John Dittmer

the medical committee for human rights and the struggle for social justice in health care

The good doctors

Details the Black struggle for civil rights in Mississippi

The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi

Local People

In the summer of 1964 medical professionals, mostly white and northern, organized the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) to provide care and support for civil rights activists organizing black voters in Mississippi. They left their lives and lucrative private practices to march beside and tend the wounds of demonstrators from Freedom Summer, the March on Selma, and the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Galvanized and sometimes radicalized by their firsthand view of disenfranchised communities, the MCHR soon expanded its mission to encompass a range of causes from poverty to the war in Vietnam. They later took on the whole of the United States healthcare system. MCHR doctors soon realized fighting segregation would mean not just caring for white volunteers, but also exposing and correcting shocking inequalities in segregated health care. They pioneered community health plans and brought medical care to underserved or unserved areas. Though education was the most famous battleground for integration, the appalling injustice of segregated health care levelled equally devastating consequences. Award-winning historian John Dittmer, author of the classic civil rights history Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, has written an insightful and moving account of a group of idealists who put their careers in the service of the motto "Health Care Is a Human Right."

The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care

The Good Doctors

Danielle L. McGuire

In his seminal article "Freedom Then, Freedom Now," renowned civil rights historian Steven F. Lawson described his vision for the future study of the civil rights movement. Lawson called for a deeper examination of the social, economic, and political factors that influenced the movement's development and growth. He urged his fellow scholars to connect the "local with the national, the political with the social," and to investigate the ideological origins of the civil rights movement, its internal dynamics, the role of women, and the significance of gender and sexuality. In Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement, editors Danielle L. McGuire and John Dittmer follow Lawson's example, bringing together the best new scholarship on the modern civil rights movement. The work expands our understanding of the movement by engaging issues of local and national politics, gender and race relations, family, community, and sexuality. The volume addresses cultural, legal, and social developments and also investigates the roots of the movement. Each essay highlights important moments in the history of the struggle, from the impact of the Young Women's Christian Association on integration to the use of the arts as a form of activism. Freedom Rights not only answers Lawson's call for a more dynamic, interactive history of the civil rights movement, but it also helps redefine the field.

New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement

Freedom Rights

''This is the best treatment scholars have of black life in a southern state at the beginning of the twentieth century.'' -- Howard N. Rabinowitz, Journal of American History ''The author shows clearly and forcefully the ways in which this [white] system abused and controlled the black lower caste in Georgia.'' -- Lester C. Lamon, American ......

John Dittmer

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