GBCC Celebrates Black History Month

As we celebrate Black History Month, we are honored to recognize history makers with ties to Montgomery County.

Today, we spotlight Dr. Webster Sewell (1901-1998)

Webster Sewell was an African American physician who operated a medical clinic in Norbeck, Maryland. In January 1960, the Montgomery County Sentinel described Dr. Sewell as “the only Negro doctor in the county,” and reported that he was sentenced to a one-year prison term for performing an abortion on a White woman, thereby losing his medical license and depriving his patients of medical care.

Throughout his career, Webster Sewell represented the enterprising spirit of the Black hospital movement. On the local level, he served as an important resource in a 1947 Montgomery County survey on race relations and he was among the unnamed professionals who documented racial disparities in health care, among other issues. The survey concluded that “the system is apparently one of discrimination which relegates all Negroes to the lowest stratum of economic, political and social life.”

Sewell’s first love was the practice of medicine and, according to his daughter, Dorita Sewell, he “respected medicine and had a somewhat romantic view of it.”19 She remembers that he was an “excellent diagnostician … and read medical journals eagerly,” noting that his practice was large and that the majority of his patients were “the poor and neglected people of Montgomery County [many of whom] he cared for free.”20 Sewell planned to raise money to build a non-discriminatory hospital, and he had a building site and architectural plans for the facility in Norbeck.21 Dorita notes that “the community was raising money for it,” but he donated the funds in the 1960s to Suburban Hospital in Bethesda “where they had more liberal policies.”

Excerpts from https://montgomeryhistory.org/montgomery-county-story-african-american-topics/