Also overlooked, she said, is the fact that the health of African Americans barely improved after emancipation, owing to the hurdles former slaves faced procuring adequate food, shelter, and clothing. This led to a disproportionate number of African Americans dying during the early 20th-century smallpox epidemic, fostering arguments in some circles that slavery was better for black welfare. Even in 1981, she said, a North Carolina study found a higher black mortality rate because of lack of access to health services. “The negroes died because they were inferior,” Hammonds said, “And they were inferior because they died.”

The event was part of a nationwide attempt by schools of public health and other community organizations and institutions to use the anniversary of American slavery as an opportunity for a soul-searching. It recalls Harvard’s own campaign in the past dozen years to come to terms with its connections to slavery through research and teaching by Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of American History, and others, and the efforts of Drew Faust, now Harvard president emeritus and the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor, to foster initiatives such as a major nationwide conference in 2017 on universities and slavery, and unveiling a plaque honoring early enslaved workers.

At Monday’s gathering, City College of New York journalism Professor Linda Villarosa, a recent contributor to The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project on the history of slavery, recalled an earlier story she wrote for Essence magazine. It focused on an African American woman in New Orleans who lost her first child because doctors ignored warning signs of an impending miscarriage. Treatment was nearly as bad when she was pregnant with her second child, who was delivered by a doctor she’d never met — a common occurrence for black women, Villarosa found. What shocked her, she said, were the letters she received in response to her piece, many of which condemned the woman for having a second child and invoking myths about the inferior health of black Americans. “The level of denial about these issues was surprising and difficult.”

A mother herself, Villarosa also found disturbing signs in her own dealings with the system. She noted that in many hospitals, the spirometer (used to measure lung capacity) is given a “racial correction” because of the perception that African Americans have inferior lungs — an infuriating falsehood that she traced back to something Thomas Jefferson wrote. She suspected that such an adjustment was made on her when she was pregnant, which was ironic, since she’d been raised at higher altitudes in the Colorado mountains and so probably had stronger-than-average lungs. Worse, when she developed a complication during her pregnancy, her doctor asked whether she’d used crack cocaine, despite her status as the health editor of a national magazine.

Villarosa did propose one solution: providing racial training for OB-GYNs. “It’s about taking our valuable training and marrying it with something else — with respect and caring, kindness and love.”

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