- Black History Month 2019 and 30 Years of JHCPU
Happy Anniversary! This issue is the first in JHCPU's 30th volume, a landmark fittingly reached with this publication of articles on the well-being and health care of a host of underserved populations in the English-speaking African Diaspora.
As JHCPU is based at Meharry Medical College, one of the two oldest and largest historically Black medical schools in the United States (founded in 1876) it is fitting that the present issue includes an incisive report by Dr. Rueben C. Warren of Tuskegee University concerning the often problematic nature of an influential set of partnerships between historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and predominantly White institutions (PWIs).
Also most fittingly, this issue includes a research paper by Dr. Carolyn M. Tucker and her colleagues on the work in health education conducted at a group of African American churches in Florida. The latter paper forms the latest in a series of links stretching back to the 1793 founding by African American women in Philadelphia of the Female Benevolent Society of St. Thomas and the 1818 founding of the Colored Female Religious and Moral Society in Salem, Massachusetts. Since these very early days—and most intensely during the United States' Progressive Era (~1890–1920)—African American women have habitually formed organizations, often called clubs, to better the lives of their brothers and sisters. On the following page are pictured five officers of the Women's League in Newport, Rhode Island in 1899.
The most famous of the women responsible for the rise of Black women's clubs in the Progressive Era was the journalist, author, and Civil Rights activist, Ida B Wells, whose work organizing women against the lynching of Blacks in the U.S. was especially influential. (Wells served as the chairperson of the National Afro-American Council's Anti-Lynching Bureau, among many other achievements.) Another towering figure in the Black women's club movement of the Progressive Era was Margaret Murray Washington, of the Tuskegee Institute, whose work on improving the health and well-being of Black people in the South and around the country beginning in the late 19th century ultimately resulted in her husband, Booker T. Washington, calling for the creation of a "Health Improvement Week" in 1914; this became recognized as National Negro Health Week (1915–1951).
Beginning in the 1890s and continuing in the succeeding decades, Black American "club women" (as they were known) labored in organized groups that stayed well behind the scenes to advance the well-being of people less fortunate than themselves, especially former slaves and their descendants. Very often, the groundwork they laid gave rise to better-known political action by Black men to advance the cause of Civil Rights in everything from the law to housing to education to health, as we saw in the case of Margaret Murray Washington's work described above.
Just as Black women's collective efforts spread outward to spur on Black men and [End Page ix]
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ultimately people of all races, so has the advocacy work of Black thinkers, physicians, nurses, educators, and activists often laid the foundation for what has become a larger movement towards equity in health for all people. As Lanny Smith writes in his essay on Liberation Medicine (this issue), "All life is worthy of life." In this spirit, the present issue includes work on a host of populations who suffer today on the losing end of health inequities in the United States. In the spirit of historical continuity, the issue concludes with a series of papers on populations in Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Ethiopia and Eritrea (immigrants to the U.S.), Jamaica, and Haiti.
We are proud to present this issue as an outgrowth of the heroic history of Black activists working towards health equity for all. The road is long, but the destination is sure.