BATON ROUGE — LSU School of Medicine first opened its doors in New Orleans in 1931, but didn’t see its first Black graduate until 1970. Dr. Claude Jenkins Tellis went on to spend decades working as a pulmonologist in the Baton Rouge area. When Dr. Tellis graduated from medical school, only 2.2 percent of doctors in the US were Black. Today, Black doctors make up just more than five and a half percent of active physicians, even though Black Americans account for nearly 14 percent of the US population. Breaking barriers at LSU Dr. Tellis, now 81, vividly remembers his
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