1900s doctor gets Dunbar accolade; plaque honors Black physician’s life

Plaque honors Black physician’s life

A new historical marker sits Wednesday on West 15th Street in Little Rock outside the former home of Dr. John Thornton, one of the state’s first Black doctors.
(Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Thomas Metthe)
A new historical marker sits Wednesday on West 15th Street in Little Rock outside the former home of Dr. John Thornton, one of the state’s first Black doctors. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Thomas Metthe)

As those in the Dunbar neighborhood work to build a thriving community, they looked to their past for inspiration last week during an event celebrating the life of one of the state's first Black doctors.

More than 60 people gathered Thursday on the lawn of Dr. John Thornton's former West 15th Street home to see the unveiling of a plaque that marks the importance of his life.

Black medical professionals once gathered at the home, built in 1896, in a similar way more than 100 years ago for some of the first meetings of the Arkansas Medical, Dental and Pharmaceutical Association -- an organization that provided a community for Black professionals barred from white associations.

The association has run continuously for 128 years since Thornton, known as the dean of Black physicians in Arkansas, co-founded it in 1893.

"Dr. Thornton set the model for what we experienced and want to experience again in this community," Angel Burt, executive director of the Dunbar Historic Neighborhood Association, told the crowd. "If we lose our history, then we lose ourselves. We need to know."

As Little Rock became more segregated in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Dunbar neighborhood started to form as a place for middle-class Black families, said Brian Rodgers, a community liaison and historian for the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center.

"It starts to become the exclusive Black neighborhood in the city," Rodgers said Wednesday. "The school was built in 1929, and it becomes the prominent Black school in the state. You saw people start moving in with family and friends to go to the school at Dunbar."

The neighborhood was complemented by the city's Black business district on West Ninth Street, where Thornton ran his medical office.

Burt said the neighborhood and business district were prestigious enough that it drew prominent Black men and women, such as Thornton, from surrounding states to Little Rock.

Thornton was born in St. Louis in 1873 and grew up in Mississippi, according to an Arkansas Historic Preservation Program report. He graduated in 1893 from the State Normal College at Holly Springs.

He then used income from teaching to put himself through Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tenn. He moved to Little Rock and married Bessie Stephens in 1904, a graduate of Walden University in Nashville. Stephens, a teacher, was the daughter of Charlotte E. Stephens, the capital city's first Black public school teacher.

Burt said Thornton is one of many successful residents of the Dunbar neighborhood. Others who lived in the neighborhood include Scipio A. Jones, an attorney partly known for winning a case that released 12 Black men convicted of murder after the Elaine race riot of 1919. Mifflin Wistar Gibbs was the first elected municipal judge in the United States, and Florence Price was a world-renowned classical composer.

"The neighborhood was prominent because people cared about the community and they cared about each other, and they knew about the importance of uniting together to build a community of success, education success, economical success, family success and business success," Burt said. "That is a perfect model for any thriving community."

Rodgers echoed Burt's thoughts, saying the success of individuals was partly because of the strength of the community.

"The population was segregated," Rodgers said. "For you to be successful, you had to depend on other members of your community. It was the idea of self-sufficiency that was big in the community."

In a way, Thornton modeled the Arkansas Medical, Dental and Pharmaceutical Association on the same idea.

It was and continues to be a way for Black medical professionals to sharpen their understanding of the needs in underserved communities by working together, association executive director Derek Lewis II said.

Black professionals in the medical field were barred from joining the American Medical Association after a vote by the association in 1870. Access to any mainstream organizations remained difficult for Black medical professions until the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

An official apology was given by the American Medical Association in 2008.

Today, the group Thornton founded remains active with 250 members statewide. It focuses on health disparities and racial inequities in underserved communities.

"Dr. Thornton is our legacy, and we need to tell the story as part of our local history," Lewis said in a news release.

By the 1940s and 1950s a large portion of the Black community lived in Dunbar, Rodgers said. It continued to be a Black neighborhood until work started on Interstate 630.

In the years that followed, migration to neighborhoods west of Little Rock started for white and Black families. University Park started to replace Dunbar by the end if the 1950s, Rodgers said.

"We lost the idea of it takes a village," Rodgers said, speaking of not just Dunbar but a movement away from neighborhood communities felt across the nation.

The idea of community is starting to gain new traction in recent years, he said.

"Now you see a resurgence of the Dunbar neighborhood," Rodgers said. "They are working to rehab the neighborhood, and the city has put money into the area. It is important that our historic Black neighborhoods are preserved. Not only do they tell us where we have been, but where we can go as a community."

Burt is one of many in the neighborhood working on revitalization efforts in the historic district. This includes plans to create history lessons about prestigious Black members of the neighborhood for the schools that serve the area.

The association already runs multiple efforts, including community events, scholarships, forums, mentor programs and health screenings. There also is a focus on building community connections in the same ways residents did in the early 1900s.

"The collaborations, the whole community stakeholders being involved in that change, will certainly make it happy and catapult it quite quickly," Burt said. "Our ancestors and enslaved people who migrated a way out of no way, they did it together and whether they were doctors or the owner of a shoe-shine shop or Black theaters, they all worked together to have a wonderful community."

Remembering the neighborhood's history remains a critical part of the future, Burt said.

"If you don't know your history, you won't know who you are and how you can gain anything," Burt said. "Knowing your history, knowing a part of who you are, will always strengthen you and make you a better person."

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