Racism leads to poor health and an ailing community
Slade describes some of the black community's health problems. Unemployment and poverty lead to a high rate of infant mortality and teen pregnancy, and rob the community of confidence. Desegregation eroded the status of the black community's leaders, giving young African Americans few role models; it also offered opportunities to individuals who leave their communities to take advantage of them. Slade is hopeful that community institutions can push back against this host of enemies to success, solidarity, and health.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with James Slade, February 23, 1997. Interview R-0019. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
-
Despite these tremendous changes with the civil rights movement, and
Medicare and Medicaid, and a lot of the things we've been
talking about, there are still, at least statistically, racial
differences in things such as infant mortality.
- JAMES SLADE:
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There is still a difference. One thing that contributes to infant
mortality is teen pregnancy and nutritional status. That's a
problem that probably won't be solved with the present
generation. Hopefully, down the line, if we can't solve the
problem of teen pregnancy, at least we'll diminish it, and
that's going to take a lot of help from a lot of different
areas. The schools, the churches, and society in general. I think part
of the problem there is employment. They see a lot of blacks unemployed,
and a lot of times they say, "What's the use of
going to college if I'm not going to be able to get a
job?" A lot of times when you get frustrated, you do things
that don't make a lot of sense. They have low self-esteem,
and perhaps getting pregnant gives them a certain status.
It's not a very wise way of looking at it. So until we solve
some of these wider social problems such as employment, and giving
people more hope when they're young. It's going to
take a lot of networking together to get this generation straightened
out. Hopefully there are some bright spots on the horizon, but
it's going to be a while before the health status of black is
on par with whites. It's going to have to come from within
the black race itself. It takes a while when you've been
pressed down to rise back up, even when the pressure's no
longer there.
Things like sports have a great impact, but sometimes it gets overplayed.
There's nothing wrong with basketball and football stars, but
the average student can't be that. We need to learn to aim at
something that's just as important, but maybe not as visible.
I think that falls back on the parents.
- KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
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Do you think that the institutions that used to encourage blacks to
solve these problems, like the black churches and schools
and hospitals, even thought they were the results of
segregation, they were resources and sources of strength. Do you think
that has changed now?
- JAMES SLADE:
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One of the sad things that's happened in integrated schools
is that a lot of black leaders fell by the wayside and got pushed out of
the system. It's just a fact of life that to some degree, you
tend to relate to people who look more like you. When you go to a
convention, you find the ladies go where the other ladies are, and the
men bunch together. The same thing with race, maybe not quite as much.
If the black students only see white leaders in positions of importance,
they won't aspire to that type of position, because they
don't have a role model. Overall, integration was good and
gave us a lot of advantages, but somewhere along the line, we lost some
of the things that segregation did offer, and how to implement them into
the system. Historically black colleges are still needed, because
it's hard to take a predominantly white institution, and get
enough black role models in important places to make a real difference.
The white professor of English doesn't want to give up his
job, if he's been there 15 or 20 years, so that the black
students can have a role model in the English department. In the
predominantly black school, he has that. But if you had enough role
models, at least percentage wise, that would inspire the students.
- KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
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I just couldn't understand, at first, how there could be
three black doctors in Wilson in the '50s, and none left by
the late '70s.
- CATHERINE SLADE:
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I think they're interested in going someplace else,
particularly the younger ones. They find out what the rest of the world
is like, and they can go.
- JAMES SLADE:
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That's what integration has made it possible for them to do.
- CATHERINE SLADE:
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After they've gotten educated, they find out that
it's not as much race as whether you can afford it. So
they're freer to go places.