Meharry Honors First White Graduate

Meharry Medical College, one of Nashville’s historically black institutes of higher education, is honoring its first white graduate this week.

Ralph Lachman graduated from the school in 1961. Lachman attended when Nashville’s Civil Rights leaders were holding sit-ins at downtown lunch counters to desegregate them. Lachman says he took part in the sit-ins because of his Jewish heritage.

“My family, my parents and I escaped from the Nazis and most of our family was wiped out in the concentration camps by the Nazis and I felt very strongly that I wanted to do this for my grandparents and the rest of my family to see that something like this would never happen in the United States.”

Lachman, who grew up in Philadelphia, says there were some cultural challenges being the only white student at an all-black college in the South. But he says no one questioned his involvement in the sit-in movement. Instead, he says many of his African-American classmates felt they couldn’t participate.

“Because they really, realistically, had the fear that if they were arrested, there would be a criminal charge and they would never be licensed as physicians which is something that never really crossed my mind, but of course, I was from a Northern state.”

Lachman will be honored at this week’s convocation of a new class of Meharry medical students. This week marks the first time Lachman has been in Nashville in over 50 years.

He now lives in California where he’s a specialist in dwarfism and fetal skeletal abnormalities.

Meharry will also be posthumously honoring its first white dental school graduate this week, Alfred Gorman. He passed away in 2003.