Loading…
← Back to schedule
F1. Reclaiming Black Health and Reimagining Black Futures in the Civil Rights Era and its Wake 
Saturday May 3, 2025 1:00pm - 2:30pm EDT
Fairfax
F1. Reclaiming Black Health and Reimagining Black Futures in the Civil Rights Era and its Wake  
Chair: Samuel Kelton Roberts, Columbia University  
 
  1. Udodiri Okwandu, Rutgers University: The War on Postpartum Psychosis: Dr. Elizabeth B. Davis, Family Planning, and Racial Uplift in 1960s Black Harlem 
  2. Kelsey Henry, Princeton University: “Deprivatized Emotions, Public Feelings: Kenneth B. Clark and the Psychologization of Antiblack Environments in the U.S., 1950s – 1960s" 
  3. Angelica Clayton, University of Pennsylvania: Cycles of Grief and Mourning Absence: The Origins of Intergenerational Trauma and its Critiques, c. 1970-2000  
  4. Alexandra Fair, Harvard University: “Black Panther Party Challenges Racist to Intellectual Duel": The Black Panther Party's Anti- Eugenic Activism   

In Listening to Images, Tina M. Campt defines “black futurity”  as the “power to imagine beyond current fact and envision that which is not but must be” to resist the subordination of Black communities. A commitment to black futurity was central to the Civil Rights Movement, which catalyzed the eventual abolishment of legalized racial segregation and discrimination. Yet, as Campt aptly observes, black futurity is not only evident in “political movements and acts of resistance” but also “less likely places.” In this vein, this panel explores how a diverse range of Black practitioners – including community organizers, developmental psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts – articulated and advanced black futurity in both the scientific and medical domains, ultimately envisioning them as critical sites to achieve social, political, and economic liberation. While cognizant that legal disenfranchisement and economic marginalization were central to racial oppression, they also interrogated how, for example, contradictory scientific discourses and postwar policies, racial biases embedded in clinical interactions,  unequal access to healthcare, and psychiatric and psychological conceptual frameworks normed around white populations,  perpetuated Black marginalization. As the Civil Rights Movement spawned countercultures, the movement’s heterogeneous offshoots  reflected novel political ideologies and approaches to achieving Black liberation, many of which exemplified the Black Panther Party’s holistic commitment to “Serve the people body and soul.” Foregrounding the  anti-eugenic politics of the Black Panther’s Intercommunal News Service,  Kenneth B. Clark’s quest for an antiracist social psychiatry at the Northside Center for Child Development, Black psychiatrist Elizabeth Bishop’s efforts to depathologize Black motherhood through family planning at Harlem Hospital Center, and Black researchers’ alternative models of intergenerational trauma and healing, this panel positions Black health activism as integral to the success of  Black social movements more broadly.   Thus, this panel not only highlights understudied and undertheorized interventions at the intersection of health politics and liberatory movement toward Black futurity, but also emphasizes their significance for understanding the historical struggle for Black freedom.
Moderators
avatar for Samuel Kelton Roberts

Samuel Kelton Roberts

Associate Professor of History & Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University
No longer on MuskX. Find me at @skroberts.bsky.social. 
Speakers
avatar for Udodiri R. Okwandu

Udodiri R. Okwandu

Rutgers University
Historian of race, gender, and medicine. Currently writing a book on how scientific and sociocultural understandings of race and motherhood shaped medical constructions of maternal mental illness in the U.S. across the 19th and 20th centuries. I also recently joined Bluesky. Follow... Read More →
KH

Kelsey Henry

Yale University
AC

Angelica Clayton

University of Pennsylvania
AF

Alexandra Fair

Harvard University
F1 Abstracts pdf
Saturday May 3, 2025 1:00pm - 2:30pm EDT
Fairfax Sheraton, Level 3
  Concurrent Session, Traditional Papers

Attendees (36)


Log in to save this to your schedule, view media, leave feedback and see who's attending!

Tweet Share
Share Modal

Share this link via

Or copy link