When we tell the story of the American civil rights era, we often leave out a crucial element: the movement for social medicine and community health. Funded by Lyndon B. Johnsonâs War on Poverty and influenced by innovations in social medicine in South Africa, this new health care movement recognized that good health played an integral role in social equality.
In 1964, a group of New York doctors organized the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) to provide first aid to activists in Mississippi during Freedom Summer. Historian John Dittmer writes about the MCHR and its precursor, the Medical Committee for Civil Rights (MCCR), in The Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care.
That same year, the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) provided almost a billion dollars for federal programs aimed at helping the poor. H. Jack Geiger, who participated in the MCHR, managed to direct some of that money to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, a rural community with staggering unemployment, little access to education, and crumbling medical facilities. Thomas J. Ward Jrâs new book, Out in the Rural: A Mississippi Health Center and Its War on Poverty, documents the legacy Geiger and his comrades left in this tiny Mississippi town.
Taken together, The Good Doctors and Out in the Rural give contemporary activists a model for reforming our broken health care system. As the movement for âMedicare for Allâ gains momentum in individual states and in Congress, the Left should take inspiration from these activists, who saw that the work of the Civil Rights Movement was not complete without winning access to just and universal health care.
The Freedom Summerâs Doctors
The MCCR had a short life, but the role it played in developing new health care practices in the United States outweighs its brevity. Physician-activist Walter Lear organized the group in the spring of 1963 to end racial discrimination in the medical profession. When its members protested the American Medical Associationâs racially discriminatory practices that June, Robert âBobâ Smith, from Jackson, Mississippi, was the only black doctor to walk the picket line.
Meanwhile, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was planning its Freedom Summer. It chose Mississippi, where in 1960 less than 2 percent of the stateâs black population was registered to vote, the product of a long history of voter suppression, intimidation and organized violence. If they could get out the black vote in Mississippi they could do it anywhere.
In 1954, just two months after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, white supremacists in Indianola, Mississippi formed the White Citizensâ Council; its most prominent member, plantation owner James O. Eastland, also chaired the US Senateâs judiciary committee. The WCC received financial support from the state legislature to track and terrorize any Mississippians who supported black voter registration or integration.
In some areas black residents still lived under curfew. High-profile killings, beginning with Emmett Till in 1955, brought national attention to the region, but many more anonymous victims also died at the hands of white supremacists. Mississippi â especially the Delta â was about as hardcore as it got.
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