Unwilling to accept the state of ill-health in black America at the turn of the twentieth century, black club women rallied around the cause of improving black health. Black women’s community work for public health was consistent with the organized social welfare activities of women across the United States. Scholars have long noted black and white women’s contributions to the creation of such institutions as churches, schools, hospitals, and public welfare agencies.¹ As the history of black club women shows, women’s private efforts laid the community roots of public health work.

Black women built the infrastructure of their communities through...

In the early twentieth century the health reform efforts of black club women became part of a national black health movement. In 1915 Booker T. Washington, the most powerful black leader of his time, launched a health education campaign known as National Negro Health Week from Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Washington, as founder and head of the school, had long emphasized sanitation and hygiene in his educational work. However, that year he set in motion a health campaign that would grow into a nation-wide black health movement over the next thirty-five years. For black leaders and community organizers, National Negro...

The establishment of the Office of Negro Health Work during the New Deal era marked a milestone in the history of American public health. It was the first time since the Freedmen’s Bureau of the post-Civil War era that the federal government institutionalized black health work within the federal bureaucracy. In 1932 the lobbying efforts of black leaders paid off, and the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) opened the Office of Negro Health Work as a clearinghouse for black health activity and as headquarters for the National Negro Health Week campaign, which became a year-round effort called the National...

Throughout the history of the black health movement, black reformers tried to secure social services for the rural poor by turning to the federal government to circumvent the inequality of the Jim Crow South. They viewed the acquisition of federal assistance as a political victory because it was a way to bypass the restrictions of local white-only policies and states’ rights justifications for systematically denying social welfare funds to African Americans. Yet, as the histories of the Tuskegee Movable School and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study illustrate, government involvement proved to have oppressive as well as progressive consequences for poor African...

In contrast to the tragedy of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the history of midwifery indicates some of the ways that government intervention was reshaped by the black rural poor to the benefit of black community health. Black lay midwives used the opportunity provided by government regulation to become important health workers well beyond their midwifery practice. Midwives, who were often sharecroppers themselves, provided health services to poor rural women and children and health education to the entire community. They helped public health nurses promote clinics, immunization programs, and prenatal and postnatal medical examinations. The success of official state and county...

Even with the public health work of black midwives, Mississippi still symbolized the worst aspects of health deprivation and economic oppression in the country. In the midst of the Great Depression, the poverty and ill-health of rural African Americans in the Mississippi Delta caught the attention of a group of black sorority women who concluded it was their duty as middle-class African Americans to serve the black poor. Members of the Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) Sorority designed, financed, and carried out the Alpha Kappa Alpha Mississippi Health Project for two to six weeks every summer from 1935 to 1942. Much...