This article addresses two related questions. To what extent did cities and towns provide African Americans adequate water and sewer services during the era of Jim Crow (1880-1925)? Whatmotivated local governments to allowAfrican Americans access to water and sewerage services? In light of the treatment African Americans received from state and local governments in areas such as education and police protection, it seems odd that blacks would have received any water and sewer service. Two explanations considered focus on fear of epidemic disease, and variation in the extent of residential segregation over time and across cities. The institutions and cultural norms that defined Jim Crow were pervasive, and there is no doubt that they extended, in some degree, to the provision of local water and sewer services as well. What remain unclear are the precise nature and extent of such discrimination, and the sources of variation in discrimination observed across cities.' Some writers argue that black and poor white neighborhoods received water and sewer service a half century or more after affluent white neighborhoods.2 One historian suggests black neighborhoods in Atlanta may have never received

The Limits of Jim Crow: Race and the Provision of Water and Sewerage Services in American Cities, 1880-1925

Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/journalism/cases/katrina/Academic%20Journals/Journal%20of%20Historical%20Geography/JHG%20Colton%202002.pdf

Basin Street blues: drainage and environmental equity in New Orleans, 1890-1930

When the 1918 influenza epidemic began, African American communities were already beset by many public health, medical, and social problems, including racist theories of black biological inferiority, racial barriers in medicine and public health, and poor health status. To address these problems, African Americans mounted efforts such as establishing separate hospitals and professional organizations and repudiating racist scientific theories. Contradicting prevailing theories about African Americans' increased susceptibility to disease, it appears that during the 1918 epidemic the incidence of influenza was lower in African Americans. Although the epidemic had a less devastating impact on African American communities, it still overwhelmed their medical and public health resources. Observations about the lower rates of influenza in African Americans did not derail racist theories about the biological inferiority of black people or overturn conceptualizations of black people as disease threats to white people. When the epidemic ended, the major problems that African Americans faced still remained.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00333549101250S314

"There wasn't a lot of comforts in those days:" African Americans, public health, and the 1918 influenza epidemic.

Between 1900 and 1940, at least 100,000 individuals in the southern United States died of pellagra, a dietary deficiency disease Although half of these pellagra victims were African-American and more than two-thirds were women, contemporary observers paid little attention to these gender and racial differences in their analyses of disease This article reviews the classic epidemiological studies of Joseph Goldberger and Edgar Sydenstricker, who argued that pellagra was deeply rooted in the political economy of cotton monoculture in the South The methods that Sydenstricker brought to epidemiology from early work on political economy obscured the role of gender inequalities in pellagra, and his focus on economic underdevelopment led him to ignore the prominent role of African-Americans as pellagra's principal victims Research methods and traditions, no less than more overt ideologies, played a role in maintaining the subordinate social position of women and African-Americans in the southern United States

/pdf/epidemiologists-explain-pellagra-gender-race-and-political-510gnf6gme.pdf

Stuart Galishoff

Papers

Germs know no color line: black health and public policy in Atlanta, 1900-1918.

Cholera in Newark, New Jersey.