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)
“O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management.”
—Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944)