James F. Shober, M.D.

He was born in Salem (now Winston-Salem), N. C., possibly to Francis Edwin Shober, who was of the Salem Moravian Community, a successful politician and businessman, who served in the state legislature and the U.S. Congress. He was also a co-founder of the first Sunday school in North Carolina and a law graduate of the University of North Carolina. His mother was a slave named Betsy Ann, who in 1859 when James Francis was between the age of 6 and 7 and he was probably sent back to the Waugh Plantation in Waughtown where his grandmother and his mother’s other siblings were living.

Shober graduated second in his class from Lincoln University in Oxford, PA, in 1875 with an A. B. degree. He went to Howard University's School of Medicine, where he was one of 48 graduates in the class of 1878 and the only one from North Carolina. Although a number of other blacks may have been licensed doctors sometime after Emancipation, Shober was the first black doctor to graduate from a regular medical school in North Carolina and was thus the first "official" black doctor in North Carolina.
He was the only black doctor in a city more than 10,000 people.

His wife, Anna Marie Taylor Shober, was an educator and taught at the Peabody School in Wilmington. His daughters both graduated from Fisk University and pursued a number of professions.

Shober was active in his church and in the Old North State Medical Society, an association of African American physicians that is still in existence today. His life was tragically short; he died on the 1st of January 1889 at the age of 36.

Reference:
Wilmington Star, 2003
Article by Ben Steelman
Wilmington Star (SC, USA)
343-2208

Source:https://aaregistry.org/.../james-shober-north-carolina.../