Dr. Watkins is also survived by another brother, James, and two sisters, Doristine L. Minott and Annie Marie Garraway.

Levi Watkins Jr. was born in Parsons, Kan., on June 13, 1944. His father was a college professor who became president of Alabama State College in Montgomery. His mother, the former Lillian Varnado, was a high school teacher and homemaker. After moving to Montgomery, the family joined Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. King was pastor. Levi was 8 when he first met him.

He earned a bachelor’s degree from Tennessee State University, where a biology teacher persuaded him to pursue a career in medicine. He learned he was accepted at Vanderbilt from a headline in a Nashville newspaper. He was still the only black enrolled there when he graduated in 1970.

After a surgical internship at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, he was named the hospital’s first black chief resident in cardiac surgery. His research at Harvard Medical School, from 1973 to 1975, led to the use of angiotensin blockers to treat congestive heart failure. He later joined the full-time faculty at Johns Hopkins and, in 1979, the medical school’s admissions committee. By 1983, the number of black students there had increased to 40, from 8. He retired in 2013.

Among those he mentored were Dr. Selwyn M. Vickers, the first African-American dean of the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, and Dr. James E. K. Hildreth, an immunologist prominent in AIDS research. Dr. Hildreth, who was dean of the College of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis, and is the incoming president of Meharry Medical College, a historically black institution in Nashville, said that Dr. Watkins, as a lone black pioneer, “had to be his own role model.”

“Dr. Watkins’s life and work illustrate how one person, at the right time and in the right place, can profoundly change institutions and their culture,” Dr. Hildreth said.

Dr. Andre L. Churchwell, who said he had been inspired by Dr. Watkins in becoming a professor and senior associate dean for diversity affairs at Vanderbilt School of Medicine, said: “Levi, whether in his role as researcher, advocate for civil rights or pushing institutions as a soldier for diversity in medical education and admission processes, never forgot his roots or values taught him by his family, of humility, egalitarianism, grace and humor. He used these lessons as part of his tool kit to push for academic excellence and broad diversity.”