{"id":120115,"date":"2024-03-08T11:53:35","date_gmt":"2024-03-08T16:53:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/?p=120115"},"modified":"2024-03-08T11:53:35","modified_gmt":"2024-03-08T16:53:35","slug":"educator-loretta-jackson-williams-md-phd-delivers-second-annual-rebecca-lee-crumpler-alumni-lecture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/2024\/03\/08\/educator-loretta-jackson-williams-md-phd-delivers-second-annual-rebecca-lee-crumpler-alumni-lecture\/","title":{"rendered":"Educator Loretta Jackson-Williams, MD\/PhD, Delivers Second Annual Rebecca Lee Crumpler Alumni Lecture"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Head
Loretta Jackson-Williams<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Second Annual Rebecca Lee Crumpler Alumni Lecture honored the pioneering Black physician with an online lecture by Loretta Jackson-Williams, MD\u201994, PhD\u201994, FACEP, vice dean for medical education and professor of emergency medicine at the University of Mississippi School of Medicine.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we honor Rebecca Lee Crumpler, I\u2019m reminded that we all stand on the shoulders of someone,\u201d said Jackson-Williams. She credited the support of professors, physicians, classmates and family, as well as BU and the University of Mississippi with helping her throughout her career.<\/p>\n

The March 6 event was , sponsored by the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine Diversity & Inclusion Office and moderated by Kaye-Alese Green, a third-year MD-JD student and the school\u2019s inaugural diversity fellow.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe (Jackson-Williams) comes from a legacy of educators and is deeply an educator at heart,\u201d said Green. Like Crumpler, Jackson-Williams is a trailblazer as the first Black administrator at the University of Mississippi School of Medicine.<\/p>\n

BUMC Provost and Dean Karen Antman, MD, noted that the Rebecca Lee Crumpler, MD, Endowed Scholarship Fund had surpassed its original goal of $100,000 and was now nearly triple that amount at approximately $284,000.<\/p>\n

When Crumpler graduated in 1864 from the New England Female Medical College (NEFMC) \u2013 the precursor of BU\u2019s medical school \u2013 she was the first Black woman in the U.S. to do so. Despite her skill as a physician and her desire to heal others, her life wasn\u2019t easy. She never had hospital admitting privileges, pharmacists refused to fill her prescriptions and the male medical establishment of her day turned their backs on her and other women physicians.<\/p>\n

Jackson-Williams was born in Mississippi in 1965 and came to medical school at BU from Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. She was the first from her school to participate in BU\u2019s Early Medical School Selection Program that helps students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, as well as colleges and universities with large Latinx and Pacific Island student populations, transition into medical school and remain there.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was surrounded in the (EMSSP) program with other students from around the country that had similar experiences to me,\u201d said Jackson-Williams. But the greater student body had limited insight into their lives, she added.<\/p>\n

In her hometown of Indianola, Mississippi, the railroad tracks literally separated the Black and white sections of town. Jackson-Williams lived in a multigenerational household led by two college-educated parents who pushed their four children to succeed, and believed education was the key to upward mobility.<\/p>\n

Her parents were protective, and in medical school Jackson-Williams discovered how sheltered she and her siblings were.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Boston I learned that, not only was I a minority as a Black female\u2026but I was socioeconomically disadvantaged,\u201d said Jackson-Williams. \u201cThose were not words in my vocabulary prior to that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, getting to know medical students outside those in EMSSP \u201cwas one of the most eye-opening experiences for me,\u201d said Jackson-Williams. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t trade it for anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jackson-Williams said she advises her students at the University of Mississippi to find at least one friend in medical school to share the highs and buffer the lows.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are lifelong relationships, people you will rely on for decades to come,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Jackson-Williams completed her residency in Oakland, California, returning home to Mississippi with her husband and child. Living in Boston and California, she realized that racism was a national problem. Despite her home state\u2019s long and troubled racial past, she saw possibilities for change.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was given a lot of opportunities at the school (University of Mississippi) and within the state,\u201d she said, that helped her to affect changes in the curriculum and address critical problems like the lack of primary care physicians in a state ranked at or near the bottom in physicians per capita. The need was greatest in rural areas and in Mississippi over 80% of counties are considered rural, all the counties are considered at least partially medically underserved and 50% of patients live in rural areas.<\/p>\n

In 2007, the state enacted a rural physician scholarship program to subsidize education for medical students from rural areas who committed to working in underserved areas. In 2020, Williams managed a Health Resources Services Administration grant that helped the school focus developing primary care physicians for rural areas.<\/p>\n

Jackson-Williams said that 75% of the students graduating from the six schools comprising graduate medical education now remain working in Mississippi, one of the highest rates of retention in the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople with the right skill set will always be our most limited resource,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The lesson she imparts to students gleaned from a career in emergency medicine, where you don\u2019t always have the gratification of seeing someone return to health, is to look inside yourself for validation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat you do is to decide that you\u2019ve given your best,\u201d said Jackson-Williams. \u201cBecause if you\u2019re always looking for external validation, you won\u2019t always get it. That\u2019s hard when you\u2019re starting out because we live in a society that values external validation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We all stand on the shoulders of someone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":903,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[282,91],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120115"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/903"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120115"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120117,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120115\/revisions\/120117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}