Catharine Deaver Lealtad

Catharine Deaver Lealtad (April 26, 1895 – January 30, 1989) was an American pediatrician and humanitarian worker. She was the first African-American graduate of Macalester College, where the Lealtad-Suzuki Center for Social Justice is named partly in her honor. Lealtad gained her medical degree at the University of Paris in 1933. She undertook humanitarian and public health work in Germany and China at the end of World War II as a commissioned officer in the US Public Health Service. Lealtad worked as a pediatrician in Sydenham Hospital in Harlem, New York, for many years. After her retirement, she provided medical care in Puerto Rico and Mexico. Macalester College awards the Lealtad Service to Society Award annually in her honor.

Early life Lealtad was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 26, 1895. Her mother, Ida Bradford Deaver Lealtad, had been a schoolteacher in Cleveland. Ida's great grandfather was a free Black man and schoolmaster (John Stewart Stanley) who migrated to Cleveland with his family from North Carolina. Her aunt, Verina Morton Jones, was a physician, social worker, and suffragist, whom Lealtad would call "a moving force" in her life.

Education and early career

Lealtad was the only black pupil in her high school class at the Mechanic Arts High School in St. Paul, and it was the first class to allow girls. In 1912, she graduated at the top of her class at the age of 17, and led the graduation as class valedictorian.

She then attended Macalester College. Lealtad graduated in 1915, majoring in chemistry and history. She was the first African-American graduate of the university. Lealtad resigned in protest at racial discrimination within the organization in 1919. Lealtad then worked briefly as associate secretary for the New York Urban League, before undertaking the role of assistant director of the branches of the civil rights organization, the NAACP, in 1920.

Lealtad became interested in pursuing a career in medicine. She trained as a laboratory technician and worked in a laboratory in New Jersey for three years. With the financial support of a French doctor, Phoebe Du Bois, Lealtad enrolled in medicine at Cornell University. with a thesis on chronic multifocal Langerhans cell histiocytosis, which was called Hand-Schüller disease at the time. She specialized in pediatrics. There, she began a lifelong friendship with another intern, Helen Octavia Dickens. Lealtad was discharged from the Corps in September 1947, with the rank of Surgeon Reserve—the equivalent of a major in the US Army. It is believed to be the first hospital in the US with African-American medical staff, and in 1943 it formally adopted an interracial policy. By the mid-1940s, approximately half the medical staff was Black.

Honors

Honor Scholarship Society, Macalester College, 1915. Lealtad was the first person granted two honorary degrees by Macalester College: Doctor of Science (1949), Doctor of Humane Letters (1979). Lealtad-Suzuki Center for Social Justice, Macalester College, named in her honor of Lealtad and Esther Torii Suzuki. Macalester College annual Alumni prize named in her honor: The Catharine Lealtad, Class of 1915, Service to Society Award.

Personal life When she returned to the US after her service in China, Lealtad bought a home in a Quaker-sponsored multiracial community in Connecticut.

Lealtad spent her last nine years in a Veterans Administration retirement home in Queens, New York. In 1983, she created an endowment to Macalester College for scholarships for African American, Latino, and Native Americans with strong high school records, which are still awarded in her name. She died in New York aged 93, on January 30, 1989. An obituary was published in The New York Times.