A Note from the Editor

As we embark upon the new year, fresh from Barack Obama’s landmark inauguration, JHCPU marks Black History Month by presenting a journal issue whose focus is on minority health, well-being, and health care. Overall, this issue has three themes: Minority Health across the Lifespan, Minority Health and Cancer, and reports from clinicians On the Front Lines of improving health and health care in medically underserved populations. Before we turn to those themes, however, we will pause to situate ourselves a bit in a broader historical context, in recognition of Black History Month.

The theme adopted for Black History Month this year by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) is the Quest for Black Citizenship in the Americas, in honor of the centennial of the founding of the NAACP and its century of efforts in securing the full rights of citizenship for those of African descent in the United States. The ASALH website includes this reflection on the past year and the past century:¹

The election of Barack Obama as the first American president of African descent will mark a watershed in American history. Carter G. Woodson was fond of quoting a nineteenth-century novelist [Fredrika Bremer, 1849] who wrote that the romance of America’s history was the fate of the Negro. Neither the founding fathers nor the African slaves could have ever imagined a day when a black man would hold the most exalted office in the nation. A century ago, when a group of men and women—whites and blacks, Jews and Gentiles—joined ranks and formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, they were visionaries. In the abolitionist tradition, carrying on the work of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, they saw through a stormy sky of racial oppression and despair. With African Americans being disenfranchised and segregated, lynched and raped, uneducated or miseducated, and everywhere casually maligned, the NAACP lit a torch for equality and social justice. Committed to struggle and armed with hope, the NAACP constituted the vanguard in the movement for full citizenship, and they continue to press the cause of equality and social justice. As the grand ole civil rights organization marks its centennial, the progress of black citizenship cannot be better symbolized than by the election of Barack Obama. O, what a century!

An important contributor to African American life throughout the past century and into the present day is the network of institutions known as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) (among them our own Meharry Medical College, founded in 1876).² An article in the current issue, by Saundra Glover and colleagues, reports on a project to increase work to combat health disparities, by means of a Kellogg-funded educational intervention at the University of South Carolina and six South Carolina HBCUs:

• • Allen University, founded in 1870 by the African Methodist Episcopal Church;

• • Benedict College, founded in 1870 and named for its benefactor, Mrs. Bathsheba A. Benedict, of Rhode Island;

• • Claflin University, founded in 1869, as an offspring of the Baker Bible Institute;

• • Morris College, founded in 1908 and named for a church leader, the Rev. Frank Morris;

• • South Carolina State University, founded by the State of South Carolina in 1896, under the 1862 Morrill Land Grant Act;³ and

• • Voorhees College, founded in 1879 by 23-year old Elizabeth Evelyn Wright, a former student of Booker T. Washington, and named in honor of an early benefactor, Ralph Voorhees of New Jersey.

Glover et al.’s article provides a useful overview of the pipeline project that this consortium carried out over a five-year period. The program offered fellowships to African American students, from high school through graduate programs, along with structured learning experiences in public health advocacy, practice, and research.

Minority Health across the Lifespan

Seven articles in this issue fit the theme of minority health across the lifespan, as they examine children, mothers, fathers, and the elderly in specific health-related circumstances. We begin with a Commentary from the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University...