The first floor of the School of Public Health building, just off the main lobby, is home to the Paul B. Cornely Community Room. Often used to host school events and serve as a flexible space for classes or studying, the room honors a pioneer in the fight for equity and civil rights in public health.
Born in the French West Indies, Cornely moved around as a child, his family going from Puerto Rico to New York before settling in Detroit. Cornely graduated from Detroit’s Central High School and studied at the College of the City of Detroit before enrolling at U-M.
When Cornely joined U-M in 1926, the university had roughly 13,000 students. Fewer than 100 were African American. “Racism was rampant in many areas of the city and the university,” Cornely said about his early years in Ann Arbor.
Cornely joined the university’s Negro-Caucasian Club, a student group with hopes of “abolition of discrimination against Negroes.” With other club members, he participated in sit-ins at lunch counters in restaurants throughout Ann Arbor that refused to serve African Americans.
After graduating with his bachelor’s degree in 1928, Cornely enrolled in the Medical School, where he was one of four African American men in a class of 160 students. He graduated in 1931, and while he expressed a desire to remain in Ann Arbor, U-M’s hospital did not hire Black doctors, even those who had graduated from the university’s Medical School.
Cornely took a position at segregated Lincoln Hospital in Durham, North Carolina. While there, the dean of Howard University’s College of Medicine offered to hire Cornely to teach at the university on the condition that he return to school to earn a doctorate in public health.
Cornely returned to U-M, where his graduate studies in public health examined the ways in which the medical community failed to provide adequate care to Black patients, who had alarmingly high mortality rates compared to white patients.
Cornely graduated in 1934, making him the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in public health in the United States.
Following his graduation, Cornely moved to Washington, D.C., where he taught at Howard University for 39 years. Throughout his career, he fought for the desegregation of hospitals and equal health care opportunities for all. He died in 2002, a month shy of his 96th birthday.
— Katie Kelton, The University Record
