The American Medical Association, the US’ largest medical association on Thursday issued a formal apology for its historical antipathy toward African American doctors, including policies that effectively restricted membership to whites.

The apology is among a number of national initiatives to reduce racial disparities in medicine and to recruit more African American to become doctors and to join the Medical Association. According to 2006 data on AMA’s Web site, less than 2 percent of its members were black and fewer than 3 percent of the nation’s 1 million medical students and physicians were black, although blacks represent roughly 13 percent of the US population.

Also, the apology is the result of an analysis made by a panel of experts on the history of the racial divide in medicine. The report is due to be published in the July 16 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The report’s lead author, Robert B. Baker, professor of philosophy at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and director of the Union Graduate College-Mount Sinai School of Medicine Bioethics Program, said the apology is important because “a heritage of discrimination is evident in the under-representation of African Americans in medicine generally and in the AMA in particular,” the Washington Post reports.

This is not the AMA’s first apology for its discriminatory history. Three year ago, Dr. John Nelson, then AMA’s president, offered a similar apology during a meeting on improving health care and eliminating disparities, sponsored by the government’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

The previous year, the AMA joined the National Medical Association, a black doctor’s group and other minority doctors' groups in forming the Commission to End Health Care Disparities.

“By confronting the past we can embrace the future. The AMA is committed to improving its relationship with minority physicians and to increasing the ranks of minority physicians so that the workforce accurately represents the diversity of America's patients,” Ronald M. Davis, the immediate past president of the AMA, said in a statement posted Thursday on the AMA Web site.