Republican Mayor of Belhaven N.C. Adam O'Neal of Belhaven, North Carolina speaks at rural healthcare rally, June 15, 2015 in Washington, D.C.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
stated, "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman because it often results in physical death," after a meeting of the
Medical Committee on Human Rights in 1966.
Nearly 50 years later we see people across the U.S. still fighting the battle for their health care as extremist politicians in Congress continue to wage war against Obamacare, and state legislatures block Medicaid expansion, denying health care to hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens.
Rarely do we think of the struggle for health care as part of the ongoing civil rights movement, but it is a key element. Nowhere can we see that illustrated more clearly than in North Carolina, where Gov. Pat McCrory and the Republican-dominated General Assembly have blocked Medicaid expansion.
Rural hospitals are at risk, affecting health care for citizens who are white, black, latino, Asian and Native American, many of whom live below the poverty line, and are the "working poor."
The National Rural Health Association has identified 283 more rural hospitals across the country that are in danger of going under—more than 10% of all such facilities. The group found that the financial conditions of the hospitals just hanging on are similar to facilities that already have closed.
In North Carolina, the Republican mayor of the town of Belhaven, Adam O'Neal, has been fighting alongside the Moral Mondays movement to save their local hospital, Pungo, which was closed by Vident Health.
Read on for more on the battle to save Pungo, the latest victory, and the history of health care and civil rights.
In the ongoing struggle for health care it is good to be able to report some positive news. Mayor Adam O'Neal tweeted:
This would never have been possible without a fight and bipartisan efforts.
RALEIGH — An eastern North Carolina mayor who walked 130 miles to the state capital in a bid to reopen his town’s shuttered hospital received a warm welcome from state Rep. Garland Pierce.
Belhaven Mayor Adam O’Neal held a Thursday rally on the front lawn of the North Carolina General Assembly building after walking from the Beaufort County town. Pierce, D-Scotland, who chairs the N.C. Legislative Black Caucus, spoke in a press conference held in conjunction with the rally, joining Rep. Larry Hall, D-Durham, the House minority leader, and Sen. Bill Cook, R-Beaufort.
“This is a bipartisan effort,” Pierce said. “Republicans get sick and Democrats get sick. I am from a rural area and I do understand the importance of having a hospital.”
In a time of strife and division in our nation, there are stories that can give us hope that we can join together around life and death issues that affect us across racial, class, and party lines.
"Story of America," by Anabel Park and Eric Byler, has documented all of the events around the hospital, on video. There's also "Battle of Belhaven: To Save or Close a Hospital in rural eastern North Carolina." There are too many video segments to embed here. I suggest you take some time and look at them. One segment that moved me was interviews with residents in neighboring Hyde County, which also depends on Pungo Hospital.
To understand the hypocrisy of legislators and the impact of denying health care to women in North Carolina, this piece by Emma Akpan posted at Moms Rising gives the details.
It is ironic that “pro-family” legislators over the years have sought to implement reproductive health-care restrictions when the ability to plan your family is a large predictor of the health of the mother and the child. If North Carolina lawmakers are truly concerned about the lives of women and children, they would remember that when women go without health coverage, they have a harder time having healthy babies. While North Carolina’s infant mortality rate is down from previous years, it is still higher than the national average. Seven infants die for every 1,000 live births in North Carolina, compared to six deaths for every 1,000 live births nationally.
There are many factors that contribute to infant mortality: most importantly, the health of the mother. But many North Carolina women don’t have access to affordable health care. National reports also show both uninsured and insured women often go without even basic health care, such as yearly checkups, citing as the reasons high co-pays, not able to take time off of work, and lack of child care. And, with hospitals in predominately Black communities closing, the situation only grows more tragic. As Reverend William Barber explained following the closing of Vidant Pungo Hospital earlier this year: Poor, uninsured mothers, many of whom are African American, rely upon emergency rooms to seek necessary prenatal and postnatal care. North Carolina’s….tragic trend [of infant mortality] will only continue if health care providers like Vidant continue to move emergency care facilities out of predominantly poor, predominantly black areas to wealthier, whiter communities with higher rates of health insurance.
Recently, members of Daily Kos and local activists who attended the
Daily Kos Connects conference in Asheville, North Carolina got a chance to hear Rev. William Barber and to meet and spend time with veteran civil rights activists
Bob Zellner, and
Al McSurely.
Zellner had his walking stick with him, the one he used as he marched alongside of Belhaven Mayor Adam O'Neal on the 283-mile walk to Washington, D.C. in 2014.
What links this struggle for health care to the historical and ongoing battle for civil rights is illustrated by the filing of Title VI complaints to the Justice Department by the North Carolina NAACP. NAACP Attorney Al McSurely explains this in a video segment.
Title VI Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964
Title VI, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq., was enacted as part of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance. As President John F. Kennedy said in 1963:
Simple justice requires that public funds, to which all taxpayers of all races [colors, and national origins] contribute, not be spent in any fashion which encourages, entrenches, subsidizes or results in racial [color or national origin] discrimination.
When we think about the early phase of the civil rights movement and the impact of legislation that was enacted after massive organizing and protests, we often think of school desegregation, the ending of Jim Crow facilities, and the establishment of voting rights. Rarely does the battle for health care and access to hospitals come into the discussion. Here is some of that history.
The Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care
The Medical Committee for Human Rights was organized in 1964 to support civil rights activists during Mississippi's Freedom Summer. MCHR volunteers exposed racism within the American Medical Association, desegregated southern hospitals, set up free clinics in inner cities, and created the model for the community health center. They were early advocates of single-payer universal health insurance. In The Good Doctors, celebrated historian John Dittmer gives an insightful account of a group of idealists whose message and example are an inspiration to all who believe that "Health Care is a Human Right."
For those of you who are interested and engaged in health care activism, this book is an important read. Here are a few of the
editorial reviews.
“Civil-rights historian Dittmer focuses on one of the lesser-known groups involved in the struggle… Dittmer reveals the motivations of many of the organization’s leaders, and he paints a disturbing picture of the shameful treatment of both black doctors and patients in the South. In the early chapters he writes vividly of the challenges facing civil-rights workers and of the brutality—beatings, jailings, killings—inflicted on them… A stark reminder not just of the actions of a group of idealistic activists but of the violence and turmoil of the nation’s not-so-distant past.” —Kirkus
“Those who think themselves familiar with the civil rights movement in the United States are in for a welcome surprise. The Good Doctors by prize-winning historian John Dittmer tells the heroic, and previously overlooked, story of an organization that stood at the barricades in every civil rights struggle from Selma to Chicago to Wounded Knee, battling inequality and racism in the medical profession while setting up clinics that today reach hundreds of thousands of underserved patients. The Good Doctors should be required reading for every American who views quality health care as a basic human right.”—David Oshinsky, author of Polio: An American Story, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in History
“Deeply researched, brilliantly conceived, beautifully written and unsparing in its analysis of every character who walks across its pages, The Good Doctors is a triumph of passionate scholarship and balanced judgment.”—James H. Jones, author of Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
"In this era of racial healing, The Good Doctors is a shocking reminder of how recently Jim Crow reigned over medical care in America. Well into the 1960s, many hospitals and doctors’ offices remained segregated, with blacks given separate and grossly unequal access to beds, waiting rooms, and other basic services. Dittmer tells the tale of the courageous few in the medical profession who fought racial injustice and went on to many other battles in the 1960s and early 1970s. Freedom Summer, Selma, the anti-war movement, Alcatraz, Wounded Knee—they’re all here, in this tour of a turbulent and inspiring time that speaks forcefully to our own."—Tony Horwitz, author of A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World and Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War
One of the key figures in those early civil rights health battles, and the Medical Committee for Human Rights was Dr.
Jack Geiger.
Dr. Jack Geiger and colleague Dr. Count Gibson are often credited as the pioneers of the community health center movement in the United States. Dr. Geiger was active in the Civil Rights movement in the early 1940’s and, after completing his medical training, participated in the Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964. Within the following years, Dr. Geiger helped organize residents in Bolivar County, Mississippi, and in the Columbia Point Public Housing Project in Boston, MA, to establish the nation’s first two community health centers. The health centers were funded through the Office of Economic Opportunity, the agency directing the so-called War on Poverty. The early health centers provided important medical services but also addressed the social determinants of health such as poverty, unemployment, malnutrition, and environmental health issues. There are now over 1,200 health centers nationwide, which were modeled after these community health centers.
You can listen to
Dr. Geiger tell his story when he was interviewed by John Dittmer for the Civil Rights History Project.
A key piece of the history of fighting poverty for whites and blacks in North Carolina was the establishment of the North Carolina Fund. Today's fusion movement has roots in that period.
To Right These Wrongs
When Governor Terry Sanford established the North Carolina Fund in 1963, he saw it as a way to provide a better life for the “tens of thousands whose family income is so low that daily subsistence is always in doubt.”
Illustrated with evocative photographs by Billy Barnes, To Right These Wrongs offers an incisive account of this pioneering effort in America’s War on Poverty.
Robert Korstad and James Leloudis describe how the Fund’s initial successes grew out of its reliance on private philanthropy and federal dollars and its commitment to the democratic mobilization of the poor. Both were tactics calculated to outflank conservative state lawmakers and entrenched local interests that nourished Jim Crow, perpetuated one-party politics, and protected an economy built on cheap labor. The North Carolina Fund came up short in its battle against poverty, but its story continues to be a source of inspiration and instruction for new generations of Americans.
Change Comes Knocking tells the story of the North Carolina Fund, a biracial antipoverty organization that confronted explosive issues of race, class, and politics during the 1960s. The documentary brings the story of the War on Poverty alive with archival photographs, period news footage, and first-hand testimony from men and women who were on the front lines.
Daily Kos Senior Political Writer Joan McCarter and other writers have been following the Belhaven story, and issues around rural health care, poverty, and Medicaid expansion for some time. In case you missed them:
By Joan McCarter: State Medicaid expansion refusal causes North Carolina hospital to close
By Jon Perr: Better Dead and Red: How the GOP blocked health care for red state Americans
By Joan McCarter: Republican mayor in North Carolina warns GOP over Medicaid fallout
By Egberto Willies: This Southern Republican defies GOP in coming out for the Medicaid Expansion to Obamacare
By Joan McCarter: We're losing rural hospitals across the nation
By Joan McCarter: Republican mayor leads another trek to DC for Medicaid expansion
By JoanMar: We Just Sued North Carolina. #StDDs #LetOurPoorPeopleLive, Week 46
Daily Kos has also been covering the Moral Mondays movement, and Rev. William Barber.
Let us come together, join today's fusion movement, and fight for the right to insurance and access to health care. Your lives and the lives of family, friends, and neighbors may depend upon it. This isn't just an issue for North Carolina: It affects our entire nation.