The North Carolina Dental Society was founded in 1856. For more than a century it did not admit Black dentists. This was not an oversight or an administrative gap — it was policy, enforced by the same legal and social framework that excluded Black professionals from every organized institution in the state. Black dentists in North Carolina who wanted professional development, peer exchange, continuing education, and collective advocacy had one option: build their own organization. They did. The Old North State Dental Society — named for North Carolina’s historic nickname — became the professional home for Black dental practitioners in the state, providing what the segregated mainstream society refused to provide, and doing it with the same professionalism and institutional rigor that the exclusionary organization claimed as its exclusive domain.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Black health care professionals across the South organized multi-professional groups — small associations of physicians, pharmacists, and dentists in the same community who gathered to share knowledge, maintain professional standards, and support one another in the absence of access to white professional organizations. These groups served multiple purposes simultaneously. They maintained clinical competency in practitioners who had no other access to professional development. They promoted public health awareness in Black communities that were systematically underserved by public health infrastructure. They advocated for fair and equitable state and federal health laws. And they created the organizational experience and institutional knowledge that would eventually produce formal professional societies. The Old North State Dental Society grew from this tradition.
The ONSDS operated as the professional organization for Black dentists in North Carolina through the entire Jim Crow era — through decades when Black dental students could not attend the University of North Carolina’s dental school, when Black dentists could not join the state dental society, when Black patients in many communities had no access to dental care at all because there were no Black dentists nearby and white dentists either refused to treat Black patients or treated them in segregated waiting rooms and under inferior conditions. The ONSDS trained its members, maintained professional standards, and connected North Carolina’s Black dental community to the National Dental Association — founded in 1913 as the national organization for Black dental professionals excluded from the American Dental Association.
The North Carolina Dental Society did not admit African American members until the 1970s. By that point the ONSDS had been operating for the better part of a century — maintaining professional standards, developing practitioners, and serving communities that the mainstream organization had never served. Formal integration did not dissolve the ONSDS. It continued to operate because the communities it served continued to need it, because the health disparities it existed to address had not disappeared with desegregation, and because the institutional knowledge and professional community it had built over a century had value that integration alone could not replicate. The ONSDS remains active today, promoting oral health among people of color in North Carolina and maintaining a professional network that is a direct continuation of what Black dentists in this state built when the door was closed to them.
Oral health disparities remain among the most persistent and least addressed health inequities in the United States. Black Americans experience higher rates of untreated tooth decay, periodontal disease, and oral cancer than white Americans. They have less access to dental insurance, fewer dentists practicing in their communities, and higher rates of dental avoidance due to cost. These disparities are not biological — they are the documented result of a century of exclusion from professional organizations, denial of access to dental education, systematic underfunding of community health infrastructure, and insurance systems that reflect and perpetuate economic inequality. The Old North State Dental Society was founded to address the consequences of that exclusion. It is still doing that work.