In the third email of our Black History Month series, we’re highlighting some of the many significant contributions Black leaders and communities have made in the ongoing fight for health justice.

Long before the United States was founded, Indigenous Black and Brown communities across many continents developed infrastructure and systems of care, health, and well-being for their communities.¹ From traditional African medicine to clinics with culturally embedded care, some of these practices have been preserved for hundreds or even thousands of years and continue to be utilized to this day.²

One of those longstanding systems is mutual aid: using the resources of social networks to provide aid to those in need. For centuries, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) communities have come together and pooled money, time, and other resources to care for each other when institutions and those in power failed them. One notable example of mutual aid took place in 1793, when the Free African Society (one of the first Black mutual aid societies in the U.S.) of Philadelphia took up the call to help those impacted by the brutal yellow fever epidemic ravaging the city.³ Members came together to provide medical help for the sick, shelter for orphans, and transportation and burial services for the dead. Mutual aid societies like this rapidly grew throughout the 1800s across the U.S. in order to feed, house, and care for one another.⁴

In the late 1960’s, the Black Panther Party established their own well-known mutual aid network, providing free breakfast, health clinics, ambulance service, and other resources to Black communities in cities across the country as a means to help BIPOC survive while fighting for racial justice.⁵ Mutual aid networks have continued to this day, with a resurgence in 2020 when tens of thousands of mutual aid groups and projects around the world were created, many stemming from the Black Lives Matter movement.⁶

The founding of Medicare can also be tied back to the Civil Rights Movement. Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, hospitals and medical schools were highly segregated. When Medicare was introduced in 1965, it provided additional revenue to hospitals, but also created a financial incentive for dismantling Jim Crow in health care. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act made it illegal for any program or activity receiving federal funds or assistance to discriminate based on someone’s race, color, or national origin — so hospitals that continued the practice of segregation based on race became ineligible to receive federal funding. The potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars forced changes in hospital policy almost over night.

As a result of the tireless work of Civil Rights activists and organizations like the NAACP and the National Medical Association (a professional organization of Black doctors created due to their exclusion from the American Medical Association), and the federal government taking action, hospitals began changing policies and desegregating their institutions with the enactment of Medicare in 1966.

Numerous Black individuals have also made countless, game-changing contributions to public health and medicine throughout history, including:

Emma Reynolds, who was repeatedly refused entry into nursing school because of her race, went on to establish the first nursing schools to train Black women in the United States.
Onesimus, an enslaved African who introduced the African method of inoculation against smallpox in Boston in 1721 — almost a century before the smallpox vaccine was created.
Henrietta Lacks, a young Black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951, whose cells were used without her consent or knowledge to make “key scientific discoveries in the fields of cancer, immunology, and infectious diseases” for decades after her death.⁷

While we honor and uplift these important BIPOC contributions to health justice throughout history (and so many more), our fight continues today. Together, we are working to pass Medicare for All to establish a single-payer health care system that will guarantee quality, equitable care for ALL across our country, without leaving anyone behind.

Thank you for being a part of our movement.

In solidarity,

Nurses’ Campaign to Win Medicare for All

Sources:

1. “The Black History of Public Health: From Legacies of Racism and Resistance to Futures of Equity and Justice,” Serin Bond-Yancey, Community Commons.
https://www.communitycommons.org/collections/Black-History-of-Public-Health
2. Ibid
3. “‘Solidarity, Not Charity’: A Visual History of Mutual Aid,” Ariel Aberg-Riger, Bloomberg, December 22, 2020.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-22/a-visual-history-of-mutual-aid
4. Ibid
5. “The Black Panther Party,” Solidarity Economy Association.
https://www.mutualaid.coop/history/black-panther-party/
6. “‘Solidarity, Not Charity’: A Visual History of Mutual Aid,” Ariel Aberg-Riger, Bloomberg, December 22, 2020.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-22/a-visual-history-of-mutual-aid
7. “The Black History of Public Health: From Legacies of Racism and Resistance to Futures of Equity and Justice,” Serin Bond-Yancey, Community Commons.
https://www.communitycommons.org/collections/Black-History-of-Public-Health