The Black Freedom Movement and Public Health

Principal Investigator:
Maxwell Burkey

Abstract:
This project explores the politics of public health by refashioning the understanding of and intervention in "the public" made by the twentieth century's Black Freedom Struggle.

Description of Research:
This research employs the COVID-19 pandemic as a point of departure, turning to the Black Freedom Movement to reframe debates about public health and American democracy. In centering the reality of suffering, and in lending suffering civic value as a meaningful form of political agency, this project argues that the Black Freedom Movement cared for the public wellbeing and offers resources for remaking the politics of public health on fresh ideological terrain. Indeed, it is odd that the most thoroughgoing transformation of the public sphere in American life—that instigated by the Civil Rights Movement—has not been repurposed to illuminate the dilemmas of public health. Specifically, this work suggests that the ethic of willful suffering at the core of nonviolent resistance tactics employed by civil rights activists contests the commonplace construal of public health mitigation measures as tradeoffs with freedom. Rather, seen from the lens of the Black Freedom Movement, public health interventions, like those deployed amid the COVID-19 pandemic, are examples of willful suffering, and are therefore public acts that nurture civic freedom.