Vivien Thomas with His Vanderbilt Lab Colleagues

Many Vanderbilt lab technicians were Black men, all of whom were paid low salaries. Mr. Thomas made friends easily and quickly bonded with his fellow lab techs. In this 1940 photograph, Thomas is sandwiched in between Mr. Andrew Manlove (left), who was the younger brother of his best friend, Mr. Charles Manlove. To Thomas’s right is Mr. Samuel Waters.

After working at Vanderbilt for ten years, Thomas’s supervisor, Alfred Blalock, received a much-desired promotion to be chief of surgery in Baltimore, Maryland at the medical institutes of Johns Hopkins University, which was segregated. He wanted Thomas to come with him. When the head of surgery at Vanderbilt told Thomas that he’d lose his job when Blalock left for Hopkins, the Thomases realized they had to move to Baltimore. Once at Hopkins, Thomas learned that the only other Black employees at Hopkins were janitors and housekeepers. All the other lab technicians were white men who mostly ignored him because he was Black: he’d lost the workplace comradery he’d enjoyed at Vanderbilt. He felt lonely and isolated at work for the first time.