Black Public Health Heroes

Racism is deeply rooted in our nation’s systems and institutions. It is especially apparent in policies and practices with origins that date back to slavery. The legacy of slavery is still around, and the black community is living through it as the major contributor to health disparities.  

At the University at Albany School of Public Health, we recognize that black men and women have contributed and continue to contribute significantly to improving health on a local, national and international level. As you work towards anti-racism, we encourage you to reflect on how racism has influenced health disparities, to seek out knowledge on how you can reduce bias in the work that you do, and to learn more about the sacrifices and hard work of black public health practitioners, both throughout history and today.    

Below you will find just a few examples of the many black public health heroes who dedicated their lives to improving the health of others. These public health heroes contributed a great deal to public health and medicine despite the obstacles they faced as black women and men.    

George Washington Carver  

George Washington Carver was born into slavery, and despite hurdles set before him, enrolled as the first black student at Iowa State Agricultural College. Carver went on to become principle, beloved professor and president at Tuskegee Institute, where he devoted his time to helping southern farmers use his crop rotation technique to keep their soil healthy and their crop yields hefty. Carver promoted racial harmony in the south and even travelled to India to advise Mahatma Gandhi on nutrition to support the Indian Independence Movement.    

Marilyn Hughes Gaston  

Marilyn Hughes Gaston grew up impoverished, living in a public housing project in Cincinnati, Ohio. After seeing her mother suffer from lack of healthcare, she became a physician and dedicated her career to providing medical care to poor and minority families. Gaston published a national study showing the effectiveness of penicillin as a treatment for babies will sickle cell disease. This study resulted in the legislation that now funds nationwide Sickle Cell Disease screening programs.    

W.E.B Du Bois  

William Du Bois was among the first to declare that the health disparities between black and white Americans were a result of social conditions rather than inherent traits. Du Bois used census reports, vital statistics, and insurance records to link the poor health of African Americans to the legacy of slavery. His work was essential in showing the consequences of racism and discrimination.    

Charles R. Drew  

Charles R. Drew was a physician and medical researcher who is well known for his research on blood and plasma. Through his work, Drew illustrated that all humans have the same type of plasma, thus rendering that in many cases, a simple plasma transfusion could be performed rather than a whole blood transfusion. He helped establish a blood bank at Columbia University and became supervisor of the Blood Transfusion Association for New York City during WWII. Plasma and blood transfusions proved successful and saved many lives during the war. Drew was subsequently appointed as the Director of the Red Cross Blood Bank and the Assistant director of the National Research Council, which was responsible for collecting blood for the U.S Navy and Army. Despite his many successes, Drew stuck with his values and resigned in protest of the United States War Department’s policy that African American blood should be kept separate from that of White Americans. Even after his resignation, his career continued to flourish as he became a teacher and role model to the students at Howard University.    

Malik Yakini  

Malik Yakini is an activist serving as the executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. Yakini recognizes the impact of white supremacy on the food system and works towards food security for the black community. Much of Detroit obtains its food from gas stations and convenience stores due to the lack of grocery store chains. Detroit’s Black Community Food Security Network is involved with urban farming, youth programs, and community owned cooperative grocery stores; each of which are used as ways to empower and provide healthy food to the community.    

Sherman A. James  

Sherman A. James is an epidemiologist and health researcher known for the concept of “John Henryism”, a strategy for coping with prolonged social discrimination by expending high levels of effort which results in psychological distress. While investigating racial health disparities, James concluded that racism and low control over one’s environment ultimately lead to shorter lifespans in African Americans. Sherman James’s work helped guide the discussion on the role of the social determinants of health on African Americans.  

Comfort Momoh  

Comfort Momoh has a long and impressive history of fighting Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). She began her work in women’s health as a midwife and opened the United Kingdom’s first FGM clinic in 1997. Even after her retirement from midwifery, Momoh continues working against FGM through her non-profit organization, Global Comfort.    

Joycelyn Elders  

Joycelyn Elders attended medical school in 1956, where she was required to eat in a room separate from her white classmates. Nonetheless, Elders excelled and became chief resident at the University of Arkansas, where she over saw all residents and interns. Elders was the first person in the State of Arkansas to become board certified in pediatric endocrinology. President Bill Clinton appointed her as the head of the Arkansas Department of Health, where she highlighted many public health issues. She nearly doubled childhood immunization uptake, increased home-care options for the chronically or terminally ill and worked to expand sex education and the states pre-natal care program. In addition, Elders was the first African American to serve as Surgeon General.    

William Hinton  

In the early 20th century, the effects of syphilis caused devastation to communities. In 1927, William Hinton developed a diagnostic test for syphilis that was endorsed by the U.S Public Health Service. Hinton’s test became the standard for syphilis testing for the next 30 years. Hinton’s expertise on syphilis landed him a position at Harvard Medical School as the first black professor. He published and shared his knowledge in Syphilis and Its Treatment, making him the first black American to publish a medical textbook.    

Bette Lorrina Catoe Strudwick  

Bette Strudwick became a pediatric physician, despite the obstacles presented by racism and sexism. She found that the growth rate of black babies was lower than that of white babies at the same socioeconomic level. Strudwick was unable to secure a grant to continue her research on this topic but was fiercely motivated to continue her work. Therefore, Strudwick instead went on to practice medicine from her own home. For 59 years, she cared for generations of children.        

Roselyn Epps  

Roselyn Epps’s career and contributions to public health were both impressive and extensive. Epps dedicated much of her career to child and maternal health. She worked in various clinics specializing in care for children, was involved in youth projects, and even held administrative roles, one of which was Commissioner of Public health in D.C’s Department of Public Health. Epps contributed more than ninety professional articles to various peer reviewed publications, coedited both The Women’s Complete Healthbook, and Developing a Child Care Program.    

Solomon Fuller  

Inspired by his grandparents who were medical missionaries in Liberia, Solomon Fuller migrated to the United States to pursue a career in medicine. He became a pathologist, researcher, and America’s first African American psychiatrist. Often, he faced workplace discrimination and was paid significantly less than his white counterparts. Fuller was required to perform autopsies; uncommon and pleasant procedures at the time. It was through autopsies that Fuller got to examine tissue samples from deceased mental patients. He went on to study with Alois Alzheimer who believed that loss of memory was caused by a disease rather than just old age. It was Fuller who discovered Amyloid plaques in cadaver brains - confirming the cause of Alzheimer’s disease.    

Donna Christian-Christensen  

Donna Christensen was inspired to become a physician when she learned about need for healthcare providers of color. It was after working for the Poor Peoples Campaign in Washington that she decided to pursue family medicine. She successfully became a physician and practiced medicine through several different positions until 1996. She went on to run for Congress and became the first female physician to win a congressional election. She chaired the Congressional Black Caucus’s Health Brain Trust and was appointed to the House Select Committee on Homeland security where she oversaw public health infrastructure. These positions allowed her to work towards reducing healthcare disparities for minority communities and to extend health insurance coverage.    

Mary Eliza Mahoney  

Mary Eliza Mahoney knew from a young age that she wanted to become a nurse and worked hard to make that dream come true. She was one of four students to complete The New England Hospital for Women and Children’s nursing program, making her the first African American to become a licensed nurse. Mahoney struggled to find a job in a hospital because of racism and opted to work as a private nurse where she was known for her excellent patient care. Aside from being a nurse, Mahoney dedicated her time to campaigning for women’s rights. She was one of the first women to register to vote and has secured a spot in the National Women’s Hall of Fame.    

David Satcher  

David Satcher was a successful medical doctor and Public Health Administrator. He lived through the hardships of having little access to health care and knew from a young age that he wanted to become a physician. He became class valedictorian at his racially segregated high school and went on to pursue higher education. He was the first African American to obtain both an M.D and a Ph.D. Satcher held various administrative roles which included serving as President of the Morehouse School of Medicine, the first Medical College for African Americans in the south. Satcher was also appointed director of the CDC and later Surgeon General, where he focused on eliminating health disparities, promoting health equity, and disease prevention with initiatives to increase childhood immunization rates.    

Martin Luther King, Jr.  

Martin Luther King Jr. is well known for combatting racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. He once said, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.” Just one day before his assassination, King was in Memphis supporting the equal treatment and compensation of black sanitation workers. The black sanitation workers were not offered protective clothing, worked in hazardous environments and were paid significantly less than their white counterparts. The black workers were not even allowed to wash their hands before eating lunch and several were killed operating faulty equipment. King recognized the importance of accessible and acceptable health care and proudly fought for it.    

Vivien Thomas  

Vivien Thomas was a laboratory supervisor who developed a procedure used to treat blue baby syndrome (now known as cyanotic heart disease). He was the assistant to a surgeon at Vanderbilt University and later at the Johns Hopkins University. He served as supervisor of the surgical laboratories at Johns Hopkins for 35 years. Without any education past high school, Thomas rose above poverty and racism to become a cardiac surgery pioneer and a teacher of operative techniques to many of the country's most prominent surgeons. His contributions to public health were portrayed in the movie Something the Lord Has Made.      

David Williams  

David Williams is currently the Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His research focuses mainly on the effects of racial and socioeconomic differences on physical and mental health. Williams helped create The Everyday Discrimination Scale which is currently the most widely used measure to assess perceived discrimination in health studies. He has authored more than 475 scientific papers and served on the editorial board of 12 scientific journals. Williams work was ranked as one of the most cited black scholars in the Social Sciences.    

Byllye Avery  

Even after the passage of Roe v Wade, access to abortions was limited, especially for black women. Byllye Avery helped increase women’s access abortions by helping them travel to New York to obtain them. In 1974, Avery co-founded the Gainesville Women’s Health Center to further expand access to abortions and other healthcare services for women. In 1983, she founded the Black Women’s Health Imperative, a national organization that is “dedicated to improving the health and wellness of our nation’s 21 million black women and girls – physically, emotionally and financially.”

Patricia Bath  

Patricia Bath is an American ophthalmologist with a long list of accomplishments. One of her biggest accomplishments is making access to eye care more widely available for underserved populations. She noticed that there were far more blind and visually impaired patients at the eye clinic in Harlem than the eye clinic at Columbia University. She conducted a study and found that the increased prevalence of blindness in Harlem was due to a lack of access to eye care. To fix the problem, she proposed the idea of community ophthalmology, which would train volunteers to offer basic eye care to underserved populations who would otherwise go without it. Bath became the first female ophthalmologist to be appointed to the faculty of the UCLA School of Medicine and the first woman to chair an ophthalmology residency program in the United States. She also developed the laser probe, making her the first female African American physician to receive a patent for a medical invention. Her invention is used worldwide.