This Juneteenth, Veterinary Medicine Still Has a Long Way to Go

One school has educated more than 70 percent of the nation's Black veterinarians. That fact alone says everything about how far this profession still has to travel.

Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Texas finally learned they were free, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had already been signed. The gap between the law on paper and the freedom actually delivered is, in many ways, the story of this country. It is also, in a much smaller but very real way, the story of veterinary medicine.

A Profession That Still Looks Like 1965

Veterinary medicine remains one of the least racially diverse professions in the United States, a fact that has not meaningfully shifted in over a decade of public attention to the problem. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Black veterinarians make up only about 1.2 to 1.3 percent of the profession, depending on the year and survey cited, while the U.S. population is roughly 14 percent Black. White veterinarians make up somewhere between 83 and 91 percent of the field, depending on the dataset.

Veterinary school enrollment tells a slightly better but still sobering story. As of 2023, roughly 80 percent of students in AVMA accredited veterinary schools were white, with Black or African American students making up only about 3 percent of the student body. That is progress compared to where the profession started, but progress measured against a very low bar.

In 2025, the AVMA Council on Education (COE) removed the requirement for veterinary schools to report student race data, despite formal feedback submitted during the public comment period by veterinary professionals, including leaders in academic veterinary medicine. Critics argue that without collecting and reporting demographic data, it will become increasingly difficult to track who is entering veterinary programs, measure changes in student diversity over time, or assess whether efforts to broaden representation within the profession are having an impact.

The Weight Carried by a Single Institution

Here is the number that should stop every veterinary professional in their tracks: more than 70 percent of Black veterinarians currently practicing in the United States graduated from one single institution, Tuskegee University's College of Veterinary Medicine.

Tuskegee, a historically Black university, is the only veterinary school in the country situated on an HBCU campus. It was conceptualized by Dr. Frederick Douglass Patterson and opened its doors in 1945 with an inaugural class of just five students. Since then, more than 3,000 veterinarians have graduated from its program, becoming, almost by default, the backbone of Black representation across the entire profession.

That kind of concentration is not a sign of veterinary medicine's progress. It is a sign of how little weight every other accredited veterinary school in the country has carried in this work. There are more than 30 other accredited veterinary schools in the United States. The fact that one HBCU has had to do the heavy lifting for the entire profession's Black representation is itself the headline.

The Pioneers Who Opened the Door

The history of Black veterinarians in America stretches back further than most people realize. Dr. Augustus Nathaniel Lushington became the first Black veterinarian licensed in the United States in 1897, after earning his degree from the University of Pennsylvania. It would take more than fifty years before a Black woman entered the profession. In 1949, two Black women earned their veterinary degrees in the same year: Dr. Alfreda Johnson Webb, a Tuskegee graduate, and Dr. Jane Hinton, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. William Waddell, also a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, was the first member of the AVMA.

More recent history shows what becomes possible when the door stays open even a little wider. Dr. Michael Bailey, a 1982 Tuskegee graduate, was elected in 2024 as the first Black president of the American Veterinary Medical Association. Dr. Ruby L. Perry and Dr. Willie Reed, both Tuskegee alumni, have received the AVMA Lifetime Achievement Award. Dr. Athema Etzioni, a 2001 Tuskegee graduate, became the first Black woman board certified in veterinary clinical pathology in 2014. Each of these milestones came years, sometimes decades, after they arguably should have.

What Black Veterinarians Are Still Navigating Today

Representation gaps do not stay confined to enrollment numbers. They show up in exam rooms, in hiring decisions, and in the daily experience of being a Black veterinary professional in an overwhelmingly white field.

Black veterinary professionals have described being mistaken for support staff, questioned by clients who ask to see a different doctor, and met with comments about their appearance from people who simply did not expect a Black veterinarian to walk through the door. These are not relics of an earlier era. They are present day experiences described by veterinarians and technicians currently practicing.

It is also common to hear Black veterinary students say they never saw a veterinarian who looked like them growing up, and that the absence of that representation made the profession feel like it simply wasn't built for them. That is not a small detail. Children begin forming ideas about what careers are available to them as early as age seven or eight, which means the lack of visible representation in veterinary medicine is shaping decisions long before anyone applies to vet school.

Why This Matters Beyond the Numbers

Diversity in veterinary medicine is not simply a matter of fairness, though fairness alone would be reason enough. It directly affects the people and animals this profession serves. A Black pet owner in Birmingham, Alabama spent nearly two months searching for a Black veterinarian to treat her puppy and to serve as a role model for her children, eventually giving up the search entirely. That is not a hypothetical access problem. That is what a 1.2 percent representation rate looks like from the other side of the exam room table.

The profession is also facing a veterinarian shortage driven by burnout, the cost of veterinary education, and rising demand for care. A field that draws from a wider, more representative pool of talent is a field with a deeper bench to pull from. Closing the diversity gap and closing the workforce gap are not two separate problems. They are the same problem, viewed from different angles.

Where Vet Candy Stands

Vet Candy exists to serve every veterinary professional and every veterinary student, and that mission only means something if it includes confronting the parts of this profession that have not caught up to where they need to be. Juneteenth is, at its core, a day about the distance between freedom promised and freedom delivered. Veterinary medicine has its own version of that distance, measured in decades of enrollment data and a single HBCU shouldering a weight no institution should have to carry alone.

Closing that gap will take more than a holiday acknowledgment. It will take continued investment in HBCU veterinary programs, intentional mentorship for Black veterinary students and early career veterinarians, and a willingness from every other accredited veterinary school in the country to ask why one institution has had to do so much of this work for so long.

This Juneteenth, Vet Candy is recognizing the veterinarians, students, and institutions who have carried this profession's diversity work largely on their own, and recommitting to the idea that veterinary medicine should look like the country it serves.