Looking within: Elevating Black scholarly contributions to empirical approaches in developmental science.

Over the past century, Black American scholars have designed, applied, and promoted conceptual frameworks and research models that propose nuanced understandings of psychological development. This article highlights examples of their contributions to understanding the differential impact of diverse contextual and situational factors. Through examinations of the psychological effects of Blackness on the development of cognition, competence, identity, and social functioning, Black psychologists outline pathways and provide tools for ecological culturally rooted methodologies. These multidisciplinary approaches run in contrast to dominant trends in the field and thus broaden developmental science's reach and influence. In the 1950s, developmental research by Black psychologists was instrumental to the fight for civil rights. Today, it continues to provide a basis for advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Thurgood Marshall, Hero of American Medicine.

One of the heroes in American history, Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) sought legal remedies against racial discrimination in education and health care. As director of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) of NAACP from 1940 to 1961, his success in integrating law schools in Texas led to the first black medical student admitted to a state medical school in the South. Representing doctors and dentists needing a facility to perform surgery, the LDF brought cases before the courts in North Carolina that moved the country toward justice in health care. His ultimate legal victory came in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the decision that declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. In 1964, the LDF under Jack Greenberg, Marshall's successor as director, won Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital, a decision that held that hospitals accepting federal funds had to admit black patients. The two decisions laid the judicial foundation for the laws and administrative acts that changed America's racial history, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Social Security Act Amendments of 1965 that established Medicare and Medicaid. His achievements came during the hottest period of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Well past the middle of the twentieth century, black Americans were denied access to the full resources of American medicine, locked in a "separate-but-equal" system woefully inadequate in every respect. In abolishing segregation, Marshall initiated the long overdue remedy of the unjust legacies of slavery and Jim Crow.

Pathologizing the Crisis: Psychiatry, Policing, and Racial Liberalism in the Long Community Mental Health Movement.

The community mental health movement has been generally regarded as a benevolent movement that replaced old notions of psychiatric racism with new ideas about the normality of race. Few studies, however, have explored the movement for its active support for new surveillance and policing strategies, particularly broken windows theory, a policing approach partly responsible for the expansion of prisons in the United States after the 1970s. Looking to racially liberal approaches to psychiatry in the 1960s and 1970s crafted by integrationist psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West and black nationalist psychiatrist J. Alfred Cannon at the University of California, Los Angeles, this essay demonstrates that cultural and biological explanations for racial violence in civil rights and black nationalist discourses renewed surveillance on poor people of color that resulted in increased forms of incarceration, segregation, and discrimination for them by the 1980s. Rather than forward racial justice, I argue that psychiatric discourses arguing for the racial sameness of white and black minds in the 1960s and 1970s relied on scientific and cultural narratives centered on child development, gender, and sexuality that obscured the processes of racial capitalism that continued to produce poverty and sickness in black communities.

Citizenship and Learning Disabled People: The Mental Health Charity MIND's 1970s Campaign in Historical Context.

Current policy and practice directed towards people with learning disabilities originates in the deinstitutionalisation processes, civil rights concerns and integrationist philosophies of the 1970s and 1980s. However, historians know little about the specific contexts within which these were mobilised. Although it is rarely acknowledged in the secondary literature, MIND was prominent in campaigning for rights-based services for learning disabled people during this time. This article sets MIND's campaign within the wider historical context of the organisation's origins as a main institution of the inter-war mental hygiene movement. The article begins by outlining the mental hygiene movement's original conceptualisation of 'mental deficiency' as the antithesis of the self-sustaining and responsible individuals that it considered the basis of citizenship and mental health. It then traces how this equation became unravelled, in part by the altered conditions under the post-war Welfare State, in part by the mental hygiene movement's own theorising. The final section describes the reconceptualisation of citizenship that eventually emerged with the collapse of the mental hygiene movement and the emergence of MIND. It shows that representations of MIND's rights-based campaigning (which have, in any case, focused on mental illness) as individualist, and fundamentally opposed to medicine and psychiatry, are inaccurate. In fact, MIND sought a comprehensive community-based service, integrated with the general health and welfare services and oriented around a reconstruction of learning disabled people's citizenship rights.

The Underappreciated Doctors of The American Civil Rights Movement. Part I: Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard, MD.

During the fight to end segregation in the United States, most of the 25 or so black physicians who had not already left Mississippi took risks to become active in civil rights locally and nationally. One of the first was T.R.M. Howard, MD, whose life story is both an encouragement and warning for today's physicians. Howard, the protégé of a white Adventist physician, became active in civil rights during medical school. While serving as chief surgeon of the all-black hospital in Mississippi, he formed his own civil rights organization in 1951 and worked to solve the shootings of 2 of its members, George Lee and Gus Courts, and the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. His reports of these events and collaborations with other civil rights icons helped trigger the modern civil rights movement. At the same time, he became a nationally known proponent of abortion rights and then fled to Chicago in 1956, after arming his Delta mansion with long guns and a Thompson machine gun. Howard will be remembered for many things, including his activism for the social determinants of health as president of the National Medical Association.

Perspectives on the Meaning of "Disability".

The meaning of "disability" has shifted with changes in public policy. Half a century ago, Congress was convinced that narrow determinations of disability are easy for physicians to make. But with the advent of universal civil rights protection against disability discrimination in the US, deciding whether particular individuals are disabled became increasingly contentious, until Congress intervened. What should now be addressed in each case is not whether the functionally compromised person is severely disabled enough to exercise a right, but whether mitigating interventions and reasonable accommodations can together achieve equitable access for that person.

An Unwilling Partnership With the Great Society Part I: Head Start and the Beginning of Change in the White Medical Community.

By 1965, the policies and programs of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society brought optimism to black physicians and a new wave of resistance against black civil rights advocates in the American South. The largest of the first Head Start programs, Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), had its roots in Freedom Summer 1964 and the Medical Committee for Human Rights. Like other proposed programs with strong medical components, CDGM was caught in a legislative Bermuda triangle created by the powerful Mississippi congressional delegation to maintain white supremacy and plantation economics. Physician-led investigations exposed the extraordinary level of poor health among Mississippi's black children, supported Head Start as a remedy, and awakened the white medical establishment to health disparities of the Jim Crow period. It was also the beginning of positive change in the previously silent white medical community in the South and their support of civil justice in health.

An Unwilling Partnership With the Great Society Part II: Physicians Discover Malnutrition, Hunger and the Politics of Hunger.

The civil rights and social legislation of the Great Society following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was slow to provide relief for black in the South. Mississippi Senator James Eastland led an effort to defund Head Start, including his state's program, Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), a program with a strong medical component. A senatorial committee, including Robert Kennedy, came to investigate CDGM in 1967. The unimaginable poverty, hunger, malnutrition and chronic disease found in black families was vehemently denied by Eastland. Visits of physician groups then corroborated the findings. The Mississippi delegation made sure that food relief never came and funding for CDGM ceased. Health services were lost to 6000 impoverished children. The epic television documentary, Hunger in America, soon premiered on network television. It triggered ongoing efforts to address health disparities, including implementation of the National Nutrition and Health Survey (NHANES). Similar physician leadership is needed to address the lasting health disparities in our country.

Medicine as a Public Calling.

The debate over how to tame private medical spending tends to pit advocates of government-provided insurance--a single-payer scheme--against those who would prefer to harness market forces to hold down costs. When it is mentioned at all, the possibility of regulating the medical industry as a public utility is brusquely dismissed as anathema to the American regulatory tradition. This dismissiveness, however, rests on a failure to appreciate just how deeply the public utility model shaped health law in the twentieth century-- and how it continues to shape health law today. Closer economic regulation of the medical industry may or may not be prudent, but it is by no means incompatible with our governing institutions and political culture. Indeed, the durability of such regulation suggests that the modern embrace of market-based approaches in the medical industry may be more ephemeral than it seems.

Social Security Policy and the Early Disability Movement--Expertise, Disability, and the Government, 1965-77.

In 1965, the Disablement Income Group launched its National Disability Income campaign to fight for equal treatment of disabled people in the British social security system. By 1977, a series of benefits were created to cover the general population. Yet, despite the obvious political significance of these developments, very little research has focused on the early pan-impairment disability non-governmental organization (NGO). Existing scholarship has come from one of two traditions: the 'poverty lobby' and NGO histories that focus on expert campaign groups; and disability studies which describes a teleological narrative of the development of disabled people's attempts to secure civil rights. This article contends that neither approach is satisfactory. The crossovers between these two historical approaches are necessary to understand how these groups operated and to appreciate their political significance. Using the archives of the Disablement Income Group, the Disability Alliance and the Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation, this article shows that the history of these NGOs is more nuanced than previously described. Similarly, the novelty and growing power of civil rights and poverty lobby campaigning should not be overstated. Through a specific analysis of the lobby in its social and political context, historians can find a clearer picture of how these groups operated and better analyse their significance.