Vanderbilt University Garraway's 2017 gift to
Vanderbilt, was made in honor of her brother
Levi Watkins Jr. who died in 2015, for "his transformative leadership and service, his historical medical inquiry and the tremendous imprint he left on students and faculty at
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine (VUSM). He was the first African-American to graduate from the university's school of medicine as a member of the Class of 1970. According to the school, "When Watkins walked through the doors of VUSM in 1966, he broke new ground by becoming the school's first African-American student. When he graduated four years later after being elected into the
Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA) medical honor society, he was still the only one."
Johns Hopkins University In 2019, Garraway created a scholarship at
Johns Hopkins, also in memory of her brother, Levi Watkins Jr. who was the first African American to become the university's chief resident in cardiac surgery. In 1979, he established Hopkins' national recruiting program for medical students of color and in 1980, he implanted the first automatic heart defibrillator at Hopkins.
LeMoyne-Owen College Garraway's 2020 gift to LeMoyne-Owen college was inspired by the movie and book,
Hidden Figures, which describes the true story of three African-American female mathematicians working at
NASA as human computers, who played a critical role in the 1960s U.S. space efforts. "Seeing the movie and reading the book made me think that she (Mrs. Turner) saw hidden figures in me," Garraway said. According to Garraway, after watching the film she made plans to create an endowed scholarship fund at
LeMoyne-Owen College, a
historically black college in
Memphis, that now includes the institution formerly known as S.A. Owen Junior College. The resulting Juanita R. Turner Memorial Scholarship is named for the junior college math professor who had made an extra effort in 1957 to tutor Garraway in math. Little is known of Turner except that when she was attending Grant Elementary School, she was the youngest winner of the citywide spelling contest (for African-American students) in 1927. She earned a master's of science degree in mathematics from the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. == Publications ==