Dr. Charles S. Finch III, a distinguished Egyptologist and founding director of the Morehouse School of Medicine’s International Health Program, transitioned on January 17. He was 77. To list his many achievements and honors would exhaust the limits of this column, but to say his life embodies the ideas of Cheikh Anta Diop, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, and Dr. Leonard Jeffries is an estimate of his magnificence.
Dr. Finch was born on February 25, 1948, in Topeka, Kan. He attended the elite Commonwealth School in Boston and while there, he met Charles Merrill, who helped to develop and refine Finch’s already keen mind and academic skills. From this turning point, it was an easy step into the corridors of Yale University, where he majored in history and joined the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. While at Yale, he also met Ellen Nixon, and they married in 1972. He was soon enrolled at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, where he would launch his career in scientific research and a rigorous pursuit of study in anthropology, comparative religion, and ancient African history. He often said that his real education didn’t begin “until [I] left college.”
From 1979 to 1982, Dr. Finch was the clinical preceptor at the Duke Watts Family Medicine Clinic in Durham, N.C., where he also served as an investigative epidemiologist and assisted in advancing African American cultural heritage, including the development of Kwanzaa in Raleigh. In 1982, he moved his family to Atlanta. This set the stage for his serious endeavor in African medicine, which culminated in his authoring a significant essay about the same subject, published in Ivan Van Sertima’s Journal of African Civilization.
Evidence of his acclaim in this field was vividly displayed in a letter he wrote to the esteemed Dr. Diop, stressing that “the Old Testament appears to be a mine of information about Egyptian cosmogony and its earliest books seem to have been given intact to the Hebrews from the Egyptians through Moses. I am sending you, under separate cover, a copy of the ‘Proceedings of the Nile Valley Conference,’ which is the ‘Nile Civilizations’ issue of the Journal of African Civilizations. I look forward to communicating with you again soon.”
That began an affiliation of friendship and research that continued the quest for a deeper understanding of African history and innovation. It also set in motion a phenomenal collection of books by Dr. Finch, including The African Background to Medical Science (1990), Echoes of the Old Dark Land: Themes from African Eden (1991), The Star of Deep Beginnings: Genesis of African Science and Technology (1998), and Nile Valley Civilization: 10,000-Year History (2023), which many noted scholars feel is his magnum opus.
His legacy lives on through his fellowship and scholarship, his teaching, and the hundreds of students who sat spellbound by his extensive and compassionate study of our African past, present, and future.