In honor of Black History Month, The Chronicle takes a look at Wilhelm Delano “Del” Meriwether, Duke’s first Black medical student and a world-class sprinter:
As Wilhelm Delano “Del” Meriwether watched the United States track team struggle against France during a 1970 track meet, he boldly told his wife, “Hey, I think I can beat those guys.”
Myrtle Meriwether waved her husband’s comment off. Del was not an athlete. He had neither a coach, nor any training experience. At the time, he was a 27-year-old hematologist who had become the first Black person to graduate from the Duke School of Medicine just three years prior.
But a year after Del made his ambitious declaration while lying in bed watching the American sprinters flounder on TV, he made good on his promise. A doctor by day but sprinter by night, Meriwether broke world records seemingly without breaking a sweat, eventually finding himself inches away from becoming an Olympian just two years after he stepped onto the track for the first time.
Despite the acclaim, Meriwether's track accolades constituted just one chapter of a long and dynamic career featuring civil rights activism, public health leadership and investment in underserved communities at home and abroad.
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Born on April 23, 1943, in Nashville, Tennessee, and raised in segregated Charleston, South Carolina, Meriwether displayed an aptitude for science from a young age. He appeared in the national science fair twice while attending Burke High School and worked in a veterinary hospital while still a student. By the time he graduated, Meriwether had been recognized by the American Veterinary Medical Association for his research on internal parasites found in dogs.
Impressed by his accolades, Michigan State University recruited Meriwether to its veterinary program in the fall of 1960. After a year at the school, however, he realized that his interests lay in human medicine, so he decided to switch to the pre-medical route.
Accordingly, after completing his MSU degree program in just three years, Meriwether ventured to Duke in 1963. He was the University’s first African American medical student and the only Black student in his class.
In a 2008 interview by Jessica Roseberry, then-oral history program coordinator at the Duke University Medical Center Archives, Meriwether said he applied to Duke at his father’s encouragement.
“Duke was not my first choice,” he said. “… During the sixties, Duke [alongside] a number of other schools in the South needed some guidance and pushed to diversify its student body, and as a result, I … agreed to come to Duke.”
He explained that several schools in the region were actively recruiting Black students in the wake of a new federal policy that mandated hospitals and medical institutions be racially integrated in order to qualify for federal funding. Despite the University’s delay in diversifying its student body, Meriwether maintained that “[t]he school itself was not a solid resistant entity.”
“[T]hey simply needed help, and with my father and others, we helped liberate a good institution,” he said. “Everyone benefited.”
As part of the admissions process, though, Meriwether was asked to come to Duke for an interview — an experience that almost convinced him to not enroll at the University. After his Sunday evening arrival at the Raleigh-Durham airport, a tired and hungry Meriwether made it to campus looking for something to eat.
The University cafeteria was closed, so Meriwether asked a Black woman on duty where he could find food. She replied, “there’s no place nearby for Black men and women to eat,” but when Meriwether pressed further, she eventually gave him vague directions to a place named “the Blue Light.”
But Meriwether was turned away by the restaurant’s owner, who stated that the young Black man “did not belong inside the restaurant with clients.” After a 10-minute standoff, an angry Meriwether left hungry.
He said he refrained from telling Duke’s administration about the incident. Once he was accepted, though, he made it a priority to push the University to change both its policies and the policies of private establishments that served Duke students to become more inclusive.
Influenced by the Civil Rights Movement, Meriwether advocated for increasing the diversity of students and faculty on campus. The hospital also integrated its wards while he was a student, though he noted he was not an “active” participant in the process, which went “smoothly” with the “blessing” of some University administrators.
While many of his peers who led integration efforts at other universities faced backlash and made national headlines, Meriwether did not find his experience at Duke to be “a huge event.”
“I don’t think that it’s always necessary to make a big to-do about something that is morally right and that needs to be done,” Meriwether said in the 2008 interview. “I think the quieter things can be done, the better.”
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In 1967, he graduated from Duke with honors.
Meriwether went on to pursue an internship at the University of Pennsylvania, working under former Duke professor James Wyngaarden, and in 1969, he moved to the Baltimore Cancer Research Center. It was then that he picked up running on the side, for “exercise and entertainment,” he said.
By June 1971, Meriwether was competing in the Amateur Athletic Union championships against world-record holders. Clad in an unconventional uniform of gold swimming trunks and black-and-white suspenders over a hospital T-shirt, he clocked a stunning nine seconds in the 100-yard dash. At the time, the feat had only been achieved by one other man. Meriwether’s time was deemed “wind-aided” — otherwise, he would hold the record today (though the event was replaced by the 100-meter dash in most competitions in 1970).
Meriwether picked up several national titles over the course of his running career. Representing the Baltimore Olympic Club, he logged a 9.6 100-yard in the South Atlantic AAU meet, a 9.5 in the Baltimore Municipal Games and a 9.4 at the All-Eastern. Meriwether’s sprinting escapades remained a side hustle; though he spent his nights training alone on the Johns Hopkins University track, his days were devoted to treating leukemia patients.
Still, the young hematologist’s prowess at the sport was undeniable. He was profiled by national outlets including The New York Times, Sports Illustrated and Time, and readers couldn’t get enough of the thrilling underdog tale.
But staying true to the shooting star storyline his ascendancy seemed to emulate, Meriwether’s moment in the spotlight was short-lived. In 1972, the fledgling track star lost out on a chance at that year’s Olympic Games due to a knee injury. After a similar injury took him out of the running in 1976, Meriwether retired from the sport to focus on his career in medicine.
Before retiring from running, Meriwether had completed his residency at the Ohio State University, then conducted hematology research at Harvard Medical School and Boston's Thorndike Memorial Laboratory before earning a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins.
He served as a 1973-74 White House Fellow, and in 1976, he was appointed director of the U.S. Public Health Service’s National lnfluenza Immunization Program amid fears of a swine flu epidemic. There, Meriwether led a team that helped immunize 40 million people against the virus by the end of the year.
In 1983, Meriwether moved to Gazankulu, South Africa, on a mission trip with his second wife, Nomvimbi, who was born and raised in the African country but studied in the United States as an adult. There, Meriwether became one of only six physicians available to treat half a million people.
The couple’s stay was only meant to last a year, but they ended up spending eight years serving the community, a period Meriwether looked back on as “the most rewarding of [his] life” in a 1997 interview with Sports Illustrated.
Some of his work entailed petitioning for supplies, teaching about birth control and treating patients at the rural Tintswalo Hospital. Many of Meriwether’s patients were women, children and elderly refugees who had been relocated from the neighboring country of Mozambique, then in the throes of civil war.
According to Meriwether, his experience of the American Civil Rights Movement and integrating Duke’s medical school prepared him to be a part of the South African anti-apartheid movement, which he characterized in 2008 as “the last civil rights movement on earth based on color.”
“I prefer to use the word ‘liberate,’ as opposed to merely ‘integrate,’” Meriwether said in the 2008 interview. “… My wife and I did not integrate South Africa. We helped liberate those who were in positions of leadership, as well as the masses who were discriminated against and confined.”
In 1990, Meriwether returned to the U.S. and served as an emergency doctor in the Washington, D.C. area. He has since provided emergency medical services in Pennsylvania and Maryland.
He and his wife founded the Meriwether Foundation in 2007, a nonprofit that operates “health, education, nutrition and economic empowerment programs in rural and peri-urban areas of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique.”
Meriwether — now 81 years old — has retired in Maryland, passing on the baton to the next generation of Duke’s Black medical students.
Editor’s note: Meriwether did not respond to The Chronicle’s request to interview ahead of publication.
Zoe Kolenovsky is a Trinity junior and news editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.
Srilakshmi Venkatesan is a Trinity first-year and a staff reporter for the news department.