Undertaker’s Son Built Medical School With a Mission : Sullivan Acclaimed as a Man of Vision

In this city, he is known as one of the “Atlanta Huxtables”--an allusion to the popular Bill Cosby family sitcom in which dad is a doctor and mom is a lawyer, and both are impressively upwardly mobile.

But, friends and associates say, the real life story of Louis Wade Sullivan is more inspiring than any TV tale. Sullivan, who turned 55 last month, is president of the Morehouse School of Medicine and President-elect George Bush’s controversial leading candidate for secretary of health and human services.

“That a man could start where he started and achieve the kind of eminence he’s achieved is remarkable,” said Anna Grant, chairwoman of the sociology department at Morehouse College. “He’s an uncommon person. He’s the kind of person who should be lifted up and rewarded.”

Father Was Undertaker

Where Sullivan started was in the rural southwestern Georgia town of Blakely, population 6,000. His father was an undertaker there before moving the family to Atlanta. “He was just a boy when I knew him, but he was a fine fellow and his folks were good people,” said Earl F. (Tige) Pickle, 74, a retired columnist for the weekly Early Country News and one of the few townspeople who remembers the family.

Sullivan’s success includes taking a small medical program that started out on a shoestring at Morehouse College and dramatically turning it into a full-fledged medical college with a unique mission: to graduate physicians who would forsake big bucks and plush offices to work in impoverished inner-city neighborhoods and rural areas in the South.

“We tell them they’re not going to starve if they become a family physician in a small community,” Sullivan once said in an interview in his precise, deep voice. “They may not have the six-figure or higher income of a neurosurgeon in a big metropolitan area, but there are contributions and impact that have other rewards that cannot be measured in terms of income--like what they’re doing with their life.”

His supporters say that kind of vision and his wide-ranging experience in health care services make Sullivan a natural for the job as secretary of health and human services.

“He is very knowledgeable about the problems one finds in hospitals and medical practice and about the problems of state and federal legislation and regulations,” said Royce Diener, chairman of the Beverly Hills-based AMI, a Fortune 500 health care company on whose board of directors Sullivan sits.

What Sullivan doesn’t know, Diener added, he picks up fast. “When he first came on our board, it was his first experience with a New York Stock Exchange-listed public company, and when we got on the subjects that related to that aspect of our business, he would say: ‘I don’t know a lot about this, but it’s a great learning opportunity.’ And believe me, he’s a quick study.”

That is not surprising. After the family moved from Blakely to Atlanta when Sullivan was young, he distinguished himself in the often fiercely competitive intellectual environment of Atlanta’s black public schools and colleges.

He was graduated from Booker T. Washington High School--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s alma mater--in 1950 as class salutatorian and then earned an undergraduate degree with highest honors in 1954 from Morehouse College, often called the “Black Harvard of the South.” He went on to earn his doctoral degree in medicine with honors at Boston University in 1958 and completed his internship and medical residency at New York Hospital, Cornell Medical Center.

At Morehouse, his friends affectionately dubbed him “der Kopf” --German for “the head.”

“It was our way of referring to the singleness of his academic and scholastic purpose,” said Dr. Ezra Davidson, chairman of the obstetrics and gynecology department at Charles R. Drew Medical School in Los Angeles.

Sullivan’s professional career includes stints as an instructor at Harvard Medical School and a professor at Boston University’s medical college.

A member of the Institute of Medicine and the American College of Physicians, he also was the founding president of the Assn. of Minority Health Professions Schools and a major organizer of the National Black Leadership Initiative on Cancer--a disease in which blacks often are at higher risk and have poorer survival rates than whites.

In 1975, he returned to Morehouse as director of the school’s medical education program. In 1978, he became founding director of the Morehouse School of Medicine. In the space of a decade, he managed to turn what was a two-year program with limited resources and little reputation into an accredited four-year school with almost 160 alumni working around the country.

“I think he’s an excellent administrator,” said Dr. Beverly Simons, a Morehouse medical graduate who now works at the New Lower Richland Medical Center in rural Eastover, S.C. “It would be health and human service’s loss if his nomination were blocked. He works well within governmental circles.”

Sullivan also has a close ally where it counts--in the President-elect’s office. He and Bush became friends in 1982 when Bush was invited to speak at the Morehouse medical school. Later that year, Sullivan was one of three black leaders who accompanied the Bushes on a seven-nation trip to Africa.

Barbara Bush on Board

In 1983, Bush’s wife, Barbara, was asked to join the board of trustees for the medical school, which became independent from Morehouse College in 1981. Sullivan credited the soon-to-be First Lady with vigorous recruiting efforts for the school’s campaign to raise $15 million.

Sullivan introduced Mrs. Bush to the audience on the last night of the Republican National Convention in New Orleans this year, and he and his wife, E. Ginger Sullivan--who has a law degree but does not practice--are frequent guests of the Bushes in Washington.

Not all of Sullivan’s colleagues think highly of him. One instructor at the Morehouse medical school compares him unfavorably to Booker T. Washington, the turn-of-the-century black educator who founded Tuskegee University, and to the fictional black university professor Dr. Bledsoe in Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man.”

“He is an individual who is shaped very much by the sources of his funding, which is mainly white philanthropy,” said the instructor, who requested anonymity. “He’s very charming, very bright and has an excellent command of names. But his prescription for education is very much that of the Booker T.’s and Dr. Bledsoe’s among black Southern college presidents--playing to white philanthropists and to segregationists in the state Legislature for funding.”

The reputation of Sullivan’s school also was tarnished earlier this year when it was disclosed that it had given a four-year contract as a consultant and guest lecturer at $675 a month to then-Atlanta county Commissioner A. Reginald Eaves. Eaves reportedly gave only two lectures. Meanwhile, he voted for county funds for the school and sought to gain greater influence for it at Grady Hospital, the downtown public hospital with which the school is affiliated.