Black History

Cal Reparations Task Force: Yale Professor Traces Long History of Racism in Public Health

“It is important for us to recognize that many critical issues that we are wrestling with today have long, old, and deep historical roots,” said Dr. Carolyn Roberts, a professor at Yale University. “These include racial bias and disparate medical treatment, race-based medicine, and medical exploitation. In our historical analysis, we must consider not only American slavery and its afterlife, but also the transatlantic slave trade.”

Published

4 years ago

March 22, 2022

Antonio Ray Harvey

Yale Professor Carolyn Roberts is a historian of medicine and science.

By Antonio Ray Harvey, California Black Media

Dr. Carolyn Roberts, a professor at Yale University, provided to the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans detailed descriptions, both verbal and visual, of the horrific experiences Africans endured during the transatlantic slave trade.

A historian of medicine and science, Roberts said the trauma descendants of enslaved Africans suffered during transportation to the United States was only the beginning of a “broken relationship” between African Americans and the United States’ healthcare system.

“It is important for us to recognize that many critical issues that we are wrestling with today have long, old, and deep historical roots,” Roberts said. “These include racial bias and disparate medical treatment, race-based medicine, and medical exploitation. In our historical analysis, we must consider not only American slavery and its afterlife, but also the transatlantic slave trade.”

The transatlantic slave trade was the “largest forced oceanic migration in human history,” a passage that was responsible for transferring between 10 million and 12 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th century, Roberts said.

A majority of the African people taken captive were young women and men who were on the cusp of starting families. This generation of Africans ended up contributing to the enrichment of the enslavers, Roberts said.

For the voyage, Africans were placed in tiers below the decks of cargo ships that would sail up to 5,000 miles across the ocean Roberts said. To make sure that the enslaved stayed healthy for the duration of the trip and arrive to their destination alive, slave traders hired medical doctors.

“A majority of enslaved people who arrived in the United States arrived onboard British slave ships,” Roberts said. “British slave ship medicine was based on systemic violence and dehumanization. (The doctors) performed invasive and forced medical inspections. Women and girls were pinned down and their legs were held open so that doctors could see if they had previously borne children.”

Drugs, whips, and pistols were used by slave traders if the enslaved women and men did not comply with the medical practitioners’ orders. Roberts said it was common for doctors to assume that Africans had the capacity to withstand extreme physical pain.

Roberts was one of several experts that spoke during the public, mental and physical health segment of the two-day meeting held in January.

Dr. Tina Sacks, an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare; Dr. Cassondra Marshall, UC Berkeley Public Health professor of Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health; Brett Andrews, CEO of PRC (formally Positive Resource Center) in San Francisco; and Melissa Jones, executive director of Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative (BARHII) were other panelists during the meeting.

Roberts did not stop with the horrific details captured Africans suffered on the high seas. She forewarned the nine-member panel about a graphic image she was about to display. It was a black-and-white photo of a human cadaver on a gurney. Surrounded by white doctors, the image depicted a surgical examination being performed on a Black man.

These acts of inhumanity had an adverse effect on Black Americans, Roberts said, and the resulting cruelty and racism endured 157 years after slavery was abolished in the United States.

“So, a new management of healthcare enters the world. This is a form of healthcare where medical violence against Africans and African descended people became an acceptable normative, an institutionalized practice for over a century in the context of the British slave trade. This forced Black people into a unique and troubling relationship with Western medicine before they set foot in the United States,” Roberts explains.

“It also created a new understanding of the doctor-patient relationship, a relationship that was violent, personalized, extractive, and exploitative,” she argues.

Over the years, the enslaved Africans and their freed descendants learned to trust themselves by concocting their own medicinal formulas.

“They developed their own medical systems. They blended medical knowledge from Africa with medicinal plants in the Americas,” Roberts said. “However, they could not avoid white doctors who began to use their bodies to advance medical science.

Roberts holds a joint appointment in the departments of History/History of Science and Medicine, and African American Studies and a secondary appointment at Yale School of Medicine.

Roberts’ research interests concern the history of race, science, and medicine in the context of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade.

“It’s a sobering moment when we began to understand the health impacts of multigenerational racism and oppression,” Dr. Cheryl Grills, a member of the Task Force, said.

The Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans will have its eighth meeting at 9 a.m. on March 29 and March 30.

Antonio Ray Harvey

Posts by Antonio Ray Harvey

Up Next

Rebecca Kaplan Officially Files to Run for District 3 Alameda County Supervisor

Don't Miss

Congress Passes Anti-Lynching Bill After 200 Failed Attempts Over 100+ Years

Antonio Ray Harvey

Click to comment

Art

After 10-Year Wait, Fillmore Heritage Center Reopens in San Francisco

After serving as the economic and cultural hub of the Fillmore’s historically Black community for more than a decade, the center’s closure ended what was called the “Rebirth of the Cool,” referring to the neighborhood’s role during the height of Black Jazz in the United States.

Published

10 hours ago

June 10, 2026

bpusa-syndication

Rev. Amos Brown of Third Baptist Church addresses community members at the Fillmore Heritage Center ribbon cutting. Photo by Linda Parker Pennington.

By Linda Parker Pennington, Special to The Post

Last Saturday morning, the cloudy skies cleared just as the highly anticipated ribbon-cutting ceremony began, marking the reopening of the Fillmore Heritage Center at 1330 Fillmore and Eddy.

The complex – which had once included Yoshi’s Jazz Club, the Lush Life Art Gallery, the Koret Heritage Lobby, a 54-seat microcinema, and the Black-owned 1300 On Fillmore restaurant – shuttered in 2015.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announcing the reopening of the Fillmore Heritage Center. Erika Scott, owner of Honey Art Studio, looks on with pride. Photo by Linda Parker Pennington.

“The Fillmore is the most important neighborhood in San Francisco’s history for centering Black culture, music, business, and community, and has shaped this City and influenced the entire country,” said San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie to the gathering of more than 100 community leaders, business owners, and public officials. “This building reflects the deep roots of the Fillmore. Urban renewal left deep scars that are still felt today. This Center celebrates a strong Black community that continues to shape San Francisco. I am proud to join the community as we reopen the Fillmore Heritage Center.”

Although the previous stakeholders will not be returning to the center, spaces are available for nonprofit organizations and ventures, such as Fillmore native Ericka Johnson’s Honey Art Studio.

“This Center will be an economic engine and a thriving venue that shines a light on the Black-owned businesses in this neighborhood and lifts the entire district,” Lurie continued. “Our City is committed to this community for the long term.”

“We’re excited to collaborate with the City to finally reopen these doors,” said Ken Johnson, a videographer and community leader who’d been lobbying for the reopening of the center. “It’s an opportunity to showcase the entrepreneurship and creative spirit of this ‘Harlem of the West’ and the ‘Rebirth of the Cool,’ grounded in our uniquely gifted Fillmore community.”

This month, through its Office of Economic and Workforce Development, the city will begin renting the building’s noncommercial spaces for pop-up events celebrating local talent, arts, and entertainment primarily centered in the Fillmore.

bpusa-syndication

Posts by bpusa-syndication

Arts and Culture

COMMENTARY: Black Music is the Sound of Black Freedom: Let Us Reclaim Both This Juneteenth

Black Music Month started when Black Music Association members Ed Wright, Kenny Gamble and his wife, journalist and radio host Dyanna Williams were able to persuade President Jimmy Carter to establish the observation on June 7, 1979.

Published

1 day ago

June 9, 2026

Oakland Post

Robert Johnson (1911-1938) is thought of as the godfather of blues music, especially Delta blues. The 29 songs recorded by him during his short life have been of massive inspiration to guitarists and musicians over the last 80 years. Public domain photo.

By Wanda Ravernell

Black Music Month and Juneteenth are inextricably linked – Black music is the sound of our freedom.

From the plaintive moans of the enslaved Africans’ ‘sorrow songs,’ to the fields of Civil War battle where Black soldiers picked up abandoned bugles, to the upright piano played in juke joints on Saturday night and churches come Sunday morning, our ancestors’ innovation in the face of want, fear, degradation, and hopelessness has yielded genres of music imitated ’round the world.

In 2000, Congress made it official. In 2009, Pres. Barack Obama changed the name to African American Music Heritage Month and in 2023, Pres. Joe Biden changed it back to Black Music Month, two years after he declared Juneteenth a national holiday, the result of a movement led by Opal Lee.

Our ancestors battle for freedom over these last 400 years and the music that allowed them expression of their humanity deserved to be honored.

But we may be losing sight of the value of their sacrifices.

‘Sing a Song Full of the Faith That the Dark past Has Taught Us…’

Along with the long-known exploitation of Black musicians whose recordings were stolen by record companies, the commercialization of Juneteenth feels like another kind of theft.

I had never heard of Juneteenth until I moved to the Bay Area from my hometown of Philadelphia. I didn’t know it was one of many freedom festivals celebrated by descendants of enslaved people in the United States.

Emancipation Day was Jan. 1 in Pennsylvania, April 16 in Wash., D.C., May 20 in Florida, and Aug. 8 in Kentucky. But Juneteenth, June 19, has the most renown, known in Texas as the ‘colored peoples’ Fourth of July.’

It was marked by parades, beauty pageants, rodeos, backyard barbecues and church picnics.

Yes, church.

The formerly enslaved began the day praying in thanks for their freedom just as they had prayed for Jubilee – the day of freedom – when they had chains on their feet and hands. They ‘testified’ about their past suffering and how they had managed to overcome.

And they sang.

Although, we will not hold it this year, Omnira Institute’s Juneteenth Ritual of Remembrance recalled this part of Juneteenth with prayers in the languages of the African captives. In the middle of the ceremony, a soloist would lead us in singing “Many Thousand Gone” while we took turns reciting portions of the Emancipation Proclamation, the news of freedom that took more than two years to reach Texas – two months after the Civil War ended.

“Many Thousand Gone” was famously recorded by Black luminary Paul Robeson in 1947:

“No more auction block for me,

No more, no more

No more auction black for me

Many thousand gone.”

Other verses refer to the ‘pint of salt’ and the ‘driver’s lash,’ the realities of enslavement that they had survived.

‘Sing a Song Full of the Hope That the Present has Brought Us’

All of the genres of African American music have at their root songs like that, the essence being, as Stevie Wonder, wrote, “the joy inside our pain.” So Black music is not just music. It is our story, our history, our very strength.

During the Civil Rights Movement, which peaked 100 years after slavery ended, the people testified that it was the freedom songs – based on spirituals – that gave them the heart to march, face attack dogs, fire hoses, beatings, and shootouts with vigilantes.

The music reminded them that power was in the people. That music, our music, can do so again. We don’t have to accept the commodification of the products of our culture.

The power of those songs is showing a resurgence across the South as we battle again for the right to self-determination through the ballot box.

Those songs are the voices of our ancestors, voices forged in their blood, their sweat, their tears, joy and, above all, faith. Those songs, those prayers live in our blood and our very breath.

This Juneteenth, let us reclaim those holy voices expressed in Black music for ourselves. It is our birthright. It can neither be bought nor sold. No more. Never again.

Wanda Ravernell is the executive director of Omnira Institute, sponsor for 18 years of the Juneteenth Ritual of Remembrance and Oakland’s 11^th Annual Black-Eyed Pea Festival, which will take place on Sept. 12.