Tag Archives: civil rights

Asthma and the Civil Rights Movement

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Today’s guest post is written by Ijeoma Kola, a PhD candidate in Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and a former National Science Foundation graduate fellow. Her dissertation examines the history of asthma in urban African Americans in the 20th century, with special attention to medical history, environmental racism, and community activism. On Tuesday, November 14 at 6pm, Ijeoma will give the talk “Unable to Breathe: Race, Asthma, and the Environment in Civil Rights Era New Orleans and New York.” Click HERE to register for this event.

In July 1965, several months after the assassination of Malcolm X and the freedom marches from Selma to Montgomery, the New York Times ran a story about “an emotional epidemic” of asthma sweeping across New York City.[1] Although the writer focused on psychosomatic explanations to link asthma symptoms to the hostility of the Civil Rights Movement, it prompted me to explore the significance of asthma’s emergence as a racial problem during the 1960s.

Asthma Linked to Rights Drive

Osmundsen, John A. “Asthma Linked to Rights Drive.” New York Times. 1965.

Before the 1960s, little was written about asthma in African Americans. For much of the early twentieth century, doctors debated whether black people could have asthma, as they understood the disease to afflict middle and upper-class whites, who were believed to have more civilized lifestyles and delicate constitutions than poor blacks.[2]

However, in the 1960s, several “outbreaks” of asthma made national news headlines. In the fall of 1960, nearly 150 patients from adjoining neighborhoods were treated for asthma at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. One patient, a 73-year-old man, died.[3] After several years of seasonal asthma admission spikes in the same hospital, researchers at Tulane University found that asthma related visits to the emergency room correlated with fire department calls from spontaneous fires at the base of garbage heaps, some five to twenty years old, around the city. Smoke containing silica particles would drift downwind to where the majority of people who visited Charity Hospital, triggering asthma attacks.[4]

Air Pollution and NO Asthma

Lewis, Robert, Murray M. Gilkeson, and Roy O. McCaldin. “Air Pollution and New Orleans Asthma.” Public Health Reports 77, no. 11 (November 1962): 953.

Air Pollution and NO Asthma 2

Lewis, Robert, Murray M. Gilkeson, and Roy O. McCaldin. “Air Pollution and New Orleans Asthma.” Public Health Reports 77, no. 11 (November 1962): 948. with modifications.

At the time, however, the New Orleans asthma epidemic of November 1960 was quickly forgotten, as events over the course of the next few days would quickly turn attention away from asthma to something more urgent. A week after Dennis Knight’s death, on November 14, 1960 – four black 6-year old girls – Leona Tate, Tessie Provost, Gaile Etienne, and Ruby Bridges – began the school integration process at two elementary schools in New Orleans. Violent protests broke out across the city, and only 13 of the usual 1,000 students at the two schools attended on integration day.[5]

In New Orleans in 1960, and in several other American cities with a large concentrated black community over the next decade, asthma appeared to present itself alongside moments of racial tension. Although the New York Times connects these two phenomena with a psychosomatic explanation of emotional distress, I view the relationship differently. Neighborhoods where African Americans lived – often restricted to due to segregation and redlining – were more exposed to both indoor and outdoor particles that triggered asthma symptoms. While struggling to breathe, black people simultaneously fought for the right to live as equals. Rather than think of Civil Rights as a cause of asthma, I see asthma outbreaks in black urban America and subsequent efforts to reduce the asthma disparity as both a symptom and a symbol of the Civil Rights movement.

References:
[1] John A. Osmundsen, “Asthma Linked to Rights Drive: Authorities Note Sharp Rise in Ailment Among Negroes and Puerto Ricans in City CAUSE STILL UNCERTAIN Tensions of Fight for Gains Play at Least Some Role, Many Experts Contend,” New York Times, 1965.
[2] Horace F. Ivins, “Pollen Catarrh-Hay Fever,” in Proceedings of the Fourth Quinquennial Session of the International Homoeopathic Congress, Held at Atlantic City, N.J., U.S.A., June 16 to 22, 1891 (Philadelphia: Sherman & Co., 1891), 732–43.
[3] “Medics Puzzled:: Asthma Epidemic Hits New Orleans; 149 Seized, 1 Dead,” Philadelphia Tribune (1912-2001); Philadelphia, Penn., November 12, 1960, sec. 2.
[4] Robert Lewis, Murray M. Gilkeson, and Roy O. McCaldin, “Air Pollution and New Orleans Asthma,” Public Health Reports 77, no. 11 (November 1962): 947–54.
[5] John G. Warner, “Mob of 5000 Is Hosed By New Orleans Police: Police Hose New Orleans Segregation Rioters,” The Washington Post, Times Herald  (1959-1973); Washington, D.C., November 17, 1960.

Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee: Civil Rights Pioneer

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Today’s guest post is written by the Honorable Diane Kiesel, an acting justice of the New York State Supreme Court. She is the author of She Can Bring us Home (2015), a biography of Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee. On Wednesday, September 21st at 6pm, Kiesel will give a lecture, “Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee:  Civil Rights Pioneer.” There is no charge, but please register in advance here.   

Today, when social security and Medicare address the needs of the elderly, health care programs are in place to take care of the sick and a myriad of government agencies exist to help the poor, it is hard to imagine a time when the hungry, the elderly, the sick and the poverty stricken – particularly if they were people of color – were largely forgotten.

Diane Kiesel's She Can Bring Us Home, a biography of Dorothy Boulding Ferebee.

Diane Kiesel’s She Can Bring Us Home, a biography of Dorothy Boulding Ferebee.

Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee (1898-1980), was a well-known African American physician in her day who focused on the health needs of the destitute early in the 20th century, providing a private safety net where none was yet put in place by the government. For seven summers during the Great Depression, Dr. Ferebee, who came from privilege and whose Washington, D.C. medical practice catered to the upper class of her race, led what came to be known as the Mississippi Health Project.  She and a team of all-volunteer doctors, nurses, schoolteachers and social workers traveled to the Mississippi Delta to bring health care to tenant farmers and sharecroppers. The women who made up the health project were graduates of some of the nation’s finest historic black colleges and members of the elite Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. They left their comfortable homes to drive thousands of miles of unpaved roads through the Deep South to swelter in the cotton fields for their cause.

dorothy-and-car

Photo of Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, ca. 1958. Courtesy of Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington D.C.

It was a daunting task. Their sharecropper patients earned about $50 a year; they worked the most fertile ground on earth but their diets contained almost no fruits or vegetables because the landowners refused to let them use valuable cotton acreage for gardens. They suffered from diseases that had not, and should not, have been seen in the United States since the 19th century – even though it was 1935. Pellagra and rickets were common, as were outbreaks of smallpox. Tuberculosis deaths were rampant. Thirty percent of the black men in the region suffered from untreated syphilis. Dr. Ferebee’s health team not only had to face disease, but ignorance. Some mothers had no idea how old their own children were. They thought if they put tea bags on their children’s eyes, they would cure their colds and feared cutting their hair lest their children be unable to speak.  Some of them had never seen a physician and others had never used a toothbrush.

In the Jim Crow South, Dr. Ferebee’s motives were suspect – some plantation owners feared she was a Communist union organizer or civil rights agitator. But she persevered, and before World War II gasoline and rubber rationing helped put an end to the project, she and her team provided inoculations, medical and dental care as well as nutrition and hygiene lessons to 15,000 of the poorest of the poor. To this day the United States Public Health Service calls it the best volunteer health effort in history.

Ferebee Scrapbook, Box 183-30.

Dorothy and her medical team stuck in the mud in Mississippi. Photo Courtesy of Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington D.C.  From the Ferebee Scrapbook, Box 183-30.

The Mississippi Health Project propelled Dorothy Ferebee into the national spotlight. She became president of Alpha Kappa Alpha and followed the iconic Mary McLeod Bethune as the leader of the National Council of Negro Women. In that role she met with presidents and testified before Congress on major civil rights issues. She became a consultant to the State Department where she traveled to Third World countries to bring best health care practices to emerging nations.

Fifty years after the Mississippi Health Project ended one of the participants described it as the inspiration for the next generation of civil rights activists who participated in Freedom Summer and the voting rights struggles of the early 1960s.

Join us to learn more about Dr. Ferebee, this Wednesday night, at The New York Academy of Medicine (103rd St. and Fifth Avenue) for a lecture and book signing (books will be available for purchase on site). Register here; we look forward to seeing you!