field of biostatistics, along with demographics, he exposed the Southern senator’s questionable claims.
Specifically, he did a spatial analysis using latitude coordinates to show that Black people lived longer in states that abolished slavery, like New Hampshire and Connecticut, than in Georgia where slavery was legal. He also stratified mortality rates by age, race, and place to demonstrate that Black people in New England lived longer than those in the South. And finally, he showed that racial differences in longevity were due to socioeconomic factors and were not inherently biological. “There are sufficient grounds for the belief that the slaves…under all [their] disadvantages, would, if freed from slavery, attain a longevity not very much below that attained by the Europe-American population.”
James McCune Smith was born in 1813 and grew up in the Five Points neighborhood in New York City. He was the son of a South Carolina enslaved woman who fled to New York to escape his father, a wealthy merchant named Samuel Smith who enslaved them both. Young James and his mother lived in constant fear that the slave hunters who patrolled his neighborhood would recapture them. Despite his difficult childhood, his intellectual gifts were obvious.
He graduated from the first African Free School, which was funded by the New York Manumission Society, a wealthy group of progressive white men that included Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, but was denied admission to Geneva Medical College (later part of Syracuse University) and Columbia University because he was Black. So benefactors from his days at the African Free School paid for him to attend the University of Glasgow in Scotland, then one of the premier academic medical institutions in the world. He graduated at the top of his class, earning a BA in 1835, an MA in 1836, and a medical degree the following year. Later, a hall at the school would be named after him.
Throughout his life, McCune Smith was a fierce and fearless advocate for the less fortunate. As a young medical student in Glasgow, he was horrified to discover that a senior physician at the hospital where he was training was treating impoverished women suffering from gonorrhea with silver nitrate. This was normally used in low concentrations as a topical treatment, but his superior, Alexander Hannay, was using it full strength internally, which may have resulted in several deaths. McCune Smith exposed the more powerful physician, in two articles in the weekly science journal, The London Medical Gazette, risking his career and jeopardizing his own future. This was certainly not the first, nor would it be the last, time one of our public health warriors took steps toward justice at great personal cost.