Dr. Sampson Harrell

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  Raúl Necochea: The cloud. There it is. Welcome, Dr. Harrell. Today is Wednesday, February 9, 2022. My name is Raúl Necochea from the Department of Social Medicine at the UNC School of Medicine, and I am interviewing Dr. Sampson Harrell, class of 1972, UNC School of Medicine. Welcome, Dr. Harrell.

  Dr. Harrell: Okay. Well, let me see what I did. Did you cut me off or what happened?

  Raúl Necochea: No, I didn’t. You’re not getting my picture now?

  Dr. Harrell: Yeah, but let me see if I can get it, okay.

  Raúl Necochea: Okay. You can –

  Dr. Harrell: Okay, we’re back. Okay.

  Raúl Necochea: Okay, thank you. Were you able to hear me earlier?

  Dr. Harrell: Say it again?

  Raúl Necochea: Were you able to hear me earlier?

  Dr. Harrell: Yeah, I can hear you now.

  Raúl Necochea: Okay. But you couldn’t hear me earlier, right?

  Dr. Harrell: No, I couldn’t see you. I could hear you, but I couldn’t see you.

  Raúl Necochea: Oh, okay. Well, I just said some introductory stuff that we need for the beginning of the transcript. And here are some questions that we’ve been asking to all of the alumni, all of the African American alumni that we’ve been able to recruit for this project. The first one, just to go in order, has to do with your origin story. So, would you please tell us your place and date of birth?

  Dr. Harrell: Okay. I was born in Ahoskie, North Carolina in 1943.

  Raúl Necochea: Can you spell that, Ahoskie?

  Dr. Harrell: A-H-O-S-K-I-E.

  Raúl Necochea: Okay.

  Dr. Harrell: It’s in eastern North Carolina, Hertford County, on the other side of Rocky Mount. It’s not that far from Norfolk, Virginia.

  Raúl Necochea: Thank you. And what was your family like? What was it like to grow up with them?

  Dr. Harrell: Well, we had a large family. We had about 16 of us and we lived on a farm, and we owned our own farm and that was a big advantage, I think. That gave us a chance to go to school when we needed to go to school. Many times the folks who did sharecropping – if they wanted to go to school – they could only go if the person who owned the farm would allow them to go. So, they couldn’t go to school [regularly].

  Raúl Necochea: Wow. So, who lived there with you on that farm?

  Dr. Harrell: Who did what?

  Raúl Necochea: Who lived there with you on the farm?

  Dr. Harrell: Oh, I had brothers and sisters and my mother and father. There was nobody else back there. It was way back in the woods. It was about 100 acres, but we didn’t have electricity or a bathroom back then. This is in 1943, ’40, 1950.

  Raúl Necochea: Wow. What grew in the farm?

  Dr. Harrell: We had tobacco, cotton, corn, peanuts, and we grew garden vegetables and things – watermelons, cucumbers. It was a complete farm.

  Raúl Necochea: Wow.

  Dr. Harrell: But we owned it ourselves.

  Raúl Necochea: You owned it all. Wow.

  Dr. Harrell: Yeah, my father and mother owned the farm. [My grandfather gave it to them when they got married].

  Raúl Necochea: Were you the oldest, the youngest?

  Dr. Harrell: No, no. I was number 10.

  Raúl Necochea: Number 10, okay. Your oldest sibling, how old are they?

  Dr. Harrell: Most of them have passed now, but they were – the oldest one, before I went to first grade he had already gotten into college. He left home and went to college.

  Raúl Necochea: Wow, wow.

  Dr. Harrell: So, I didn’t know him very well until I became an adult.

  Raúl Necochea: And the youngest one?

  Dr. Harrell: The youngest one she was born after we moved off the farm. We owned the farm. We moved off the farm. We still farmed, but we moved away from the farm and moved down the highway, and that’s when we got electricity, bathrooms, and running water.

  Raúl Necochea: When you think about your youth and growing up with your siblings and your parents and the farm, who would you say was most influential in your youth and how?

  Dr. Harrell: It was mostly my mother and my oldest brothers and sisters. They all did very well academically and they all went to college. We only had one brother that didn’t go to college. He was a prize fighter.

  Raúl Necochea: Oh, wow. Was there a physician in the family or a physician…?

  Dr. Harrell: No. I am the first physician in the family, but now we have – I have a brother and a sister who are physicians, and I have two nieces who are physicians. And believe it or not, we all went to UNC.

  Raúl Necochea: Did they stay in North Carolina?

  Dr. Harrell: They’re all in North Carolina except one and she’s in Norfolk and she’s on the faculty at one of the schools in Norfolk.

  Raúl Necochea: Where?

  Dr. Harrell: She’s an OB-GYN in Norfolk, Virginia. But she did train, she went to undergrad at Duke and went to medical school at UNC, but she’s an OB-GYN.

  Raúl Necochea: Wow. I can’t tell you I’m really, really happy that they stayed here in North Carolina.

  Dr. Harrell: All but one, right.

  Raúl Necochea: Tell me about your time in high school. I want to get to the part where you tell me about how did you pick medicine?

  Dr. Harrell: Okay. Well, my mother always talked about, “We need a doctor in the family” and we, in Ahoskie, we had one Black doctor there.

  We went to the doctor when we got sick and so I think the first time I saw him I was probably in high school playing football, but we realized that there was a shortage of Black physicians and what happened was when he came to town, he had problems getting on the hospital staff and the board of medical examiners had to come [to Raleigh] and convince them that he was good enough. And the way they did it was that they said, “We’re gonna give all of you examinations again and see if you’re all that much better than he is.”

  It turned out, he was fresh out of Howard University and he knew everything – all the latest medicine. He scored the highest of anybody at the hospital and what was so good to us was that the scores were published in the newspaper, and he had no problem after that. But he was a real good doctor. And one day when I was in high school, he came by and he talked [to the students at my high school] about why he liked to go to medical school, what you do, and all of those things, and I think he had a big influence.

  Raúl Necochea: Did he help you in some way?

  Dr. Harrell: No, he didn’t help me in any way. The main thing was that I knew what I wanted to do. All I knew was that when I left to go to college at North Carolina Central, my brother told me when I go to school, “go to the chairman of the biology department and tell him ‘I want to be a medical doctor’ and he’ll tell me what I need to take and what to do.” That’s how I got started.

  Raúl Necochea: Is that because your older brother he went to Central as well?

  Dr. Harrell: All of us went to Central, except three or four of us. My oldest brother – when I got to Central – he was on the faculty at Central. He was a [math] teacher.

  Raúl Necochea: What?

  Dr. Harrell: And my brother told me to go to talk to the chairman of the department. He was a lawyer. He went to law school at North Carolina Central and so he told me to do that, and I went and talked to him and he just told me, “Major in biology and minor in chemistry.” And that’s all I needed to do and that’s how – that’s what I did.

  Raúl Necochea: What was – just taking one step before that – what was high school, your final years of high school, like?

  Dr. Harrell: Okay, high school. Okay. High school was fine but our high school was substandard, and to give you an example, it was that in Hertford county Blacks outnumber Whites by three to one, which is unusual. But in our high school, we had about 120 students in the freshman class and the White students had about 30. Okay, we had one microscope and the White school had 11. So, we knew what’s in that [White] school because we worked in the field together and they would tell us what they had and we would tell them what we had.

  They were friendly, but they were just segregated. And I think those kinds of things and – we didn’t have the chemistry lab that we should have had and the physics lab, but we had a good math background. So, that’s how I got started. I knew that we’d probably have to study more when I got to college because some of the schools up in the Durham area [especially Hillside], they had everything they needed for preparing a student for college, but we didn’t have that. We had to make some adjustments.

  Raúl Necochea: When you were thinking about going to college, did you consider any other options besides Central?

  Dr. Harrell: [I considered] North Carolina A&T back in those days, going to Norfolk, going to UNC as an undergrad, or going to Duke as an undergrad. That just didn’t happen. You just didn’t. You didn’t apply, you didn’t get in. They didn’t permit you to apply to those schools. That was back in 1961.

  Raúl Necochea: Yeah, yeah. So, you started college at Central in 1961?

  Dr. Harrell: Right.

  Raúl Necochea: How did you finance your college education?

  Dr. Harrell: My undergrad – what happened [was] I had a small scholarship, like $250 and then I had a job. The school only cost like – when I went there – it only cost $500 for a full year and, when I left, cost $700 for a full year. And when you think about it, you can’t eat at home for that, but [the cost of college] included meals, room and board, and tuition.

  Raúl Necochea: Wow.

  Dr. Harrell: So, I worked in the summertime in New York and I came back with the money that I made in New York and I put it with my $250 a year scholarship and with the job that I had [in college]. I worked my way through school because my parents couldn’t afford to send me to school. [And I also had] another brother and sister that were in school at the same time and we all mostly worked our way through school.

  Raúl Necochea: You mentioned going to New York for some work that would allow you to save a little money. Was that the first time that you had been out of North Carolina?

  Dr. Harrell: We would go to places like Norfolk because we had relatives living there, but that was the first time. And then New York – I had a brother living there – the one that was the prize fighter. He lived in New York and what happened is we could stay with him [for] free, eat with him free, and we’d just go to work and we could save up our money. We not only worked at a regular job during the summer, but he would have odd jobs that he would do, and we used to work with him to make extra money.

  But by the time we got back to North Carolina, we didn’t have a lot of clothing. We bought our school clothes and then had enough money to pay our tuition and go to school. So, for us it was free living together because he took care of everything. I had a brother – other brothers – that did the same thing. We stayed there together with him and his family.

  Raúl Necochea: That’s very nice to have someone that you can come to and stay with and will also protect you a little bit.

  Dr. Harrell: Right.

  Raúl Necochea: Back in North Carolina going through your undergraduate studies, tell me a little bit about the preparation that you had to do to apply to medical school.

  Dr. Harrell: Okay. I majored in biology and chemistry. So, I had 33 hours of chemistry and I had about 43 hours of biology and I had about 20 hours of mathematics. I didn’t have physical chemistry and I hadn’t had calculus, but I got through school. I went to the military before I went to medical school. When I went to the military I worked in a research lab, and it was good where I was because I was outside of Baltimore and Carolina wanted us to have organic chemistry.

  They wanted us to have physical chemistry in order to improve your chance of getting into medical school. So, while I was in the military, I went to Johns Hopkins and I took both courses of calculus in the summertime and then I took physical chemistry in the evening and that’s how I got into medical school, because I had that physical chemistry. Dean Fordham – when I talked to him – I said, “Do you think I can pass in medical school?” He said, “You passed physical chemistry at Johns Hopkins, you can pass in medical school,” and I think that’s what really got me in, I guess.

  Raúl Necochea: Awesome. I want to go back to your experience in Baltimore and working for the military. This just caught me off-guard. When you were at Central, were there any enrichment programs for prospective Black medical students? You know at the time –

  Dr. Harrell: No, none, not at all and we didn’t think much of going to school at Carolina or Duke at that time. We just did the basic biology and chemistry major and I only took – if I had gone to Howard or Meharry Medical School, I wouldn’t. Nobody would have said anything about taking physical chemistry or calculus. Most of the schools didn’t require that. Carolina didn’t require it. They said it would improve your chances of getting into Carolina, so that’s why I took it then.

  Raúl Necochea: I’m very impressed about – I want to go back now to the physical chemistry course. I mean I took it once in college and I don’t care to repeat that.

  Dr. Harrell: Right.

  Raúl Necochea: But also that’s – sorry, maybe this is not for the recording. Never mind. It’s a tough course.

  Dr. Harrell: Well, calculus was a tough course for me and you’re competing with students at Johns Hopkins. Maybe they could spend three hours studying but I had to spend four hours studying. So, I would just say that it’s all to say that if you don’t learn it in three hours, can you learn it in four hours? You always say there is no such thing that you can’t learn it, it’s just a matter of how much time does it take you to learn it.

  Raúl Necochea: Now, let’s go back to this military parenthesis. How did that come about?

  Dr. Harrell: When I got out of college, I worked at a research lab for about six months and I got drafted into the military because the Vietnam War was going on and I got drafted into the military. I was in Baltimore when I got drafted and they asked me – when I finished basic training – they asked me where did I want to go. I didn’t go straight from college to medical school. When I got out of basic training, they said where did I want to go? I said, “I want to go to Maryland.”

  So, they sent me to a research post outside of Baltimore and it worked out real well. We did a lot of biological research and it was a good deal because I worked for civilians. We went to work at 9:00 and we got off at 3:30. That means I had a chance to get to Johns Hopkins to class by 6:00. The class for physical chemistry was on a Wednesday and a Friday. It started like 6:00 and lasted until 9:30 or 10:00 for two semesters.

  Raúl Necochea: You mentioned earlier that part of the original plan had been – it included applying to Howard and Meharry as well. Now I understand some of the context for why that was at the time. How did the decision to apply to UNC come about?

  Dr. Harrell: Okay. First, we knew about UNC since I lived in Durham. And the reason for that was that I didn’t particularly want to go a long ways to go to school and I didn’t particularly want to go to Washington, DC. So, I applied to three medical schools. I applied to Howard University. I applied to the University of Maryland, and I applied to UNC. The University of Maryland said that I was competitive, but not compared to out of state students. So, they elected not to take me. And before I got the results back from Howard, I had already interviewed at UNC and I had gotten accepted. So, I told Howard that I was gonna go to UNC.

  Raúl Necochea: Do you remember anything about the process of applying – especially that interview at UNC?

  Dr. Harrell: Yeah. It was an interesting interview but, see, what people don’t realize [is that] there are a lot of nice professors at UNC and the person I was interviewed by was Dean Fordham. I actually remember him, and he was one of the nicest [people] I guess in the world. And he was the one that really said that he’s gonna offer me a position and would I come [if he offered me a position]. And also I think it was Dr. Penick and Dr. Penick’s father was a Methodist minister at St. Augustine College in Raleigh – the Black college in Raleigh.

  There was a building that was named after him because he was so instrumental in keeping that college afloat. So, they were two nice guys that I had for the interview and Dr. Penick was on the admission committee. So, this was –

  Raúl Necochea: Can you spell the last name of Dr. Penick?

  Dr. Harrell: P-E-N-I-C-K.

  Raúl Necochea: Got it. Thank you very much. And then they offered you admission and –

  Dr. Harrell: They offered me a position. One of the things that I liked about the school at the time was that when I was there we didn’t have to take the departmental exam and we took the exam once a year at the end of the year – the National Boards – and by doing that it eliminated any bias because the National Boards is a national exam and you wouldn’t have to worry about instructor bias and that made it much, much easier. It gave me the confidence that I needed that I could get through.

  Raúl Necochea: Did anyone discourage you from applying to UNC?

  Dr. Harrell: No. What I know is I was told that they never took Blacks. They took one Black a year. That’s what my professor told me, they said that I don’t think anybody from Central had ever been to UNC. In fact, before I got there, there had only been about five or six Blacks who had been accepted by UNC, and that was one per year. There was only one per year at the time.

  Raúl Necochea: I’ve been hearing this a lot from other folks that I have been interviewing that this was a big part of the reputation of UNC at the time. There would be one every year so that when you came in, you would know one Black student who was ahead of you and then you would be that person for the next one. It’s interesting that this was the reputation.

  Dr. Harrell: Right, and I changed a lot of that my freshman year. What I did is I talked to Dean Fordham and I talked to Dean Taylor. I’m not sure if you remember Dean Taylor or not. Dean Taylor was the Dean. Dr. Fordham was the Assistant Dean and what happened was that Dr. Taylor – if you don’t know him – you probably know James Taylor, the singer. That’s his father. Okay?

  Raúl Necochea: Really?

  Dr. Harrell: Really. So, he was a real, real nice guy also. I said to him, “Dr. –” and what happened was that I went there my freshman year and I talked to them about getting on the admission committee.

  Raúl Necochea: Really?

  Dr. Harrell: And they put me on the admission committee.

  Raúl Necochea: Oh, for your second year?

  Dr. Harrell: The second year, I was on the admission committee.

  Raúl Necochea: That’s interesting.

  Dr. Harrell: And I interviewed all the Black students and they allowed me to go to all of the Black schools and recruit. I told them that if they went to the schools, nobody could listen to them because – if you got 10 Black schools and you’ve been taking one each year, that means it [appears that] you never take anybody because it takes you 10 years to get one from each school. So, I told them, “let me talk to the students.” And the first year that I was on the admission committee and recruited, they accepted 17 [Blacks] and 13 came. So, that changed that policy then and the students all did well.

  What I explained to them is that a lot of the students who came from substandard high schools, they’re not gonna be as competitive as some of the student who came from the best high schools and had the most well-educated parents, but if you get into a situation where you all [are] in the same educational environment, those students who didn’t have the opportunity to learn things at high school, they will do just as well because they’ll be able to have the same teaching system, same laboratories, and those types of libraries that we didn’t ever have. And what happened is that they bought the argument and students did very well.

  Raúl Necochea: This is amazing. I had no idea that – Permit me. The years that you were in the medical school were the years that overlap with the creation here in the UNC School of Medicine of the MED program.

  Dr. Harrell: Right. They started as I got there. They didn’t have [the MED program] before I came, right.

  Raúl Necochea: Right. And I imagine that some of the things that you learned – that you were able to say – they fed into the institutional memory.

  Dr. Harrell: Right.

  Raúl Necochea: Okay. This is phenomenal. I’m so glad that you’re telling me this stuff. Of course, it makes perfect sense that there would have been initiatives about how to encourage more applicants that were African Americans, but I did not know that. Gosh.

  Dr. Harrell: Yeah. I was the one, and some of the faculty members really got angry about it. They didn’t want any more minorities in the school, but that issue is that we need more Black physicians and it’s dropping down again because [in] some areas, some communities, you’re not gonna have anybody that’ll go into those communities. You don’t have a Black physician to do that. So, we need to get more [Black students into medicine] and it’s hard to do it now because I’m at the age where I can’t really influence people – younger people – because they see me as ancient. So, it’s a different world.

  But I do have two nieces who are physicians. They are 35, 40 and I have, like I say, a brother and a sister. They all went to Carolina. My baby brother and my baby sister went.

  Raúl Necochea: What was it like to be the one Black student in your class? Did you think –?

  Dr. Harrell: The students were nice. When you had the department exam, you need to have a lot of friends to study with because most of the time some of them will know about what kind of things that you may need to know. But when you’re taking a national exam, you need to just mainly read your books and read your notes and use their little test booklet that you test yourself on. Use those, and you can make sure that you use your time wisely.

  Now, I did go to football games and basketball games because I went back from Chapel Hill to Durham to see North Carolina football games. I had a brother on the team and so I used to go back and see him. I used to go back to see the basketball games [at Central]. I didn’t just stay in the lab 24 hours a day. I used to go fishing. There’s Orange Lake and a lot of other places you can go fishing. So, I did have to get recreation. And my wife was in school and she went to get her Master’s in microbiology when I was in medical school. So, that worked out real well too.

  Raúl Necochea: That’s a question that I also wanted to ask you. I wanted to ask you about things that kept you steady in pursuit of your medical degree. Having a partner, of course, is very important, having all these hobbies that you mentioned – fishing and going to events – also helped. I mean the students are very interested in what sources of inspiration Black alumni from back then had that helped them overcome any doubts that they had or difficulties and stress.

  Dr. Harrell: And also with my classmates we got along very well. We went over to the gym and played basketball together and those types of things. When we had parties, I would go to them. But there would be some people in your class that’s not gonna like you, but if you were in a class and there were some folks that you don’t like, that’s just life. They don’t try to get in your way. They just didn’t. They weren’t as social as some of the other ones, but I didn’t have any major problems.

  We had some faculty members that may have been biased and one I thought was real biased. I reported him to the dean’s, so the dean had a meeting with him and I think the dean agreed with me that he was biased. The thing about it, when we were in the hospital and we were making rounds and things, when he talked to the students he wouldn’t have no eye contact with me. So, I reported it to the dean and then we solved the problem.

  Raúl Necochea: This is a faculty member, right?

  Dr. Harrell: Faculty member, yeah. We had to do that. You see here’s the catch, okay? The catch is when I mentioned initially that we didn’t take the departmental exam. So, if you passed all of your National Board tests, you didn’t need no faculty recommendation. You only needed a faculty recommendation if you didn’t pass. And my attitude is that “You can’t pass the exam, you don’t need to be a doctor.”

  Raúl Necochea: You mentioned that you were close or at least that you got along well with Dean Fordham and Dr. Penick. Anyone else that you were close to here?

  Dr. Harrell: It’s gonna be hard to remember. Dr. Bakewell was a nice person. He was my class advisor. I can remember him very well. There’s a Dr. Black. Most of the doctors were very, very nice and easygoing. They didn’t have any kind of attitude or anything. You had a few that didn’t want any minorities there, so I guess it was hard for them to adjust to it. But overall, you’d be amazed how warm and caring the faculty members were.

  Raúl Necochea: Do you recall facing some hardships as a medical student?

  Dr. Harrell: Not really. There was one faculty member that said he didn’t – I was graduating early because I went to summer school and I was finishing in three and a half years and he didn’t think I should finish in three and a half years – I should have stayed another semester – and so he told the dean that. Well, when we met with the dean, I told the dean that “If I finished everything that I’m supposed to take, no use to keep me there an extra semester if I’ve already finished everything, because by going to summer school I did that.”

  So, what I did during that six months that I finished early – the dean agreed with me – [was that] I went to work at Lincoln Community Health Center in Durham and I got a lot of clinical experience and I had several doctors and nurses that worked with me so when I went to do my residency, I was way ahead of a lot of the students because I had six months of clinical training in a community health center.

  Raúl Necochea: At Lincoln?

  Dr. Harrell: Right.

  Raúl Necochea: When you were a student, was there a time when you ever doubted your abilities as a med student?

  Dr. Harrell: No. No, not really. I felt that I was competitive. I felt that once I got through my freshman year. I think for most of [the students] freshman year is the worst year, taking biology – not biology – but gross anatomy, and physiology, and biochemistry. So, once I got through my freshman year, I had no more worries and I still felt that I was doing okay.

  Raúl Necochea: How did you finance your medical studies at Carolina?

  Dr. Harrell: The what?

  Raúl Necochea: How did you finance the studies?

  Dr. Harrell: Oh, okay. There was a public health scholarship that [was for] $2,500 a year. And also, being a veteran, you have a VA benefit. The two together was all I needed, and I got what I needed. I stayed at student housing. I can’t think of the name of it – right across the street from the hospital. There were some brick places over there. That is where I stayed. That cut down on the cost tremendously.

  Raúl Necochea: Yeah. I imagine you were already married at the time?

  Dr. Harrell: Right, already married. I was married when I was in the military. My wife worked at DuPont doing research there and she got her Master’s at Chapel Hill and later – when I went to Howard University to do my residency –she worked in a research lab [at the VA Hospital]. But when she came back to Durham she went to NC State and got her doctorate. So, she ended up being a professor at Duke University.

  Raúl Necochea: Wow.

  Dr. Harrell: She’s a retired professor at Duke University.

  Raúl Necochea: In microbiology too?

  Dr. Harrell: Right.

  Raúl Necochea: Wow.

  Dr. Harrell: A full professor in microbiology at Duke University, right, in the medical school.

  Raúl Necochea: Wow – two careers.

  Dr. Harrell: Being in microbiology and being in the medical area, it helps you in med school too because we could study microbiology together and all those things. So, a lot of the clinical things that she’ll say, it works out well.

  Raúl Necochea: Yeah, yeah. You can help each other. You said you went to – Sorry, I interrupted you.

  Dr. Harrell: No, go on. No, you didn’t.

  Raúl Necochea: You said you went to Howard for residency.

  Dr. Harrell: Right.

  Raúl Necochea: Tell me a little about the transition.

  Dr. Harrell: Okay. The decision to go to Howard was that – when I left Carolina – believe it or not Carolina didn’t have a family practice program.

  Raúl Necochea: What?

  Dr. Harrell: No. They were in the process of getting it. Family practice was coming up all around the country and Howard University had had theirs about three or four years and it was an approved program and the doctor I worked for at Lincoln, he was on the Board of Trustees at Howard and the fellow who was in charge of the family practice program told him that I’ll be a good student to have – resident to have. And so considering that, Howard. What you had to do at Carolina [was] you had to do two years of pediatrics and two years of internal medicine and that was family practice. Okay? And at Howard, you just had a regular three-year family practice residency, and so that’s why I chose to go there.

  Raúl Necochea: So, how did you first got interested in family medicine as a specialty?

  Dr. Harrell: Well, sir I’ll tell you like it is. Back in the day, the only kind of doctor was a medical doctor and there was family practice and general practice. You didn’t really see doctors being a surgeon or a psychiatrist. All the doctors we knew about was the medical doctor and that was my main interest. And when you look at it in a Black neighborhood, you need a family physician more so than you need highly specialized doctors.

  And in family practice, you can sort of give the patient the direction they need to go into. Most of them need guidance, along with whatever they’re doing and that’s the big issue in most neighborhoods. You need a doctor who is, like I say, it used to be what they called Dr. Welby – the guy that used to be on television – that will just take care of the patient and then be a family friend.

  Raúl Necochea: Tell me about the differences between living in Chapel Hill and living in Washington, DC.

  Dr. Harrell: Okay. Now what we did is, at Howard University in Washington, DC, we lived in Maryland. We lived out by the Beltway. It would take me about 30 minutes, 35 minutes, to get downtown to Howard. We bought – I was a veteran so we bought a condominium because I had VA benefits and that’s where we stayed until we finished our residency.

  Raúl Necochea: Okay. Did you have any kids?

  Dr. Harrell: Yeah. We had one when we were at Chapel Hill and he was about – when we got to DC, he was about three years old and when we got back down here, he was about five going on six years old. So, that’s when we came back to Durham and everything was in place. We bought a house and we settled down in practice and my wife, years later, went to NC State and so it worked out pretty well because she could drive from here to Raleigh. Back then, that was before I-40 was present, if you can believe it’s been that long.

  Raúl Necochea: When you were at Howard, who would you say were your most influential mentors?

  Dr. Harrell: There was a guy name Dr. Matory. He was actually a surgeon, but most of those doctors practiced medicine also. And then we had several top-flight chief residents and interns. There was a guy named Dr. Melvin Gerald who was a friend of mine and what happened with him was that he taught us a lot during residency [and we’re still friends today].

  [One of the endocrinologists there,] he wrote a chapter in the endocrinology book and there was a fellow in pediatrics – I can’t remember his name – but he was an expert in sickle cell disease. So, we had a lot of top-flight professors and also not only did we have professors from Howard, but they came from Georgetown and George Washington also and as part-time faculty members.

  Raúl Necochea: Do you think there was a special moment when you felt that you came into your own as a medical professional?

  Dr. Harrell: I felt confident. Again, [the feeling that] I’m coming into my own was probably junior year in medical school. You felt like you had accomplished what you needed to accomplish and all you needed to do was to improve on it and it worked out really well. And the thing about it is that what people really probably should know is that once you finish your sophomore year, you can really say that medical school is two years.

  The next two years it’s more or less a real, real enjoyable time because you’re seeing patients and you’re getting a chance to discuss right there on the spot. You don’t have to go get a book and read what’s going on. The professors will tell you what is going on and it’s a good learning experience.

  Raúl Necochea: You’ve already touched on this a little bit when you were telling me about why family medicine, but I want to ask you again anyway. How does being a Black physician matter in your workplace, in your family, in your community?

  Dr. Harrell: Say that one more time again.

  Raúl Necochea: How does being a Black physician matter in your family and in your community?

  Dr. Harrell: Okay. It matters an awful lot because you got a lot of family and many of them just don’t have the doctors that they need and I’m basically sort of a consultant to them. They can always feel comfortable calling me and asking about questions and I also was a mentor to my brother, Russell, and my sister, Cynthia. My brother Russell got into medical school at Chapel Hill after spending three years at Central and my sister, Cynthia, she went to Wellesley College and she came and she did well also at Chapel Hill. But my brother Russell is in family practice and my sister Cynthia [is in occupational medicine]. In general, you need somebody in your family who’s in health care if you can.

  If you can’t have a doctor, you got to have a nurse or someone, PA, or somebody in your family. It’s a big help as far as making sure that they do the thing. At least they know what they need to do for longevity, and I think that’s one of the biggest things that’s missing. You have a lot of people that go to the emergency room or they go to the doctor when they get sick, but you don’t have nobody to tell you when you’re 20 what you need to do to be healthy at 30, 40, and 50. And that’s where in the family unit each year, we have a section where we talk about health tips and all those types of things, and this has been going on for years and it pays off.

  Raúl Necochea: When you said your sister went to Wellesley, I just remembered that my wife too she went to Wellesley.

  Dr. Harrell: Oh yeah?

  Raúl Necochea: Yeah, yeah, yeah and well now –

  Dr. Harrell: My sister, what she found out the hard way was that when she went to Wellesley, that folks were doing physics, chemistry, and everything. They were putting this material on the computer and she didn’t have any computer skills. So, she had to go back and learn all of that, but we told her that she probably should have stayed at Central, but she did fine. And also she went over to MIT– I think she went over there and took calculus at MIT. I believe that’s where she took calculus because they couldn’t get along with the instructor at Wellesley.

  Raúl Necochea: Well, there’s been some pretty major transitions with information technologies over these few decades. When I was – well, never mind. The internet alone [was] quite something in the ‘90s. I imagine the use of electronic medical records was also something else – a big transition. If you take stock – wait, sorry. Let me take one step back. After residency, did you finish your three years there at Howard, and did you stay in the Washington, DC area, or did you come back right away?

  Dr. Harrell: No, I came straight back to Durham and I started working at Lincoln Community Health Center. I went there part-time and opened my office within about six months after I got back to Durham.

  Raúl Necochea: And have you been in Durham ever since?

  Dr. Harrell: Ever since. I came back in ’72. No, I came back in ’75 and I’ve been here ever since. [I retired in 2008].

  Raúl Necochea: All right so glad that you stayed. This is a major theme for all of us. Over your whole career, Dr. Harrell, of what are you proudest?

  Dr. Harrell: Mainly the fact that I helped to get students to UNC and got family members to go into medicine and I convinced a lot of students in the Black schools that they could come into – go into medicine. When I went to those Black universities, I didn’t just have the students in their senior year or junior year. They had all the biology and chemistry majors come in and listen to my talk and I even had some of the faculty members that applied to UNC and got in from the schools I went to. I think that let them know what it was like for a Black to go to medical school, it made a huge difference.

  And the other thing – since I’ve been out – is I got involved in politics. When I first came back in, I think, about 1980 [was] when I got involved. Back in the day, in order to get on the Board of Medical Examiners you had to be a member of the North Carolina Medical Society, but Blacks couldn’t [join] the North Carolina Medical Society. So, that means that you couldn’t be a member of the Board of Medical Examiners, and that means they had no Blacks on the Board of Medical Examiners.

  But Governor Hunt was the governor then and what we did is that we had a friend – a fellow named Bill Rush. I met him over at Chapel Hill. I used to play basketball with him. He’s a Black guy who was working as a minority [advisor]. We told him that there was a place in the law, a book – no what do you call it – an article in the law that said that the governor can appoint two people to the Board of Medical Examiners, and could he get the governor to appoint one of us? It didn’t say that a person had to be a non-medical doctor. It could be a medical doctor or anybody.

  So, he appointed the one we recommended, Dr. John Daniels. He’s one of the top surgeons in Durham and so that was the first [time] we got a Black onto the Board of Medical Examiners. And so that worked. And also I was on the scholarship committee – UNC Scholarship committee – where we used to review records and recommend [students] for scholarships. And also I did a lot to help the School of Nursing at Central and the nurses at Durham Regional Hospital as far as Watts Hospital that – you may not know was it – was probably one of the most racists hospitals in the country, Watts Hospital, before they merged with Durham Regional – before they merged with Lincoln.

  Before they merged with Lincoln, the federal government came down and had a meeting with Lincoln staff and Durham. I wasn’t part of that. We weren’t at the meeting, but they had guidelines that they set forth and when we went over there, they weren’t following those guidelines, because the Black nurses were supposed to be in certain positions based on their education. And so, we helped the nurses deal with that. One of the reasons why the nurses can’t do too much complaining is [that] if you have x or y, and you complained, you’d get fired. So, we got all that straightened [out].

  And I also did things like, I was on the nursing home committee that reviewed nursing homes and we were making sure that nursing homes got what they deserved. I was on that committee for about three years. And then there was – I guess you’ve probably heard of the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People, that political committee. They had a medical section. I worked with them for three or four years. So, the main thing is that I didn’t just come to Durham to make money. I did try to help the community and the folks around.

  Raúl Necochea: Yeah, I see that. That’s a very important theme in everything that you’re telling me in the community. If you think about the students themselves – and I mean I’m asking you this because this project came up as a student initiative – what has your experience taught you about ways to support our minority students?

  Dr. Harrell: Well, it’s not as easy as it used to be because you need somebody to be able to tell them – not just when they get to college but in high school – just start programming yourself that you want to be in medicine and then that the schools are integrated, and you have a few Blacks here and a few Blacks there. You don’t have the audience to talk to a large group at a time. And it helps to let them know that it’s a long haul, but anything that you want to do [these days] is gonna be financially rewarding and be rewarding for a career. It’s gonna be time consuming and hard and it’s not [that] everybody can be doing it.

  Those times you have to let people know – and we do it in the family. But it’s hard for us to – It’s not like it used to be when you can just – like I used to do – walk around to the colleges and talk to folks. You need people that’s closer to their age range and medical students may be able to do that [more effectively than a person my age]. And so I think you may need to look and see if you want to still send them out to minority colleges. Those who are already at Chapel Hill, they all know about what’s going on.

  Raúl Necochea: Wow. Thank you. That was excellent and those are all the questions that I had for you, Dr. Harrell.

  Dr. Harrell: One other thing I want to mention is that you all may feel that you all didn’t start getting minorities early enough, but you all were five years ahead of Duke, okay?

  Raúl Necochea: Oh, yes.

  Dr. Harrell: Okay. The first Black that finished at Duke finished when I finished Chapel Hill, but we had already had about five or six or seven people finish in North Carolina. So, they were Tar Heels.

  Raúl Necochea: That makes me happy. That makes me very happy. Let me stop this recording.

  Dr. Harrell: There’s one other thing I might mention to you. Back in the day when Blacks didn’t go to Carolina, the state had a grant that they gave to each Howard and Meharry medical schools that helped assist the schools in taking those students into the school, okay?

  Raúl Necochea: Yeah. That was a big part of how, yeah, how we got Black docs into medicine.

  Dr. Harrell: Right.

  Raúl Necochea: They sent them either to Tennessee or up north instead of integrating the schools.

  Dr. Harrell: Yeah.

  Raúl Necochea: Yup.

  Dr. Harrell: Okay. Nice talking to you.

  Raúl Necochea: Very nice talking to you. Let me stop this and – I’m stopping.

  [End of Audio]

  Duration: 54 minutes

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About

Dr. Sampson Harrell was born in Ahoskie, NC, Hertford county, in 1943. He grew up with his parents in his 15 siblings in a local farm they owned. After attending NC Central University, he served in the military at a lab in the Baltimore area, which allowed him to take additional courses at Johns Hopkins prior to applying to medical school. He was admitted to the UNC School of Medicine. Shortly after his first year began, he pitched an idea to Dean Taylor and Dean Fordham, to include him in the Committee on Admissions to improve the recruitment of Black applicants. By his second year, he began doing that in earnest, helping increase the number of those students who applied and got admitted. His years at the UNCSOM coincided with the establishment of the MED program. In his final semester at Carolina, he went to work at Lincoln Community Health Center in Durham, which served him well in residency at Howard University in Family Medicine. Following residency, he and his family settled in Durham in 1975, where has practiced since and, among other things, helped select the first Black member of the North Carolina Board of Medical Examiners and served on a review committee for nursing homes.