Robby Klein
If you’ve tuned in to any of the local coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, you have seen Dr. James Hildreth.
As a member of Metro Nashville’s Coronavirus Task Force, he’s frequently present at Nashville Mayor John Cooper’s daily press briefings on COVID-19. Hildreth has been a consistent voice on the global pandemic, how it is affecting our city and, disproportionately, the black community, all while continuing to guide the medical college.
Under the leadership of Hildreth, Meharry Medical College, one of the nation’s largest historically black medical schools, recently received a $34 million gift from Bloomberg Philanthropies to increase the number of black physicians nationwide and help medical students pay off student loan debt. Hildreth has also been working with the Black Caucus and the White House to fight against systemic racism and build equity for the underserved locally and nationally.
Robby Klein
This May, he testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on “The Disproportionate Impact of COVID-19 on Communities of Color” and highlighted the alarming healthcare disparities that have long-plagued communities of color and how these disparities have been exacerbated since the spread of the coronavirus.
The accomplished HIV/AIDS researcher is still actively involved in the field, working on finalizing plans to get FDA approval to test a new therapeutic agent that shows promise for COVID-19 treatment, and he’s working with Operation Warp Speed to establish Meharry as a test site for COVID-19 vaccines. Hildreth is also focusing on encouraging the black community to enroll in COVID-19 vaccine trials.
“My father died when I was 11 years old and during his illness, he received very little medical attention,” he says. “The fact that we were black and poor was a major reason for that lack of access to healthcare. Without role models and with the odds stacked squarely against me, I made the decision to become a doctor. To realize this goal given my circumstances, I came to believe that I had to gain entry into an Ivy League school, Harvard in particular. Getting a scholarship to Harvard and several other Ivy League schools as a poor black kid from rural Arkansas is an achievement that in my mind has not been matched since.”