A comprehensive historical account of race and healthcare in the segregated South

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), winner of the Alabama Historical Association's James F. Sulzby Award for 2026; 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.