BATON ROUGE — LSU School of Medicine first opened its doors in New Orleans in 1931, but didn’t see its first Black graduate until 1970. Dr. Claude Jenkins Tellis went on to spend decades working as a pulmonologist in the Baton Rouge area.
When Dr. Tellis graduated from medical school, only 2.2 percent of doctors in the US were Black. Today, Black doctors make up just more than five and a half percent of active physicians, even though Black Americans account for nearly 14 percent of the US population.
Breaking barriers at LSU
Dr. Tellis, now 81, vividly remembers his time at the LSU School of Medicine. It was 1966 when he started, and racial tensions were flaring.
“Because of all of the things that had gone on in our history leading up to that time, I concluded that I wanted to apply. And once I applied, if I had been accepted, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. You know I was kind of scared,” Tellis said…