Roland T. Smoot

Roland T. Smoot, the first African-American faculty member and assistant dean at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, died of apparent heart arrhythmia January 25, 2006 in the hospital's emergency room. He was 78.

Dr. Smoot, who retired in 2004, was on his way to the hospital from his Ashburton home for a heart test when he was stricken on the Baltimore Metro.

"He was a quiet, gentle, committed and determined person who reminded me, in his own way, of Rosa Parks," said Dr. Levi Watkins, a Johns Hopkins surgeon and close friend who was a patient of Dr. Smoot's. He also was Dr. Smoot's physician and had operated on him for a heart condition 22 years ago.

In 1978, Dr. Smoot was named an assistant dean for student affairs at Hopkins and spent the next 26 years recruiting and counseling students at the school. He sought out promising minority students for careers in medical fields, entertained them at his home and kept in touch with them after they embarked on careers.

Family members said he worked with about 500 minority students during his tenure. "He was a solid, wise person who was a good judge of students and their potential," said Dr. Richard S. Ross, former dean of the medical school. "He was a truly admirable person."

Born in Washington, he was an only child. His father was a postal worker, and his mother did domestic work. He excelled at math and science as a child and went on to graduate with honors from Howard University's undergraduate and medical schools.

During World War II, he served in the Army, which enabled him to attend the university on the GI Bill. After residencies in Winston-Salem, N.C., and the Tuskegee Hospital for Disabled Negro Veterans in Tuskegee, Ala., he moved to Baltimore in 1960. While at Tuskegee, he met and married a registered nurse, the former Minnie Lee Richardson.

"He found a passion in internal medicine and planned to specialize in it despite the fact that there were only a handful of black specialists in the nation," Hopkins undergraduate student Claudette Onyelobi wrote about him for an oral history project in 2004.

Dr. Smoot joined the staff of Baltimore's old Provident Hospital on Division Street, which at a time of racial segregation served the city's African-American community. In the oral history, Dr. Smoot said that only two other medical institutions, the old Lutheran Hospital and Sinai Hospital, had admitting physicians who were black.

After settling in the Ashburton community, Dr. Smoot opened a private practice in the basement of his home, he said. He also recalled attending the grand rounds at Johns Hopkins on Saturdays - in which physicians visit patients and discuss their cases -and many times was the only black physician present. "He went there to learn to about medicine. They let him attend, and no one said anything," his wife said yesterday.

"Although Dr. Smoot thought he only stood out in the crowd because he was black, a professor of the medical school, Dr. Benjamin Baker, saw much more than that," the oral history noted. "Dr. Baker invited Dr. Smoot to become a member of the Johns Hopkins Hospital outpatient staff." The two physicians later became friends, family members said.

In 1963, Dr. Smoot was appointed chief of medicine at Provident Hospital, the same year Hopkins permitted Dr. Smoot to have admitting privileges - a first for an African-American physician at Hopkins. He was also named as a part-time instructor of medicine at the Hopkins medical school.

Dr. Smoot moved his private practice out of his home and went into a partnership with Dr. Donald Stewart and other physicians. They established the Garwyn Medical Center in the 2300 block of Garrison Blvd. initially to serve black patients. "My husband and his friends worried that it would be a risk at first, but it turned out very well," his wife said.

In 1974, he was named an assistant professor of medicine at Hopkins and he also joined the faculty of the University of Maryland medical school.

"His quiet strength as a leader and his genuine warmth as a human being were evident both inside and outside this institution," said Dr. Edward D. Miller, dean of the Hopkins medical school and chief executive officer of Johns Hopkins Medicine. "Quiet leadership is a difficult art, but Roland Smoot practiced it well."

Family members said he much enjoyed working with students who wanted to go into the medical profession.

"My position at Hopkins Med helped in the fact that I got to speak to students who were having a lot of problems. I got to help them resolve those problems," Dr. Smoot said in an interview for a Hopkins publication. "I got to reassure them that the situations they were in were not unusual and that people had been in similar situations and had made it through OK. ... It was great at Hopkins not only because it was one of the leading places to practice medicine, but also because minorities had a passion and desire to pursue excellence in medicine."

In 1983, he was elected as the first African-American president of the 6,000-member Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland, the state medical society. Earlier, he served as president of the Baltimore City Medical Society. "He wasn't really accepted at first in these groups, but he hung in there and worked his way up to the top," his wife said.

Dr. Smoot sold his practice in 1991 to permit more time for his research into a possible relationship between cow's milk and cancer, his wife said.

Baltimore Sun, January 27, 2006