On Today, July 9th

in 1893,  In July 1893 Dr Daniel H Williams, MD performed one of the first successful open-heart surgeries in the country, suturing the pericardium on a victim of a stab wound to the heart. President Grover Cleveland appointed Dr. Williams surgeon-in-chief at Freedman's Hospital in Washington from 1894 to 1898. During his career he was instrumental in the founding of the National Medical Association, the only professional organization of its day open to black physicians, and the American College of Surgeons.

In 1883, gained the distinction of becoming Northwestern's first African American medical graduate and medical school faculty member. A strong advocate for the education of African Americans in medicine and nursing and health care for the underserved, he founded Chicago's Provident Hospital, the country's first black-owned andoperated interracial medical institution, in 1891. He would later help found other such hospitals across the country.

Born in 1856 in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, to free parents of European, Native American, and black heritage, he was apprenticed to a Baltimore shoemaker when he was 11 years old, after his father died of tuberculosis. A few months later, he ran away to Rockford, Illinois, where his mother and sisters had moved to be with family. By age 17 he was running his own barbershop in southern Wisconsin. At age 22 he began an apprenticeship with noted Civil Warsurgeon Henry Palmer, MD, followed by medical training at Chicago Medical College, later to become Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Dr. Williams died on August 4, 1931, at age 75. On September 9, 2004, the medical school celebrated the dedication of its 182-seat Daniel Hale Williams Auditorium in the McGaw Pavilion named in honor of the school's first African American graduate.

and on the same day,

 

in 1955,  E. Frederic Morrow was the first African American to serve in an executive position on a president’s staff at the White House. Morrow was a minister’s son who had graduated from Bowdoin College and was employed by the National Urban League and the NAACP before entering Army service during World War II. After the war, he obtained a law degree from Rutgers University and worked for the public affairs division at CBS. He was an adviser on business affairs in the Commerce Department before joining Eisenhower’s staff as Administrative Officer for Special Projects from 1955 to 1961. As the sole African American on a staff dealing with racial tensions related to integration, Morrow faced difficult personal and professional struggles at the White House. The Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. the Board of Education ruling, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the Little Rock crisis were the backdrop for Morrow’s White House years. On a staff with a civil-rights policy that was at best cautious, Morrow was often frustrated and angered. He lived at a time when qualified African Americans were excluded from high-level political positions. Morrow as a black "first" found relations within the president’s "official family" to be "correct in conduct, but cold." He published his autobiography, Black Man in the White House, in 1963 leaving a valuable account of his experience as a black man working in the president’s inner circle, including his disappointment with the indecision of Eisenhower’s civil rights policy.    -- courtesy, google.com and blackfacts.com