Dr. Williams Does a Deep Dive on How W.E.B. DuBois and James McCune Helped Combat Medical Racism
A very powerful story of how our history, and medical racism link up to public health. The most prominent of Du Bois’s intellectual influences was James McCune Smith. Brilliant and uncompromising, Smith was a public intellectual with the distinction of being the United States’ first university-trained Black doctor. In 1846, in a stinging and exhaustively researched rebuttal, he showed how John Calhoun’s racist analysis was spurious. Using the relatively new field of biostatistics, along with demographics, he exposed the Southern senator’s questionable claims.