{"id":10409,"date":"2023-11-30T16:24:40","date_gmt":"2023-11-30T16:24:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/?p=10409"},"modified":"2023-11-30T16:24:40","modified_gmt":"2023-11-30T16:24:40","slug":"covid-19-was-bloody-sunday-for-americas-racial-health-disparities-yet-there-is-little-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/2023\/11\/30\/covid-19-was-bloody-sunday-for-americas-racial-health-disparities-yet-there-is-little-progress\/","title":{"rendered":"COVID-19 Was ‘Bloody Sunday’ for America’s Racial Health Disparities, Yet There is Little Progress"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Hazel Trice Edney
\n<\/strong>Guest Column<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thousands of Black people had protested and many had died at the hands of police, white supremacists and racists as they engaged in non-violent campaigns to win the right to vote.<\/p>\n

Still, America did not fully sit up and hear their cries until \u201cBloody Sunday\u201d, March 7, 1965. On that day TV cameras showed protestors being brutally attacked and beaten by the Alabama State Police as they marched peacefully from Selma to Montgomery across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.<\/p>\n

It was only then that the United States government took decisive action. President Lyndon B. Johnson, a week after \u201cBloody Sunday\u201d, adopted the words of the civil rights leaders and declared before the nation in a televised speech to Congress, \u201cWe shall overcome.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within a few months, the United States Congress adopted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 and it was signed into law by President Johnson on August 6 that year. In a nutshell, the VRA prohibited any activities by anyone to abridge the right to vote.<\/p>\n

More than 58 years later, Black doctors on the front lines against racism in medicine across the U. S. had hoped that the revelation of racially disparate suffering and death amidst the Coronavirus pandemic (COVID 19) would become the \u201cBloody Sunday\u201d for revealing the truth about health disparities in America and escalate the long struggle to end them. But that has apparently not happened.<\/p>\n

\u201cI compare this now to the civil rights movement. We were really burdened with discrimination and brutality etcetera for many years,\u201d says Dr. Louis Sullivan, MD, founder of the Morehouse School of Medicine, and pioneer of the 15-year-old government agency now known as the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cBut,\u00a0the incidents such as the Birmingham police treatment of Blacks on the Edmund Pettus Bridge revealed to the nation those things that had existed for a long time.\u00a0So, in a way, I see that the Coronavirus has had the same impact. Health disparities has been an issue for years. But people have not been aware or haven\u2019t really understood or taken it as seriously as many of us who were working with disparities have taken it. But now we are confronting this. And I am hoping that this really results much more in resources and attention and research and care to be devoted to the elimination of these disparities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Sullivan is among leading Black physicians and HBCU administrators who agree that health disparities in the Black community \u2013 and the racism at the root of it \u2013 has been revealed to be far worse than anyone thinks. They say the disparities still must be dealt with through racial and cultural coalitions, increase in Black medical professionals and strengthening of public policies.<\/p>\n

\u201cCovid 19 has really pulled the scab off the sore of the underbelly of our mistreatment as Black Americans,\u201d says Dr. Rahn Bailey, MD, chief of the Psychiatry Department at Louisiana State University. \u201cIt\u2019s a long story, but a pertinent and a salient one. So, when an additional stressor like the COVID 19 or the Coronavirus presents itself, we already have a subscript in American life where whatever is bad happens worse to African-Americans. We have less health care access; we have fewer hospitals in our communities; we have less access to providers or specialists; very often we get less optimal medication or management. We have data to support that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The data indicates racial disparities across the board:<\/p>\n