When Dr. Robert Smith was growing up in his hometown of Jackson, Miss., it was hard for most of the state’s residents to get high-quality health care.
For poor Blacks, it was even harder. Health services were almost non-existent in rural parts of the nearly 50-percent Black state. In cities with hospitals, access for Blacks was limited to Black wings or wards with limited services. Black people, like Smith, who aspired to become licensed health care providers — nurses, dentists and physicians — were required by state law to go to institutions outside the state, despite the state maintaining a medical and nursing school for White students.
Growing up as the civil rights movement of the last century was gathering force, Smith seized on the issue of agonizing health disparities as his civil rights concern. He decided to dedicate his life to improving the health of his fellow citizens and reducing health care disparities.
Today, evidence abounds that Smith has been succeeding. However, the 80-year-old Howard University Medical School graduate recently told an audience that much work remains to be done.
Observers of Smith’s work over the past decades say his fingerprints can be found on health care service improvements all over the state and nation.
“He was on the frontlines of equitable access to healthcare,” says Mississippi historian Dr. Robert Luckett, director of Jackson State University’s Margaret Walker Center. Smith was “as important” to the fight for health care equity as Fannie Lou Hamer and Medgar Evers were to political equity battles, says Luckett.
Indeed, Smith, who graduated from medical school in 1961, emerged in the early 1960s as a persistent advocate for health care equity just as the civil rights movement was getting more energized. In 1962, according to a summary of his history by the weekly Jackson Free Press, he became the volunteer Southern medical field director for the Medical Committee for Human Rights. The committee served as the medical arm of the Mississippi civil rights movement, according to the paper.
