Black Women's Christian Activism by Adams Betty Livingston;

Author:Adams, Betty Livingston;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 History / General
Publisher: New York University Press

Private Space, Public Debate

Negro Health Week celebrations in the 1930s were timely, if not prescient. Two months after Ira Reid exposed Summit’s substandard housing and its correlation to tuberculosis, the local board of health initiated an assault on black working women’s bodies. Armed with a new health ordinance that mandated semiannual health examinations for all domestic servants, Health Officer Dr. Henry Dengler began an aggressive anti-venereal disease campaign. Refusal to submit resulted in a $50 fine.21 By the second week in January 1933, Dengler had examined more than two hundred women and classified sixty-eight as “diseased.” Six months later, after examining an additional nine hundred and eleven domestic servants, he announced that of the eighty-six “affected,” sixty-five were “colored” women.22

Although the USPHS authorized compulsory examinations as part of its national anti-syphilis program, in the absence of standardized protocols the sensitivity and specificity of testing could be substantially inaccurate depending on the quality of the laboratory and the serologic test. Therapeutics for treatment and follow-up also varied based upon local resources. Moreover, as medical historian Allen M. Brandt argues, “The suggestion, knowledge, or inference of immoral behavior by a patient may also have led to a tendency to identify non-specific infections as venereal.”23 Health officials generally restricted mandatory testing to high-risk populations, such as women arrested on charges of prostitution, men accused of vagrancy or sex offenses, and pregnant women. In contravention of the logic of sexual transmission of venereal infection, Dengler required all domestic servants to submit to semiannual examinations. Newark and suburban Englewood and Tenafly enacted similar ordinances.24

Local health officials usually worked closely with African American physicians, social workers, and health professionals to conduct educational programs, especially during Negro Health Week, and the health examiner issued a certificate of health based upon results provided by a health clinic or private physician. In Summit, Dengler conducted the testing himself. Historian Natalia Molina locates public health “as a key site of racialization,” one in which “[h]ealth officials not only incorporated their racially charged visions into policies and ordinances that targeted ethnic communities but also helped shape the ways mainstream populations perceived ethnic peoples.”25

Summit’s black working women comprehended fully what was at stake. Yet, consistent with the culture of dissemblance, they maintained a studied silence, shielding threats to their respectability, and enlisted allies to repel the attack on their womanhood. Prominent white middle-class women immediately voiced opposition to the ordinance. Referencing the prevalence of white men’s sexual abuse of black women, one wondered where was the protection for the domestic servant? Another questioned the legality of the examinations for American citizens and charged the health board with “petty terrorism,” offering as evidence the eight notices she had received within forty-eight hours. In one instance, before the employer could have her private physician examine a couple, they protested with their feet and left Summit. Some employers simply refused to comply.26 Despite white women’s protestations, Dengler refused to rescind the ordinance, though he reduced the fine from $50 to $25 and pledged to hire a woman doctor; that eventually became a white public health nurse.

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