Minority Health Partners

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06/20/2026

Today is Juneteenth.

It is also World Sickle Cell Day.

That connection is worth sitting with.

Juneteenth reminds us of freedom. But freedom is not only about history. It is also about whether people can access care, be treated with dignity, and be believed when they are in pain.

Sickle cell disease is an inherited blood disorder that can cause severe pain, infections, organ damage, strokes, and serious complications.

In the United States, it hits Black families especially hard.

About 1 in 365 Black babies is born with sickle cell disease. About 1 in 13 Black babies is born with sickle cell trait.

Too many sickle cell patients still go to the emergency room during a pain crisis and feel like they have to prove they are really hurting.

That should not be acceptable.

Today, we honor freedom by learning the facts, believing patients, supporting families, and pushing for care that treats sickle cell pain with urgency.

06/18/2026

This was a real question from our Juneteenth hospital post, and it deserves a real answer.

If Black people were blocked from higher education during segregation, how did they become doctors?

The answer is that they were not blocked from all medical education. They were blocked from many institutions, especially white medical schools in the South.

So Black students often had to leave home and go where they could be trained.

Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, D.C. and Meharry Medical College in Nashville trained generations of Black physicians when many white institutions would not admit them.

But medical school was only part of the barrier.

Doctors also needed hospital training and places to practice. And many white hospitals would not allow Black doctors on staff.

That’s why Black hospitals were so important.

They were places where Black doctors could train, practice, admit patients, and serve communities being denied equal care.

They were real doctors. The issue wasn’t qualification. It was exclusion.

06/17/2026

A Black hospital in Houston was dedicated on Juneteenth.

On June 19, 1926, the Houston Negro Hospital was dedicated in Houston’s Third Ward. It later became Riverside General Hospital.

This was during segregation, when Black patients were often denied equal care and Black doctors were blocked from practicing in many white hospitals.

So Black physicians and community leaders helped build something different.

A hospital for Black patients.

A place for Black doctors.

A healthcare institution created because the system around them refused to serve everyone equally.

This is why Black health history is not just about pain. It is also about strategy, resilience, institution-building, and the fight for dignity.

Juneteenth is about freedom. And freedom has always included the right to receive medical care without being pushed aside.

06/16/2026

Most people were never taught this part of history:

America’s first paramedics were Black.

The Freedom House Ambulance Service in Pittsburgh helped change emergency care in this country. These men were highly trained, served their community, and showed the nation what pre-hospital emergency medicine could look like.

They were doing more than transporting patients. They were bringing skill, professionalism, and lifesaving care directly to people in crisis.

A lot of people benefit from modern EMS today without ever knowing who helped build that foundation.

That’s why stories like this deserve to be told.

Had you heard of Freedom House before today?

06/15/2026

Last week, I got a reminder that racism affects mental health too.

Not because people simply disagreed with me. Disagreement is part of social media.

What wore on me was seeing how quickly some people jumped to racist stereotypes and blanket statements about Black people, while completely ignoring the point I was making.

And what makes it even heavier is knowing these aren’t just random screen names. These are real people in real communities. They work in schools, stores, hospitals, police departments, and other places we move through every day.

That kind of repeated hostility wears on you.

It affects how open you feel.
It affects how safe you feel.
It affects how much faith you keep in people.

Racism isn’t just something people debate politically. It can affect mental health too.

If you’ve ever felt that weight, you aren’t imagining it.

This week at Minority Health Partners, we covered four important conversations:• Some People Are Still Here… By Inches• ...
06/12/2026

This week at Minority Health Partners, we covered four important conversations:

• Some People Are Still Here… By Inches
• When a Verdict Reopens a Wound
• The Henrietta Lacks Story Is Still a Trust Issue
• Most People Explain Tuskegee Wrong

From mental health to community grief to medical history and trust, the goal is always the same: helping people better understand health, history, and the systems that shape both.

If you missed any of these posts, they’re on the page.

Which one stayed with you the most this week?

06/12/2026

A lot of people explain Tuskegee the wrong way.

They say it was a study where doctors gave Black men syphilis. That is not really the main lesson. The deeper issue is that the study was about untreated syphilis in Black men. The men already had the disease, they were told they were being treated for “bad blood,” and real treatment was withheld from them. Even after penicillin became the standard treatment, treatment was still withheld. The CDC says the study began in 1932, did not obtain informed consent, and continued until 1972.

That is what made Tuskegee evil.

It was about deception.
It was about neglect.
It was about withholding care.

And that is why people still bring Tuskegee up. Black patients still know what it feels like to have something important withheld, whether that is a diagnosis delayed, pain dismissed, a referral never offered, or treatment never properly explained.

Tuskegee also led to change. Public outrage helped push the country toward stronger research protections, including informed consent, ethics review boards, and the Belmont Report.

Tuskegee changed the rules. But it also left a memory this country still hasn’t fully dealt with.

06/11/2026

If you want to understand why some Black families still do not fully trust medicine, start with Henrietta Lacks.

Henrietta Lacks was a Black woman whose cervical cancer cells were taken in 1951 without her knowledge or consent. Those cells became the HeLa cell line and helped drive medical breakthroughs for decades. This year, her family reached a confidential settlement with Novartis over claims the company profited from those cells without permission.

That is why this story still comes up.

Because this is not just a history lesson. It is one of the clearest examples of medical progress moving forward without consent and without fairness for the family connected to it.

History like that does not just go away because time passed. It gets handed down. It shapes trust. It shapes hesitation. It shapes what people feel when a hospital, a researcher, or a drug company says, “trust us.”

Henrietta Lacks changed medicine.

But if healthcare wants trust, it has to tell the truth about the history that broke it.

06/10/2026

Today’s verdict in the Karmelo Anthony case is going to make a lot of people debate the law, the facts, and the outcome.

But for a lot of Black people, a case like this does not arrive by itself. It arrives with memory attached to it.

Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Tamir Rice. Breonna Taylor. Atatiana Jefferson. Andrew Joseph.

So when people react strongly, they are not always reacting to just one case. They are reacting to what this case brings back.

That is why repeated public trauma has such a deep effect on communities. It affects trust. It affects fear. It affects grief. It affects how parents think about their children and how people move through the world after seeing the same kinds of stories again and again.

A verdict can close a case.

It does not always close a wound.

06/08/2026

A lot more people are walking around with survival stories than most of us realize.

When we talk about mental health, we usually hear about the people who died. We do not talk enough about the people who are still here. The people who almost left. The people who had a night, a week, or a season in life where they really did not want to be here anymore.

And now they are walking among us.

They are parenting.
They are going to work.
They are laughing.
They are posting online.
They are showing up for other people.

And a lot of times, nobody even knows what they survived.

A person does not have to die for there to have been a real emergency.

Sometimes the people who look fine are the very people who barely made it.

And if that is your story, I’m glad you’re still here.

If you or someone you know may be in immediate danger or thinking about self-harm, call or text 988 in the U.S. for immediate support.

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