The Worsening "Negro Health Problem"
In the 1910s, as increasing urbanization began bringing whites and blacks into closer contact, Virginia health officials started compiling evidence of the "Negro Health Problem" - high disease, death, and maternal and infant mortality rates among blacks. Hard physical labor along with poor diet and sanitation contributed to the problem. Disease flourished in the crowded black neighborhoods, where garbage piled up, sewage went untreated, and running water was often nonexistent .
Fearing that black child-care nurses, cooks, and laundresses might spread tuberculosis to white neighborhoods, the government began looking for ways to stamp out TB and other contagious diseases. At the time, the only treatment facilities for blacks were the Central State Hospital for Mental Diseases and the State Penitentiary .
Agnes Dillon Randolph, a lifelong political activist and charter member of the Virginia State Association of Nurses, became concerned about the situation . To strengthen her political influence, Randolph rose to the position of Executive Secretary of the Virginia Anti-Tuberculosis Association. She lobbied the General Assembly to establish a sanatorium for Negro tuberculosis patients - the first ever in the United States. Although some legislators were reluctant to try such an unprecedented idea, in 1916, the legislature granted her request .
Read more about this topic: Piedmont Sanatorium
Famous quotes containing the words negro, health and/or problem:
“If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“Woman ... cannot be content with health and agility: she must make exorbitant efforts to appear something that never could exist without a diligent perversion of nature. Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“I don’t have any problem with a reporter or a news person who says the President is uninformed on this issue or that issue. I don’t think any of us would challenge that. I do have a problem with the singular focus on this, as if that’s the only standard by which we ought to judge a president. What we learned in the last administration was how little having an encyclopedic grasp of all the facts has to do with governing.”
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