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.

Why I joined the Freedom Rides.

Peter Sterling expands upon his recent Q & A article by discussing his participation in the Freedom Rides and the reasons for his involvement in the civil rights movement.

"The Living Monument": The Desegregation of Grady Memorial Hospital and the Changing South.

Grady Memorial Hospital is a pillar of public medical and surgical care in the Southeast. The evolution of this institution, both in its physical structure as well as its approach to patient care, mirrors the cultural and social changes that have occurred in the American South. Grady Memorial Hospital opened its doors in 1892 built in the heart of Atlanta's black community. With its separate and unequal facilities and services for black and white patients, the concept of "the Gradies" was born. Virtually, every aspect of care at Grady continued to be segregated by race until the mid-20th century. In 1958, the opening of the "New Grady" further cemented this legacy of the separate "Gradies," with patients segregated by hospital wing. By the 1960s, civil rights activists brought change to Atlanta. The Atlanta Student Movement, with the support of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., led protests outside of Grady, and a series of judicial and legislative rulings integrated medical boards and public hospitals. Eventually, the desegregation of Grady occurred with a quiet memo that belied years of struggle: on June 1, 1965, a memo from hospital superintendent Bill Pinkston read "All phases of the hospital are on a non-racial basis, effective today." The future of Grady is deeply rooted in its past, and Grady's mission is unchanged from its inception in 1892: "It will nurse the poor and rich alike and will be an asylum for black and white."

"Not in my name": the anti-racist praxis of Mab Segrest & Minnie Bruce Pratt.

Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946-) and Mab Segrest (1949-) are white middle-class lesbians that both came of age during the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement in rural Alabama. Today, they are considered influential figures in feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) literary movements and recognized as important activists in late twentieth-century feminist, LGBTQ, and anti-racist political struggles. Examining Pratt's Rebellion: Essays, 1980-1991 (1991) and Segrest's Memoir of a Race Traitor (1994), I argue that both texts deconstruct the sociopolitical dynamics and ideologies that inform the inculcation of white middle-class southern womanhood specifically and hegemonic white southern culture generally through performing a form of anti-racist praxis that I call geospatial critique. This term addresses how Pratt and Segrest mine spaces that they occupy for histories of struggle, paying specific attention to how white settler-colonialism and chattel slavery produced particular epistemologies of race, class, gender, and sexuality that continue to influence social identities and practices in the present. Initially developed during Pratt and Segrest's collaboration on Feminary, a lesbian-feminist journal located in Durham, North Carolina, between 1978 and 1982, geospatial critique, I suggest, is a direct response to or a way of undoing the racial training that was part of the production of whiteness in the south from the turn to the first half of the twentieth century.

FIFTY YEARS AFTER KING'S DEATH: UNTOLD STORIES OF HEROES OF THE PAST.

In 1955 three individuals converged to change the arc of history, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and arguably the most provocative but least known, Frank Minis Johnson Jr. Johnson served on the Federal District Court of the Middle District of Alabama from 1955 to 1979, during which time his numerous decisions revolutionized Civil Rights. His rulings ended the Montgomery Bus Boycott, integrated public transportation, reformed state prisons, and improved the care for the mentally ill.

Historical perspective on physical employment standards.

BACKGROUND: When one thinks of jobs with physical employment standards, the first thoughts typically center around firefighting, law enforcement, and military jobs. However, there are 100s of arduous jobs that exist in the public and private sectors that range from moderately demanding to strenuous. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 28% of the workforce in the United States performs physically demanding jobs that involve construction, machinery installation and repair, public safety, and other professions. OBJECTIVE: This paper provides a historical perspective of physical employment standards for hiring workers into these arduous jobs, how we arrived at our current knowledge base, and the challenges faced today when determining and implementing physical employment standards. METHOD: This narrative review draws on evidence from 62 published sources. RESULTS: This paper focuses on the need for a multidisciplinary approach to identifying job requirements, the professions (e.g., medical, psychology, physiology) that underpin the methodologies, and the knowledge used by current researchers. Descriptions of test and cut score development, legal issues, and challenges for the future also are highlighted.

Citizenship, Vulnerability and Mental Incapacity in England, 1900-1960s.

Over the twentieth century, the Lunacy Office (renamed the Court of Protection in 1947) was responsible for appointing 'receivers' to manage the property of adults in England who were found incapable of managing their own affairs. Tens of thousands of people were in this position by the 1920s, and numbers continued to grow until after Second World War. This article uses the archives of the Office to examine the evolution of the concept of mental incapacity over the first half of the twentieth century, offering a corrective to the popular impression that the time before the Mental Capacity Act of 2005 was an era of ignorance and bad practice. It examines the changing ways in which being 'incapable' was understood and described, with particular reference to shifting ideas of citizenship. I argue that incapacity was not always seen as absolute or permanent in the first half of the century, that models of incapacity began to include perceived vulnerability in the interwar period and that women in particular were seen in this way. From the 1940s, though, the profile of those found incapable was changing, and the growing welfare state and its principles of employment and universality saw the idea of incapacity narrowing and solidifying around knowledge deficits, especially among the elderly. This brings the history of the Lunacy Office into the twentieth century and connects it to current concerns around assessments of mental capacity today.

Reproductive Politics in Twentieth-Century France and Britain.

This special issue adopts a comparative approach to the politics of reproduction in twentieth-century France and Britain. The articles investigate the flow of information, practices and tools across national boundaries and between groups of experts, activists and laypeople. Empirically grounded in medical, news media and feminist sources, as well as ethnographic fieldwork, they reveal the practical similarities that existed between countries with officially different political regimes as well as local differences within the two countries. Taken as a whole, the special issue shows that the border between France and Britain was more porous than is typically apparent from nationally-focused studies: ideas, people and devices travelled in both directions; communication strategies were always able to evade the rule of law; contraceptive practices were surprisingly similar in both countries; and religion loomed large in debates on both sides of the channel.

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.

The Final Years of Central State Hospital.

There is a rich literature on the deinstitutionalization movement in the US but few, if any, parallel histories of state mental hospitals. Under attack from the 1950s on, state hospitals dwindled in size and importance. Yet, their budgets remained large. This paper offers a case study of one such facility, Indiana's Central State Hospital, between 1968 and 1994. During these years, local newspapers published multiple stories of patient abuse and neglect. Internal hospital materials also acknowledged problems but offered few solutions. In 1984, the US Department of Justice intervened, charging Central State with having violated patients' civil rights, the first such action filed under the 1980 Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act. Although Indiana signed a consent decree promising major reform, long-lasting change proved elusive. Civil and criminal lawsuits proliferated. In 1992, as Central State continued to attract negative attention, Indiana Governor Evan Bayh ordered the troubled hospital closed. His decision promised to save the state millions of dollars and won plaudits from many, but not all, mental health advocates. Even as the last patients left in 1994, some families continued to challenge the wisdom of eliminating Indiana's only large urban mental hospital, but to no effect.