Overview

During the COVID- 9 pandemic, commentators opined that the high concentration of African Americans in dangerous and unsafe work and living environments exposed them to the virus at higher and more deadly rates than their Euro-American counterparts. In From Enslavement to COVID- 9, Joe William Trotter Jr. delves into the historical context of this phenomenon. Focusing on four historical periods—enslavement, emancipation, the industrial era, and the digital age—Trotter argues that rather than being anomalous, the fight for adequate health care and beneficial social service policies follows a similar trajectory as the movement of Black people from enslavement to freedom. The book emphasizes how the labor requirements of work shaped the African American encounter with disease how white medical professionals developed stereotypes about the susceptibility of Black people to sickness and how those professionals denied essential medical care to the country's most vulnerable. Trotter also highlights how people of African descent drew on their legacy of activism and community-building to improve their physical and mental conditions, creating programs and strategies to combat inequality and discrimination in the nation's health care system.

Full Product Details

9781469690841

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Trotter is a brilliant historian, and his deep knowledge of labor, African American history, and urban history shows here, over and over.""--Susan M. Reverby, author of Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy ""With a global pandemic not far behind us, Trotter's sweeping and thorough history of the ways African Americans fought to secure their physical and mental well-being, even as they fought for civil and economic rights, is timely as ever.""--Earl Lewis, author of In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia

Author Information

Joe William Trotter Jr. is Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Social Justice at Carnegie Mellon University.

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