Levi Watkins Jr.

Levi Watkins Jr. grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, in the city where the civil rights movement's bus boycott began. In 1955, at eleven years old, he took part in the boycott, and he later joined the King-supervised youth group that drove parishioners to church so they could keep the boycott going. The movement's habits of persistence showed up again in his career: he kept applying where the doors were closed, then held those doors open behind him.

In May 1966, he became the first African American admitted to Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where no other Black student was enrolled during his four years. He graduated in 1970 as the school's first African American medical graduate. He started a general surgery residency at Johns Hopkins in 1971, and in 1978 became the institution's first Black chief resident in cardiac surgery.

On February 4, 1980, Watkins performed the first implantation of an automatic defibrillator in a human heart. The device, developed by his Johns Hopkins colleague Michel Mirowski and other collaborators, detects dangerously irregular heartbeats and corrects them. Watkins's operation brought it out of the laboratory and into patient care, a step that has since saved millions of lives. At Johns Hopkins, his work also included recruiting minority medical students and encouraging surgeons as they built their careers. Robert Higgins later recalled receiving Watkins's support at successive stages of his own career.

That recruiting work was deliberate. In 1979, concerned about the shortage of minority students and faculty at Johns Hopkins, he joined the university's admissions committee; in 1983 he was appointed to the medical school's admissions board, and the recruitment, retention and graduation rates for minority students climbed in the years that followed.

After Watkins died in April 2015, Johns Hopkins surgery faculty established a memorial lectureship in his name. Its first lecture, delivered by surgeon Edward Cornwell that October, honored his work in inclusion, surgical excellence and mentorship. In June 2023, Johns Hopkins named its Outpatient Center for Watkins, putting the name of the Montgomery-born surgeon on a building where thousands of patients receive care each year.

He was thirty-five years old at the time of the operation.