NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Bloomberg’s Bloomberg Philanthropies organization announced it’ll make a $600 million gift to the foundations of 4 historically black medical schools.

Bloomberg, a former New York mayor and the billionaire founding father of Bloomberg LP, will make the announcement Tuesday in New York throughout the annual convention of the National Medical Association, an advocacy group for African-American doctors.

“This gift will empower new generations of black doctors to create a healthier and more equitable future for our country,” Bloomberg said in a press release.

African Americans fare worse in health than white Americans, an Associated Press series reported last yr. Experts say increasing physician representation is one solution that might reverse these long-standing inequities. In 2022, only 6% of U.S. doctors were black, although African Americans make up 13% of the population.

The gifts are amongst the most important private donations to historically black colleges or universities, with $175 million going to Howard University College of Medicine, Meharry Medical College and Morehouse School of Medicine. Charles Drew University of Medicine & Science will receive $75 million. Xavier University of Louisiana, which is opening a brand new medical school, may even receive a $5 million grant.

The gifts will greater than double the dimensions of the three medical schools’ endowments, Bloomberg Philanthropies reports.

The pledge follows a $1 billion pledge Bloomberg made in July to Johns Hopkins University, which suggests most medical students will now not pay tuition. The 4 historically black medical schools are still working with Bloomberg Philanthropies to determine how the most recent donations to their foundations shall be used, said Garnesha Ezediaro, who leads Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Greenwood Initiative.

The initiative, named for the community that was devastated within the Tulsa, Oklahoma, race massacre greater than 100 years ago, was originally a part of Bloomberg’s campaign because the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. After dropping out of the race, he asked his philanthropy to tackle efforts to reduce the racial wealth gap, and $896 million has been given to this point, including this latest gift to medical schools, Ezediaro said.

In 2020, Bloomberg awarded the identical medical schools a complete of $100 million, which was primarily intended to reduce debt burden for enrolled students who the colleges said were at serious risk of losing the power to proceed their education due to financial burdens exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“When we talked about helping to ensure the safety and support of the next generation of Black physicians, we meant it literally,” Ezediaro said.

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Valerie Montgomery Rice, president of Morehouse School of Medicine, said the gift reduced a mean of $100,000 in debt for enrolled medical students. She said the gift helped her school significantly increase fundraising.

“But our fund and its size were still a challenge, and we were very vocal about that. And he heard us,” she said of Bloomberg and the most recent donation.

In January, the Lilly Endowment donated $100 million to The United Negro College Fund to pool funds for 37 HBCUs. That same month, Spelman College, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta, received a $100 million gift from Ronda Stryker and her husband, William Johnston, chairman of the Greenleaf Trust.

Denise Smith, deputy director of upper education policy and senior fellow at The Century Foundation, said the gift to Spelman is the most important single donation to an HBCU she knows of, making the comment before Bloomberg Philanthropies’ announcement Tuesday.

Smith is the writer of a 2021 report on the financial disparity between HBCUs and other higher education institutions, including the failure of many states to fulfill guarantees to fund historically black land-grant colleges. As a result, she said philanthropic giving has played a serious role in sustaining HBCUs and pointed to billionaire writer MacKenzie Scott’s donations to HBCUs in 2020 and 2021 as the start of a brand new chain response of support from other major donors.

“These following donations are the kind of boost and support that these institutions need at this time,” Smith said.

Dr. Yolanda Lawson, president of the National Medical Association, said she was “relieved” to hear in regards to the donations to the 4 medical schools. After the Supreme Court decision last yr invalidating affirmative motion and attacks on programs designed to foster inclusivity and equity at schools, she predicts the 4 schools will play an excellent larger role in training and increasing the variety of black doctors.

“This opportunity and this investment not only impacts these four institutions, but it impacts our country. It impacts the health of the nation,” she said.

Utibe Essien, a physician and assistant professor on the David Geffen School of Medicine on the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies racial disparities in treatment, said greater investment, including in earlier educational support before highschool and college, could impact the variety of black students who resolve to go to medical school.

He added that he believes the Supreme Court’s decision on positive discrimination and opposition to efforts to end historic racial discrimination and inequality are influencing the alternatives students make.

“Some trainees who are thinking about entering this space have a hard time seeing some of that backlash and continuing it,” he said. “Again, I think we’re in a spiral where in five to 10 years we’re going to see a troubling decline in the number of diverse people in our field.”