Honoring Dr. King in Our Community: Health Care 

More than 50 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke out against the health injustices that Black and Brown people face in the United States. He said, “the federal government granted funds to states for the construction of hospitals and for mental health, maternal and child care services, and for programs designed to control tuberculosis, cancer, and heart disease, yet, in many instances, Blacks were denied access to the programs and services.” 
 
In addition, there were numerous unauthorized experiments performed on Black Americans such as the 40-year long Tuskegee experiments that lasted until the 1970s; Dr. Eugene Saenger’s experiments during the Cold War, which exposed unknowing Black American cancer patients to lethal levels of radiation to observe the effects, and the unauthorized tissue sample acquisition and cloning of Henrietta Lacks’s cells. 
 
Despite the tireless efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists, health care inequities still exist today. According to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, Black babies in North Carolina are 2.5 times more likely to die than White babies, and Black women experience almost twice the rate of maternal mortality than White women. 
 
Achieving equity in health will require concerted efforts from many different stakeholders, but one of the key goals must be to ensure access to services. Within our United Way family of nonprofit partners, organizations providing that access to historically disinvested neighborhoods and populations include Care Ring, Despierta, Queen City Cocoa B.E.A.N.S. and Mental Health America of Central Carolinas. These agencies and many more work every day to ensure that the right to good health is available to everyone in our community. 

Ways to get educated and involved: 

MLK CALL TO SERVICE & SUPPORT 

Nonprofit agencies in our area need a variety of items to provide for their clients’ needs. We have created an Amazon Wish List for this week that includes some of those items, and you can specify which county served by United Way (Anson, Cabarrus, Mecklenburg or Union) will receive the purchases. 

READ & LEARN 

Read the remarks made by Dr. King in 1966 at a Chicago press conference before his speech at the annual meeting of the Medical Committee for Human Rights. Dr. King said, “we are concerned about the constant use of federal funds to support this most notorious expression of segregation. Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman because it often results in physical death.” 

Answer the 2025 MLK Call to Service on Saturday, January 18.