UH Creates Online Black History Exhibit
Posted: January 24, 2008

The University of Houston Center for Public History (CPH), in partnership with the Houston Medical Forum (HMF), has launched a new online exhibit, To Bear Fruit for Our Race: A History of African American Physicians in Houston. It can be found at http://www.history.uh.edu/cph/tobearfruit.

This online exhibit captures an important, but rarely told story about the struggles and accomplishments of the black professional class in Houston during the twentieth century. The CPH and HMF hopes that the website will inspire young people to contemplate careers in medicine or other professions.

The website contains a narrative "Story Experience" that chronicles the lives of people such as Franklin Robey, who was born a slave and later became one of Houston's first black doctor; Edith Irby Jones, a sharecropper's daughter who broke the color barrier at the University of Arkansas Medical School in 1948; and Bernard Harris, who realized dual dreams as astronaut and physician. Theirs are but a few of the stories contained in the exhibit.

The exhibit also features extensive resources, including more than 60 biographies, some 20 oral history transcripts, documents, photographs, and video clips of Houston's physicians. Throughout the narrative, information boxes teach students the meaning of scientific and medical terms, describe historical events, and introduce important medical institutions.

A unique feature of the website is its curriculum materials. Through a grant from Humanities Texas, the CPH and HMF hired four recent or current HISD teachers to create lesson plans in science and in social studies for middle school and high school. These lesson plans are consistent with the state's TAKS requirement.

Kathleen Brosnan, associate professor of history and associate director of the CPH, was the project director for To Bear Fruit for Our Race.

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