Dying in the City of the Blues Part 2

            In the second part of Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health, Keith Wailoo details the events that caused the attention around sickle cell anemia to rise to the national level, beginning in the 1950s. Wailoo emphasizes the importance of World War II for the United States and how the healthcare industry, as well as race relations, changed in the post-war era; “[t]he involvement of African Americans in the war effort produced a new discourse on race and health, a discourse that was tinged with disturbing questions about inequality, democracy, and citizenship.”[1] How, then, did the innovations in the healthcare industry and the return of African Americans from the war change spark an increased interest in sickle cell disease at the national level? From this section of the book, it is evident that the changing race relations, as the country was on the eve of the Civil Rights movement, and a new focus on the lives of African Americans factored into the increased interest and research in sickle cell disease.

             As World War II ended and African American veterans began returning home, the fear of a rise in racial tensions spread throughout the country, particularly in the South; many Southerners feared that African Americans would want better treatment, especially in healthcare, because of the equality they experienced in the army. This fear came to fruition as a new African American middle class emerged following the war. As Wailoo states, “[i]f whites could ignore the existence of blacks in earlier decades, they could not do so after the war.”[2] With African Americans demanding greater equality, events that led to the Civil Rights movement also played a role in the visibility of sickle cell disease in the country.

One such example was Brown v. The Board of Education in 1954, which banned segregated public schools in the United States. Focusing on the psychological effects of segregation on African American children, the media became more interested in the lives of African American children; “[i[f black children were still peripheral to these mainstream health concerns, the push for racial equality and school integration would make them increasingly visible in the 1950s. The rising social awareness of sickle cell disease reflected a convergence of racial politics and a new disease economy.”[3] With an increased interest in the welfare of black children, the steady rise of the Civil Rights movement in the South, and an increased focus on family healthcare, it is seen that these different factors contributed to sickle cell disease being discussed and researched at the national level.

---

[1] in Keith Wailoo’s Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 86.

[2] Aubrey Bowsen, “Superstition and Syphilis,” review of Roark Bradford’s This Side of Jordan (London: Harper and Brothers, 1929) in New Amsterdam News, March 1929, in [L.S. Alexander] Gumby Collection of the American Negro, Scrapbooks (New York: Columbia University Libraries, 1971-74), in Keith Wailoo’s Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 96.

[3] Ibid, 108.