Dr. Clive O. Callender fought racism in medicine and built a movement that saved thousands of Black lives.
This article is part of “On Borrowed Time” a series by Anissa Durham that examines the people, policies, and systems that hurt or help Black patients in need of an organ transplant. Read part one, two, and three.
It’s the 1960s. Inside a patient’s hospital room, cardiac monitors beep softly in the dark. The faint rise and fall of a chest. The hum of machines. There are no cell phones or call buttons. The floor is hard, cold to the touch — not the kind of place you’d want to sleep.
On many nights, it’s where Dr. Clive O. Callender, then a young chief resident at Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., lays his head for a nap. Every few hours, he wakes to check on a patient who has just received a new kidney or liver.
It was an unconventional approach, but Dr. Callender, now 88, says it was necessary to keep them alive. He is, after all, one of the nation’s first Black transplant surgeons, a position that required him to be better than good. In the 1960s, he was carrying the weight of proving Black folks could be transplant surgeons on his slender shoulders. So Dr. Callender was taking no chances.
When he completed his surgical training in 1973 at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Callender says he became the third Black transplant surgeon in the world. Over the next six decades, he dedicated his entire career to saving lives and to ensuring Black people had equal access to organ transplants.
Without Dr. Callender, it’s questionable whether transplantation for Black folks would have gotten to where it is today. He is, without a doubt, a hidden figure in this space. Throughout his career, he performed more than 600 transplant surgeries, trained hundreds of doctors, and founded The National Minority Organ Tissue Transplant Education Program, or MOTTEP. He’s received more than 200 honors and awards from medical associations for his work. And nowadays, several awards are named after him.
But behind the white coat is a humble, God-fearing man who still grapples with an internal dilemma: Did his patients thrive at the expense of his family?
“I wish I could have spent more time at home with my wife and my children, that’s my only regret,” he says. “But you know, I truly believe that God came first, then my patients, and then my family.”
The Man Behind the White Coat
I met Dr. Callender for the first time on a rainy June day in Washington, D.C., at the place he’s spent most of his career, Howard University Hospital, which used to be Freedman’s Hospital. He’s a quiet but confident man with a razor-sharp memory. He can name every person he’s ever worked with: doctors he’s trained, the head of the National Institutes of Health in the ‘80s, and patients he’s transplanted.
Lately, his daughter, Dr. Ealena Callender, drives him to and from the hospital to the brick two-story Maryland home where they’ve lived since the late 1970s. After our initial meet and greet at the hospital, we headed off to the suburbs. It’s a 45-minute, one-way commute. Her Harlem-born and raised father doesn’t drive — he never learned. Ealena tells me that occasionally you’ll see foxes, deer, and squirrels roaming the area.
Inside the house, I left my shoes at the door, and Ealena showed me around downstairs. A light pink plush carpet covers the floors. White orchids and blush-colored curtains decorate the room. Family photos and a copy of the “New National Baptist Hymnal” sit atop an upright piano. In the living room, Callender’s favorite armchair sits in a corner. It’s where he prays at the start and end of each day.
A large poster of Dr. Callender’s late wife, Fern Irene Callender, catches my eye in the hallway. She died April 2 — just a few weeks before what would have been their 57th wedding anniversary. Since her mother’s passing, Ealena tells me she’s taken more time off work. But Dr. Callender hasn’t slowed down.
On a Mission to Increase Black Organ Donors
In 1963, when Dr. Callender graduated first in his class from Meharry Medical College, an HBCU in Nashville, organ transplantation had only been around for about a decade. He headed home to Harlem for a surgical residency — getting into the transplant space wasn’t on his mind. But Harlem Hospital, a teaching hospital affiliated with Columbia University, “treated me like a stepchild,” he says. So in 1969, he completed his residency at Freedman’s Hospital.
Not long after, Dr. Callender started sounding the alarm about disparities in organ allocation. It took more than a decade for people to listen. In southeastern states in the 1980s and ‘90s, Black patients had the highest rate of end-stage renal disease, a condition that eventually requires a kidney transplant. Yet they were less likely to qualify for transplantation, and fewer than 10% of organ donors were Black.
Part of the problem stemmed from how donor-recipient matches were made. Antigen profiles are different among racial groups, but for nearly 50 years, physicians identified and prioritized genetic HLA-B markers found primarily in white patients. The practice led to higher transplantation rates for white patients than Black ones.
In 2003, after persistent advocacy from Dr. Callender, the U.S. kidney allocation system was changed to eliminate priority for HLA-B similarity. The result: more transplants for minority patients and no drop in success rates.
“It really didn’t occur to me that I was doing anything special,” he says. “Even when you read papers now about the changes that have occurred as a consequence of my interventions, they don’t mention my name. It’s because of my speaking out, that’s what made the difference.”
While allocation issues were starting to improve, another question bothered Dr. Callender: why were Black Americans less likely to register as organ donors?
In 1978, a pilot study spearheaded by Dr. Callender and funded by Howard University Hospital asked 40 Black men and women in Washington, D.C., about their hesitancy to donate their organs. Dr. Callender and his team found five main reasons: lack of education about how many Black people need organs, religious beliefs and misperceptions, distrust of the medical system, fear of a premature declaration of death if a Black person is a registered donor, and a preference for Black donor organs to go to Black recipients.
At the start of the study’s interviews, only two participants were registered organ donors. But after a two-hour session, all 40 became donors. Published in 1982, the study set the stage for how to educate the Black community and other minority populations about organ donation.
Later that year, the National Kidney Foundation and Howard University Hospital initiated the District of Columbia Organ Donor Project. By 1989, monthly donor registrations jumped from 25 to 750. By 1990, the percentage of Black people surveyed through this project who later registered as organ donors rose from 7% to 24%.
In 1991, Dr. Callender conceptualized and founded MOTTEP to expand the work of educating Black, Brown, and other non-white people nationwide about organ donation. He initially asked for a $5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health Office of Minority Health but was offered just $400,000 to set up sites in Brooklyn, D.C, and Maryland. The following year, he got another $800,000. Four years later, in 1995, Dr. Callender and his team received a $6 million grant to expand to 15 cities.
“It’s unbelievable. It’s miraculous,” he says. “All we did was educate and empower the community. We let them do the job.”
“I’m thrilled and excited to say I’ve been part of MOTTEP,” he adds. “This is the kind of thing that has made my life worth living.”
‘She Was My Biggest Fan’
Fern Irene Marshall was born July 15, 1943, at Freedmen’s Hospital, the same hospital where she later worked as an operating room nurse. She met Dr. Callender during the fourth year of his residency when she began working with him.
In the early years of their marriage, balancing career and family was difficult. Ealena says her mom often told them Callender was breaking barriers and saving lives.
“She was my biggest fan. Whatever deficiencies that I had as a father, she made up for them as a wife and mother,” he says. “Everything I’ve done successfully is a consequence of her support. There’s nothing I’ve done in which she did not support me. Most of the credit is related to my God and my wife, and my family.”
His legacy is as much hers as it is his. When asked if he thinks he would’ve made it this far in his career without his wife, his response is immediate.
“I don’t know if I’d be alive without my wife,” he says.
The President Is Home
Within hours of his and his twin brother’s arrival in the world, their mother died from childbirth complications. His older sister, Gloria, named them. With his father often away working, Dr. Callender lived in various foster homes. He credits his aunt, who helped raise him, for introducing him to church.
At age 7, he dedicated his life to Christ and decided to become a medical missionary. His goal was to go to Africa and address the “souls of mankind.” But things took a turn for the worse in the 1940s when he contracted pulmonary tuberculosis at age 15. At the time, there was no cure for tuberculosis. After six months in the hospital, doctors removed half of his right lung. After another year in the hospital, he was finally healthy enough to return to school.
That near-death experience strengthened his faith — and his resolve to honor and glorify God by saving lives. It also informed the type of doctor he was determined to become — one rooted in community.
Throughout her childhood, Ealena remembers her dad’s bedtime stories — mini sagas about growing up with his twin brother in Harlem, his father working as a chef on segregated trains, and the time he lived with his stepmother. Every story added a little more detail and a little more color to the man she calls “daddy.”
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When he came home after long stretches at the hospital, it felt like the president walking through the front door. Immediately, she and her two siblings would grab onto him and persuade him to take them for a walk. “We would just say, ‘Walk, walk, daddy walk,’” she says.
Even when he was absent, his love as a father was constant.
“It hurts my feelings when he says he was a lousy father and a lousy husband,” Ealena says. “Even if he wasn’t physically here, he appreciated us and my mother to the utmost. He adored her and respected her. I don’t think he took her for granted. He appreciated the person she allowed him to be.”
Dr. Callender’s commitment to his craft deterred Ealena and her siblings from pursuing medicine — at least, initially. Ealena studied print journalism at Howard and joined the student newspaper, The Hilltop. After working as a reporter for a few years, including a stint at the Los Angeles Times, she felt a strong pull towards medicine, but she hesitated to switch careers. In her eyes, to be a doctor meant to practice with the same intensity as her dad — at the hospital for weeks on end.
“At some point, my mom said, ‘You don’t have to be your father,”’ Ealena says. “It sounds simple. But it was mindblowing. I didn’t think I could be a doctor if I wasn’t just like him.”
Ealena graduated from medical school in 2002. Now a practicing OB-GYN, she says her specialty helps her understand why her father was so devoted to his patients. They often sent pies, cakes, and macaroni and cheese home with him as thanks for saving their lives.
“My father’s legacy is infinite,” she says.
The Road to Transplant Surgery
It’s a miracle that Dr. Callender became a surgeon. After graduating from high school, he enrolled at Hunter College, one of the campuses in the City University of New York system. Once there, he failed chemistry, English, and history classes, and at one point, his GPA was only 1.8. Advisors took one look at his undergraduate grades and told him he wasn’t cut out for medicine. By his senior year, he raised his GPA to a 2.5, but needed a 3.5 to get into medical school. At the time, only two medical schools admitted Black students: Meharry and Howard.
His acceptance at Meharry “was to my classmates’ utter shock and mine as well,” Dr. Callender says. “My twin brother, sister, and father thought I was insane for wanting to become a doctor.”
Then the next hurdle came. Who would pay for it?
As Dr. Callender tells the story, his eyes water and his voice catches. To his surprise, Ebenezer Gospel Tabernacle in Harlem held a special service to raise the funds for his tuition. It’s a day he’s never forgotten.
Once he became board certified, he met a Nigerian medical student who told him that missionaries were needed in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. So, in 1970, Fern and Dr. Callender signed up to stay for five years. But after nine months, he returned to Washington, 50 pounds lighter due to illness. He later went back to Africa, alone. During those three months, he contracted malaria and lost another 25 pounds.
It became clear that being a medical missionary was not in the cards for him, so he decided to return to the U.S. and dedicate himself fully to transplant surgery. A few years later, in 1974, Dr. Callender founded the Howard University Hospital Transplant Center.
“I’ve been through a lot of impossible situations and I’ve learned that obstacles are only stepping stones to success,” he says.
Passing the Baton
Inside the fourth-floor hallways of Howard University Hospital, pictures of Callender line the walls. A corner conference room bears his name — it’s decorated with newspaper clippings, research papers, and photos of him performing transplant surgeries.
For decades, he’s mentored and trained hundreds of students, many of whom have gone on to become transplant surgeons themselves. Edward Cornwell III, now chair of the Department of Surgery, once trained under Callender. They’ve worked alongside each other for more than 40 years.
“He’s a man with a famous gaggling laugh,” Cornwell says.
Beau Kelly grew up bouncing between poor Black neighborhoods in Detroit and the Carolinas. He remembers seeing a lot of racism, disparities in health care, poverty, and drug addiction. This environment pushed him to study medicine, fueled by the desire to fix some of these broken systems.
Kelly, now a surgical director and liver transplant surgeon at Sierra Donor Services, says Dr. Callender changed his life while he was a med student at Howard through a presentation about organ transplantation. Callender became his mentor, and they text almost every day.
“I’ve never had a mentor tell me that they love me,” Kelly says. “He is the type of person who spends the majority of his time looking up. He never stops trying to achieve better.”
In 2010, Dr. Callender put his surgical instruments away. But he still teaches a class at Howard on transplantation ethics and professionalism. When asked if he’s considered retirement, the answer is straightforward — no.
“I haven’t worked a day in my life,” he says. “It’s been fun. I have no need to retire.”
With tears in his eyes, he offered thanks to the patients he’s taken care of and his family who’ve stood by his side. Without them, there would be no Dr. Callender.
“I gave. I gave all I could give.”
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Anissa Durham reported this story as one of the 2025 U.S. Health System Reporting fellows supported by the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Commonwealth Fund. The Commonwealth Fund also supports Word In Black’s health reporting.
