By Steven K. Ragsdale
We have to say it aloud. Five Black surgeons now lead the trauma service at Johns Hopkins Hospital:
Dr. Zachary Obinna Enumah, M.D., Ph.D., M.A., ninth-year resident and critical care fellow
Dr. Lawrence B. Brown, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., a seventh-year resident
Dr. Ivy Mannoh, M.D., third-year resident
Dr. Ifeoluwa “Ife” Shoyombo, M.D., M.P.H., M.S., third-year resident
Dr. Valentine S. Alia, M.D., second-year resident
These are not symbolic appointments. These physicians have proven themselves to be trauma surgical leaders working at the center of one of the world’s most respected medical institutions. Trauma care is not ceremonial medicine in Baltimore. It is where life-and-death decisions unfold in minutes in a city shaped by violence and inequity, where leadership must reflect authority, trust, and mastery.
This moment is historic. It deserves both celebration and reflection.
However, in Baltimore, progress at Johns Hopkins has always been measured in at least two ways.
The institution measures itself by innovation, research funding, rankings and global prestige. Black Baltimore has measured Hopkins differently. It has asked: Who gets trained? Who is admitted for care? Who benefits at both the macro and micro levels? Does institutional excellence translate into measurable improvement in the neighborhoods that have surrounded it since 1889?
That tension is by no means new. It has a long and storied history.
When Dr. William H. Welch, one of the founding architects of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, died in 1930, the Afro-American did not offer unqualified praise. In an editorial titled “The Most Virulent Germ Escaped Dr. Welch,” the paper questioned whether his immense influence had materially helped Black Baltimoreans.
Welch helped shape American medical education in the wake of the 1910 Flexner Report. The reforms elevated scientific rigor. They also closed five of the seven Black medical schools operating at the time, including one of Baltimore’s own. One casualty was the now-defunct Medico-Chirurgical and Theological College of Christ’s Institution, an HBCU medical school that trained Black physicians in an old church building on East Monument and Ensor Streets before closing in 1908. The pipeline of Black physicians narrowed dramatically for decades. Black women were excluded from formal medical education during that era.
The consequences were structural and measurable.
Three years later, in 1933, the AFRO-American Newspaper reported that two Black nurses were taking courses at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene. They were described as “our only two nurses in Maryland” enrolled there.
Two.
The fact that this was news tells us how scarce access was. Black Baltimore was counting — counting who entered, who advanced, and who was allowed inside to learn and practice excellence.
Today, we are counting once again.
Five Black trauma surgeons now lead at Hopkins. A century ago, that would have been impossible. The numbers have changed. That change at Hopkins has not happened accidentally.
Dr. Levi Watkins, as a teenager, worked directly with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., serving as his chauffeur and witnessing firsthand the discipline and courage of the civil rights movement — values reinforced by his father’s leadership in Montgomery’s Black church community. He later pressed Johns Hopkins to expand Black enrollment and to understand that excellence and justice were not competing values.
Dr. Edward “Eddie” Cornwell III, whose father famously trained many surgeons at Howard University College of Medicine, led the trauma service at Hopkins for a decade, modeling visible Black surgical leadership at the highest level before moving on to lead surgery at Howard University.
Dr. Gabor “Gabe” Kelen, as Chair of Emergency Medicine, consistently supported and advanced progressive leadership within one of the hospital’s most critical departments.
These were decisions about authority. About trust. About who belongs at the helm.
(Courtesy Photoi)
Progress at Hopkins has often come through leaders willing to widen the circle.
But widening a circle is not the same as redesigning the structure.
During my time in the Outpatient Center and the Nursery/NICU, I was a witness.
In the early 1990s, I served on a Johns Hopkins Medicine group led by senior executives Richard Grassi and Colene Daniel. Our charge was to understand how Hopkins engaged the surrounding community. We gathered data across the system. What we found was striking but consistent.
Employees were doing extraordinary work in Baltimore’s neighborhoods — mentoring students, organizing health fairs, serving on nonprofit boards, and advocating for equity. Many were investing their own time and resources into the very communities that raised them. The commitment was real and had existed for generations.
But translating that energy into institutional policy has always been complicated.
Johns Hopkins leaders — including African-American executives — have long had to balance financial stability, academic priorities, philanthropy, regulatory pressures, and reputational risk — pressures that do not always align with community interests. Community engagement was valued, but embedding it into the core operating model required navigating layers of governance, competing incentives, and significant historical barriers that mattered in the past and continue to shape economic realities today.
The tension was not whether justice mattered. It was how deeply it could be operationalized — and how much it would cost.
At the center of these discussions was the unavoidable question: Who will foot the bill for reversing decades of intentional exclusion?
That tension has not disappeared.
It is still present whenever representation advances faster than resource redistribution. It is present when community initiatives depend on external funding rather than core institutional budgets. It is present when individual champions drive change that must survive leadership transitions.
This is not an accusation. My family and I have walked those corridors for generations. It is a long-standing observation about institutional gravity.
Since its founding, Johns Hopkins has stood on three pillars: medical education, research, and patient care. If this moment represents transformation, it should be visible across all three.
In education, the presence of Dr. Enumah, Dr. Brown, Dr. Mannoh, Dr. Shoyombo, and Dr. Alia signals that pathways once narrowed are widening. Their academic credentials and surgical excellence reflect not access by exception, but sustained achievement. Still, are we compelled to notice the relative absence of women of color in these celebrations, given that the original Flexner reforms excluded them from the classroom? Ironically, Hopkins was one of the only 19th-century medical schools founded with women in its inaugural class.
In patient care, their leadership in trauma matters profoundly in a majority-Black city. Representation in critical settings can shape trust, mentorship, and imagination for the next generation. In a city where chronic disease rates remain disproportionately high, emergency medicine and trauma care will always matter — at least until upstream investments improve quality of life and Black longevity.
In research and institutional investment, the measure is longer term. Are funding priorities aligned with Baltimore’s most persistent health disparities? Are community partnerships core-funded or grant-dependent? Do measurable outcomes in maternal health, chronic disease, violence intervention, and access reflect durable, sustainable change?
These questions are not born of cynicism, even if they sometimes temper my optimism. They are consistent with how Black Baltimore has historically evaluated the Hopkins presence built in the middle of a Black community.
In 1930, the Black press asked whether institutional prestige translated into justice. In 1933, it counted two nurses. In 2026, we count five trauma surgeons.
The numbers are different. The question remains.
Has the yardstick changed?
Are we witnessing not only individual ascension, but structural redesign? Has the widening of opportunity become embedded policy rather than the work of particular leaders pushing from within? Only Hopkins can fully answer these questions.
In the meantime, this moment deserves pride. It deserves loud applause. The five surgeons leading trauma care have earned it through discipline, sacrifice, and excellence. Their presence would have been unimaginable a century ago. We have celebrated progress before — with names like Basil Morgan, Bud Burnett, Malcolm Brock, and Claudia Thomas.
But applause and inquiry are not opposites. They belong together.
Black Baltimore has always measured Hopkins by a simple standard: Does your greatness include us in durable, measurable ways?
If institutional prestige and community well-being now move in the same direction, that is transformation.
If progress still depends primarily on exceptional individuals widening the circle case by case, then the architecture itself remains intact.
Are we truly moving forward?
Or are we still relying on the brilliance of a few to carry the weight of many?
By no means is that a hostile question. But it is a serious one.
And in Baltimore City, it has always been the existential question that matters most. With all the mixed messaging, has professional community-based healthcare gone on a similar path with community policing gone the way of the dodos?