Alexander Thomas Augusta

Alexander Thomas Augusta was an American surgeon, born free in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1825, who became the first African-American professor of medicine in the United States. Refused admission to the University of Pennsylvania, he studied privately, then trained at Trinity College in Toronto from 1850, completing his medical course in 1856 and practicing in Toronto. In 1863 he wrote to President Lincoln offering his services, passed the Army medical examination, and was commissioned a major, the Army's first African-American physician and the first black hospital administrator in the country when he took charge of Freedman's Hospital in Washington. He protested racial discrimination on the capital's streetcars while in uniform, left the service in 1866 as a brevet lieutenant colonel, and in 1868 joined the faculty of Howard University. He died in 1890.