Plagued by geographic isolation, poverty, and acute shortages of health professionals and hospital beds, the South was dubbed by Surgeon General Thomas Parran "the nation's number one health ...problem." The improvement of southern, rural, and black health would become a top priority of the U.S. Public Health Service during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.
Karen Kruse Thomas details how NAACP lawsuits pushed southern states to equalize public services and facilities for blacks just as wartime shortages of health personnel and high rates of draft rejections generated broad support for health reform. Southern Democrats leveraged their power in Congress and used the war effort to call for federal aid to uplift the South. The language of regional uplift, Thomas contends, allowed southern liberals to aid blacks while remaining silent on race. Reformers embraced, at least initially, the notion of "deluxe Jim Crow"-support for health care that maintained segregation. Thomas argues that this strategy was, in certain respects, a success, building much-needed hospitals and training more black doctors.
By the 1950s, deluxe Jim Crow policy had helped to weaken the legal basis for segregation. Thomas traces this transformation at the national level and in North Carolina, where "deluxe Jim Crow reached its fullest potential." This dual focus allows her to examine the shifting alliances-between blacks and liberal whites, southerners and northerners, activists and doctors-that drove policy.Deluxe Jim Crowprovides insight into a variety of historical debates, including the racial dimensions of state building, the nature of white southern liberalism, and the role of black professionals during the long civil rights movement.
Between 1935 and 1985, the nascent public health profession developed scientific evidence and practical know-how to prevent death on an unprecedented scale. Thanks to public health workers, life ...expectancy rose rapidly as generations grew up free from the scourges of smallpox, typhoid, and syphilis. In Health and Humanity , Karen Kruse Thomas offers a thorough account of the growth of academic public health in the United States through the prism of the oldest and largest independent school of public health in the world. Thomas follows the transformation of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (JHSPH), now known as the Bloomberg School of Public Health, from a small, private institute devoted to doctoral training and tropical disease research into a leading global educator and innovator in fields from biostatistics to mental health to pathobiology. A provocative, wide-ranging account of how midcentury public health leveraged federal grants and anti-Communist fears to build the powerful institutional networks behind the health programs of the CDC, WHO, and USAID, the book traces how Johns Hopkins helped public health take center stage during the scientific research boom triggered by World War II. It also examines the influence of politics on JHSPH, the school’s transition to federal grant funding, the globalization of public health in response to hot and cold war influences, and the expansion of the school’s teaching program to encompass social science as well as lab science. Revealing how faculty members urged foreign policy makers to include saving lives in their strategy of winning hearts and minds, Thomas argues that the growth of chronic disease and the loss of Rockefeller funds moved the JHSPH toward international research funded by the federal government, creating a situation in which it was sometimes easier for the school to improve the health of populations in India and Turkey than on its own doorstep in East Baltimore. Health and Humanity is a comprehensive account of the ways that JHSPH has influenced the practice, pedagogy, and especially our very understanding of public health on both global and local scales.
In 1915, William Henry Welch and Wickliffe Rose submitted a report to the Rockefeller Foundation that became the template for public health professional education in the United States and abroad. ...Based on the Welch-Rose Report's recommendations, the Foundation awarded a grant to Johns Hopkins University in 1916 to establish the first independent graduate school of public health, with Welch serving as the founding dean. The Welch-Rose Report and, by extension, the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health established and transmitted a new model of scientific training that wove the laboratory mindset together with the methods of public health administration and epidemiologic fieldwork. During the School's first quarter-century, faculty and alumni were remarkably active in frontline public health problem-solving, as well as launching public health agencies and schools of all types and sizes. The most lasting contribution of the Welch-Rose Report and the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, now the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has been to "cultivate the science of hygiene" to bring about exponential growth in the evidence base for public health. The schools that have adopted the Johns Hopkins model of public health education worldwide have produced professionals who have worked to achieve wide-ranging reforms dedicated to preserving life, protecting health, and preventing injury across populations and continents.
Thomas posits a "long civil rights movement" in health care by surveying and elaborating on the historiography of Hill-Burton in the South and considering multiple factors that contributed to the ...expansion of hospital care for blacks and whites, particularly in underserved rural areas. She focuses mainly on the fifteen-year period from 1939, when hospital construction was first debated in Congress as part of proposals to establish a national health plan, to 1954, when the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka declared segregation unconstitutional and inherently unequal in public elementary and secondary education.
During World War II, progressive southern leaders such as Claude Pepper and Lister Hill at the national level and Governor J. Melville Broughton and state health officer Carl V. Reynolds in North ...Carolina elevated health reform, particularly hospital construction, to the top of the political agenda. A variety of factors had laid the foundation for a large-scale federal hospital construction program that would represent the culmination of deluxe Jim Crow health policy’s strange hybrid of New Deal redistributive liberalism and racial parity under segregation. Hospital construction programs funded by the Works Progress Administration, Public Works Administration, Lanham Act, state health
This volume re-examines the history of twentieth-century Christian theology by tracing key concepts, problems and themes as they develop in context with new perspectives opened up by contemporary ...theology itself.
Thomas focuses on the ferment over medical education for African Americans in North Carolina between 1945 and 1960 within the context of the campaign by the National Medical Association and the ...National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to erase the color line in medical schools. Education, civil rights, medicine, and public policy converged in the desegregation of medical education, which allows important comparisons with the concurrent efforts to overturn institutionalized segregation in elementary, secondary, and higher education and in the federal hospital construction program initiated in 1946 by the Hill-Burton Act. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
conclusion Thomas, Karen Kruse
Deluxe Jim Crow,
12/2011
Book Chapter
The rise and fall of the ideology of equalization among both blacks and whites provided the backdrop for racial change during the era of deluxe Jim Crow. Beginning in the 1930s, the southern movement ...to equalize black and white schools was black-led (primarily by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People naacp), never secured federal funding, and garnered only lukewarm commitment at the state level from whites primarily bent on protecting segregation. Blacks, however, gave educational equalization their wholehearted support: the Louisiana Farmers’ Union, for example, endorsed the Harrison-Fletcher Bill in 1938. The Farmers’ Union agent who testified
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