The Education of Borden Scott: Graduating from Meharry

On March 20, 1908, The Nashville Globe wrote, “The invitations of the faculty and the graduating class of 1908 of Meharry Medical, Dental and Pharmaceutical College for the forty-second anniversary of the institution, are out to score of friends of the faculty and the students.”

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86064259/1908-03-20/ed-1/seq-4/>

 It continued:

"The class of 1908 numbers, according to the invitation and the class roll, one hundred and eleven, from the medical to the nurse-training department…

The commencement exercises for the class of 1908 of Meharry will be held Tuesday evening, March 31, at 7:30 o’clock in the spacious Ryman Auditorium. The new candidates for the doctors of medicine, dentistry and pharmacy will hear their baccalaureate sermon Sunday, March 29, at 11 o’clock in the Meharry Auditorium. Bishop Evans Tyree, D.D., has been selected to deliver this sermon. At the exercises at Ryman Auditorium on Tuesday, March 31, the principal feature will be the address to the graduating class by Hon. W.T. Vernon, Register of the Treasury of the United States…

Meharry Medical College is, no doubt, the largest, most useful and most widely known medical school in the United States for Negroes. The attention of thousands of people is drawn upon Nashville each year to these exercises. Hundreds of visitors from all parts of the country take advantage of this occasion to visit Nashville and students are here attending school from all over the world.”

Our Sydney Borden Scott, my 3x Great-Grandmother Scoatney Scott’s younger half-brother, was one of them. His name appears in the list of graduates for Meharry Medical College, in their 1907-1908 Catalogue with Announcements for 1908-1909.

Used with the permission of the Meharry Medical College Archives and Special Collections

But didn’t Borden just start there in 1906? How did he graduate so fast? Great questions! Borden should have graduated in 1910. According to the college catalogue in the year that he began, work in “the medical branches” at an approved college or university after having received a Bachelor’s Degree could qualify him for early graduation, if those courses met the standards for medical instruction. Or, he could receive “time credits” for working a certain number of hours in physics, chemistry, osteology, human or comparative anatomy, histology, embryology, physiology, and materia medica. Perhaps a combination of courses at Atlanta Baptist College and work experience at the Panama Canal (the nature of which I don’t yet know) qualified him? Even still, the catalogue notes that with the above qualifications, a graduate still needed “not less than 31 months” of study at Meharry, so the mystery lingers. And yet, Borden was one of five students – of a Freshman class of 75 – who entered with degrees from earlier study and graduated in 2 years from Meharry in 1908, so it was not unheard of.

Did anyone from his family attend the graduation? His father Solomon seems to have passed away in 1895 or 1896, but mother Nellie is still alive. (I’ll write about both of these soon!) Did she attend from Georgia, perhaps with a few of his siblings, like Scoatney, Masonia, James Solomon, John William, or Lula? If so, what was it like for this woman, who had been born in the 1830s, well before the end of slavery, to see her free-born son graduate from medical school? I can only begin to imagine.

And how did Borden himself feel? I wish I knew straight from his mouth or his hand, but haven’t found the records…yet. What I can tell you with much more certainty is what he heard that day, because it was reported not only in The Nashville Globe, but as far away as in The Washington (DC) Bee!

Meharry's commencement was reported on under the heading of "The Week in Society" in the Washington Bee on 11 April 1908.

The Globe contains a thorough rundown of every song and every speaker in the program – click here if you’d like to read it: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86064259/1908-04-03/ed-1/seq-1/. The article concludes with a list of graduates of each program. Here’s our Borden:

The Nashville globe. 03 April 1908. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86064259/1908-04-03/ed-1/seq-8/>

The Bee notes that “The exercises had been arranged with great care by the faculty and members of the graduating classes and were of unusual interest and appropriateness and successfully executed. The music both vocal and instrumental were of a very high character and rendered with singular beauty.” But it focuses its reporting on the keynote speech of the Honorable W.T. Vernon, Register of the Treasury of the United States. Sitting in the audience, surrounded by young men and women of whom some were, like him, just one generation removed from slavery, here is just a bit of what Borden heard:

“Men of the class of 1908, your mission is indeed lofty. To you will be afforded the opportunity of dealing with the structural side of the race, and broader than race will be your influence, in that their destiny affects our common country and all humanity. Then let us to the task of dealing with our problem manfully and fearlessly as becomes the future leaders of a confiding, struggling race. Your lives must harmonize with the dominant sentiment of this progressive age…

Today at birth every child has opportunities surpassing the dreams of all past ages The accumulated knowledge of the world, through centuries grown is yours...Remember that the achievements of the past are an earnest of the possibilities of the future, and that no man of impartial view can honestly predict other than our final success…

Then, members of the graduating class, go heal the sick, the halt, and the blind, so that it may be said of you, as it was said of Hippocrates, the great father of medicine, “His was the ambition which sought the aggrandizement of self in encompassing the happiness of others; his the wished-for glory, whose throne was contemporary gratitude, and whose crown was the blessings of after ages.”

I love reading these words, and imagining how he felt listening to them. But what I love even more than that is what I’m about to show you. Because the 1907-1908 Catalogue for Meharry Medical College includes not only a list of graduates, but a class photo as well! And somewhere in this image of students and professors – the men and women Borden sat and learned alongside and from - is our Sydney Borden Scott himself:

Used with the permission of the Meharry Medical College Archives and Special Collections.

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Do you have a bigger, clearer version of this image, with names that are easier to read? (The published Catalogue was quite small.) Are you descended from someone else in this photo? Or do you just have a reflection to share? Let me know in the comments – I’d love to hear from you!