Latest Release: Physicians for the People – Available February 2025
Jack D. Ellis
Professor Emeritus of History, University of Alabama in Huntsville
I am pleased to announce publication of my new book, Physicians for the People: Black Doctors and the Struggle for Healthcare Equality in Alabama, 1870-1970, which appears in the University of Alabama Press's distinguished series Nexus: New Histories of Science, Technology, the Environment, Agriculture, and Medicine
From the University Alabama Press:
"Physicians for the People chronicles the remarkable stories of 241 Black doctors who practiced medicine in Alabama during the Jim Crow era. Historian Jack D. Ellis reveals the ingenuity and resilience of these trailblazing doctors who defied segregation by establishing hospitals and clinics and providing vital healthcare to underserved Black communities.
"This meticulously researched work draws on archival sources, oral histories, and an unparalleled database to dismantle the myth of a monolithic medical system in the Jim Crow South. Jack D. Ellis argues that the post-Civil War lives of Black physicians, dentists, pharmacists, nurses, and midwives hold special significance, illuminating both the causes of health care disparities among African Americans and the reasons for their continued underrepresentation in the medical professions.
"Offering much of interest to students and scholars of Black history, medical history, and the civil rights movement, Physicians for the People exposes the deliberate exclusion faced by Black doctors within the white medical establishment and their ongoing fight for racial equality in medicine."
A comprehensive historical account of race and healthcare in the segregated South
Postcard commemorating 1912 meeting of the all-Black National Medical Association in Tuskegee, Alabama. Symbolizing Tuskegee Institute's embrace of Black health and the training of Black physicians as central to its mission, the postcard shows Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) on the left and Dr. John A. Kenney (1874-1950), director of the campus hospital, on the right. The new John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital, seen in the background, would be dedicated the following year. (Courtesy of the late Linda Kenney Miller, Dr. Kenney's granddaughter).
Black doctor examining baby at the Slossfield Health Center. Funded in part by the New Deal, the Health Center addressed the needs of 50,000 African Americans living in the blighted neighborhoods of North Birmingham and suffering high rates of infant mortality, stillbirths, and tuberculosis deaths. Despite winning a national award as the most outstanding Black community center in the United States, the Health Center began closing down in 1948 with the drying up of federal funds and the refusal of city leader's to provide needed funding. (Courtesy of University Archives, University of Alabama at Birmingham).
Biography
Jack D. Ellis is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Born in Sulphur, Oklahoma, he spent his early years in Avery, Texas before moving back to Oklahoma, where he finished his secondary studies at Lawton Senior High School in 1960. He then graduated from Baylor University and in 1967 received a doctorate in history from Tulane University. Ellis taught for twenty-five years at the University of Delaware and was chair of the Department of History during his final years there. He then joined the faculty of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he had accepted the position of dean of the College of Liberal Arts. As Professor of History, he helped to organize in collaboration with Alabama A&M University a distinguished lecture series on the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, which featured first-hand accounts from the movement's aging activists. Between 1997 and 2004, Ellis completed an oral history project in collaboration with the Medical Archives of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, recording, transcribing, and editing fifty-five interviews with Black physicians and family members in Alabama who had firsthand knowledge of medical practice during the days of segregation. The collection includes fourteen interviews with retired faculty at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, where two-thirds of Alabama's Black practitioners did their medical training. These interviews now reside at at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Ellis is the author of several books on French history and African American medical history in the South. They include Physicians for the People: Black Doctors and the Struggle for Healthcare Equality in Alabama, 1870-1970 (University of Alabama Press, February 2025); Beside the Troubled Waters: A Black Doctor Remembers Life, Medicine, and Civil Rights in An Alabama Town, with Dr. Sonnie W. Hereford III (University of Alabama Press, 2011); The Physician-Legislators of France: Medicine and Politics in the Early Third Republic, 1870-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1990); The Early Life of Georges Clemenceau, 1841-1893 (Regents Press of Kansas,1980); and The French Socialists and the Problem of the Peace, 1904-1914 (Loyola University of Chicago, 1967). In addition to his scholarly activities, Ellis is an active member of the Huntsville Traditional Music Association, of which he is past president. He performs regularly on acoustic guitar at nursing homes, schools, libraries, and other public venues. His love of traditional music stems from his childhood in East Texas and Oklahoma, and his selections range from folk songs and ballads of Appalachia and the British Isles to the music of the Carter Family, Woody Guthrie, and old-time gospel. Ellis is currently working on a memoir.