A two-year-old David Satcher lay gravely ill with whooping cough and pneumonia. He should have been in a hospital, but he was born in Anniston, Alabama, in 1941. There, like elsewhere across the Deep South, hospitals didn’t admit Black people. It was a pernicious practice of the day that also characterized much of the nation’s history of racism and inequity.
That’s why Satcher’s father summoned Dr. Fred Jackson, Anniston’s only Black physician. He came to the family’s farm and tended to his young patient all day. But as he left that evening, Dr. Jackson delivered the same crushing warning that Black parents back then knew well. Without hospital care, your sick, Black child will likely die at home.
But Satcher’s parents, self-taught farmers and faithful Sunday school leaders, were determined not to bury a third child. They followed the doctor’s orders, and his mother even “breathed” for her nearly breathless son — so go the stories of his crisis and survival that David Satcher said he heard over and over growing up.
The doctor died when Satcher was five years old, but that didn’t stop a little Black boy whose parents didn’t finish elementary school from “telling everyone I was going to be a doctor, just like Dr. Jackson,” he recalls.
Learning, leading, climbing
Today, at 79, Satcher has accomplished that and so much more as one of the nation’s preeminent physicians, a respected civil rights leader and scholar, and a pioneering public health administrator. For Satcher, the past — being Black, poor and sick in the racially segregated south — was his introduction to unequal treatment. It was also his spark. And it is ever present.
“That’s why the issue of disparities in health is very personal for me. I lived that. I lived through them,” Satcher told Diverse in an interview conducted late last year about his new book, My Quest for Health Equity: Notes on Learning While Leading, which is part memoir and an instructive look inside a legendary career that spans more than five decades.
