Aletha Maybank, who became the American Medical Association’s first chief equity officer five and half years ago, is leaving the organization.
Maybank, a widely respected health equity advocate, led the organization to reckon with its own racist past. The AMA excluded Black physicians from membership for more than a century and paid scant attention to racist practices of one of its own presidents, J. Marion Sims. In a 2021 report that Maybank oversaw, the AMA admitted to a long litany of troubling actions, including that Sims tested surgical procedures on Black women without anesthesia and that AMA policies wanted to ban “irregular-bred pretenders,” as they termed Native American doctors, from practicing medicine.
During Maybank’s tenure, the 177-year-old organization took accountability for playing a role in the nation’s deep racial health disparities and vowed to help dismantle white supremacy and racism within medicine. To many, such work was considered long overdue.
“Dr. Maybank really brought the AMA into the modern era in terms of grappling with its legacy and taking on the need to repair the ways organized medicine has failed to care for African Americans in this country,” said Mary Bassett, director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.
The departure may come as a surprise to many health equity advocates who have lauded Maybank’s work and also acknowledged the difficult and political nature of her position. She said Monday the decision was her own and came at a time she was hoping to craft a new venture — and an entirely new way — to work on health equity and improving medicine outside of a large organization. “Of course it’s bittersweet,” Maybank told STAT of her decision to step down. “I’m proud of the work.”
Maybank said she plans to launch a new venture at the intersection of art and medicine that will focus on the emotional power of narrative and storytelling to change people’s attitudes and will, and that the idea for this new path was borne from the work she has done at the AMA. “That’s one thing I’ve learned,” she said. “The will to do something to change the system comes from a deeper emotional context.”
Maybank’s stepping down comes at a time when many in the field of health equity are facing challenges to their work, including the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that colleges and universities cannot use race as a primary factor in admissions, something that could decrease the number of Black medical students over time, and other legal efforts to dismantle and defund programs focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“I’m worried. Following the murder of George Floyd, we saw a real sea change in this country and in organized medicine and public health in particular to confront racism. The backlash has been so swift it has really surprised me” said Bassett. “I’m worried that whoever takes this on next will be confronting a much less receptive world.”
The AMA said in its statement it would begin a search to find a replacement. Hinting at the sometimes difficult situations Maybank found herself in while confronting racism head on from within a long politically conservative organization, James Madera, AMA’s executive vice president and CEO in a statement thanked Maybank for taking on difficult work and “for enduring sometimes harsh criticisms.”
Maybank’s work to create change at the AMA has been praised by many in the field of health equity. “That work is hard to do in a longstanding institution where policies are really baked in,” said Félix Manuel Chinea, director of health equity and inclusion strategy at Doximity. “Getting all these people who hold power at a large organization to be on board with this work is a testament to her.”
Maybank acknowledged that some working in health equity might feel deflated by seeing her leave such a powerful position, but said she would continue working on equity and “optimal health for all” in her new work and that others would continue her work at the AMA. “That message of persistence doesn’t change,” she said. Previously, Maybank was deputy commissioner and the founding director of the Center for Health Equity at the New York City Health Department.
She said she believed the AMA remained deeply committed to the anti-racist work she pushed within the organization and praised its leaders, specifically the AMA House of Delegates, for agreeing to create her position in the first place and supporting her work. “That advocacy often doesn’t get seen,” she said.
In an interview with STAT last year, Maybank discussed her achievements and said one way she creates hope is by reminding people “we’re part of a legacy of people who believe and know that they deserve dignity … that legacy is a beautiful legacy. It’s a painful legacy, and an exhausting legacy.”