The Racial Divide in American Medicine by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2018-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Black Physicians and the Struggle for Civil Rights: Lessons from the Mississippi Experience

Part II: Their Lives and Experiences

Richard D. deShazo, MD, Robert Smith, MD, and Leigh Baldwin Skipworth, BA

Little information has previously been available on the lives and experiences of black physicians who practiced in the South during the Jim Crow era of legalized segregation. In Mississippi and elsewhere, it is a story of disenfranchised professionals who risked life, limb, and personal success to improve the lot of those they served. In this chapter, we present the stories of some of the black physicians who were leaders in the civil rights movement in Mississippi as examples. Since the health disparities they sought to address have, though not of their own making, been passed on to the next generation, the lessons learned from their experience are worthy of consideration.

Advocacy for civil rights was an extraordinary risk for black and white physicians, and few white physicians took the risk to discuss, much less support, desegregation of medical facilities or medical education before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.1,3 A few black physicians chose to stay in the state, practice medicine, and support the civil rights movement. All but a few were members of both the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP and the Mississippi chapter of the NMA. Their lives were tied together by common aspirations and uncommon experiences. Newly available data from recent biographies; archives of the State of Mississippi, including the archives of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission opened to the public in 1998; the University of Mississippi Medical Center Archives; and interviews with those physicians who remained at the time of this writing provide a window into their experience.

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