James McCune Smith | Shattering Racial Barriers

James McCune Smith (1813–1865) shattered 19th-century racial barriers as a physician, abolitionist, educator, and intellectual.

His mother, Lavinia Smith, was born into slavery in South Carolina. Her white merchant enslaver, Samuel Smith, brought her to New York City. It is believed that Samuel Smith fathered James. Lavinia became free under the 1827 Emancipation Act. James and his mother lived in the notorious Five Points neighborhood of New York City.

He attended the New York African Free School No. 2 on Mulberry Street in Five Points, one of seven schools founded in 1787 by the New York Manumission Society. The school stressed academic excellence, leadership, and citizenship. Smith was an exceptionally bright student, talented in both writing and drawing. The school awarded him the honor of delivering a speech to General Lafayette during Lafayette’s 1822 trip to New York. 

Prohibited by race from attending a U.S. medical school, Smith was the First African American to earn a medical degree from the University of Glasgow in 1837. Upon returning to New York City, he opened a pharmacy that served both Black and white customers. With it, he provided medical advice and promoted public health and learning while avoiding the racial prejudice of white medical societies.

Smith worked alongside abolitionist Frederick Douglass and wrote for Douglass’s newspaper, “The North Star.” While active in the American Anti-Slavery Society and other reform movements, he wrote and lectured using data and logic to challenge the concepts of slavery and racial inequality.

An 1844 article in the New York Tribune titled “Freedom and Slavery for African-Americans” addressed the life expectancy of Black New Yorkers. Of his 1826-27 school class of one hundred girls and boys, only six survived. All survivors were white. He stated that Black mortality was driven by poverty, discrimination, poor living conditions, and lack of medical care. In 1834, 4.2% of the Black population died, compared to 2.5% of the white population.

Smith challenged the psychological and social effects of racism when he said, “The worst form of slavery is that which robs a man of his reason and makes him believe that he was created to be a slave.”