AMA apologizes for past inequality against black doctors (2008)The American Medical Association (AMA) officially apologized in July for its history of excluding black physicians from membership, for listing black doctors as "colored" in its national physician directory for decades, and for failing to speak against federal funding of segregated hospitals and in favor of civil rights legislation. According to AMA Immediate Past President Ron Davis, in a commentary published in the July 16 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the AMA "failed, across the span of a century, to live up to the high standards that define the noble profession of medicine." The apology came in response to an AMA-ppointed expert panel's report on the historical racial divide in organized medicine, "African American Physicians and Organized Medicine, 1846-1968: Origins of a Racial Divide," also published in JAMA.
