Note: This newsletter was sent to readers in December 2023. Headway is publishing the newsletter as an article to bring it together with other newsletters on site. Read them all here.
Dear Headway reader,
Four decades ago, nearly 2,000 Black women converged on Atlanta for a conference on health at Spelman College. As Dara Mathis recently reported for Headway, this event was a milestone in a then-nascent movement.
After the story ran, we heard from several readers who’d attended the event, or knew someone who was there. I followed up with some of them to understand more fully what drew them there and the impact the conference had on them. A few things stood out from our conversations.
I was struck by how many aspects of their lives the attendees discussed openly for the first time. When she went to the conference, Brenda Smith had just graduated from Spelman and was studying at the Georgetown University Law Center. “I think that was probably one of the first places I heard about abortion,” Smith told me. “I think it was the first time that I heard open conversations about sexual violence, that people really talked about domestic violence. I think it was probably the first time that people acknowledged, or that I got the sense that people were open about, loving other women.”
Nancy Anderson was a young doctor working at a county hospital in Atlanta at the time. “I had read a book called ‘This Bridge Called My Back,’” Anderson said. “That was where I realized that, ‘Ooh, there are people who are describing, really, what it’s like to be a Black woman.’ They had all kinds of points of view. I realized that I could find other people like that in Atlanta.” Reading the book, a collection of writings by women of color, helped begin a process of exploration that brought her to the event at Spelman. Thousands of similar discrete catalysts led women all over the country to organize buses and car pools and make their way to Georgia.
Perhaps the most resonant and novel message from the conference was that women’s well-being was worth time, attention and care. Black women in particular faced ubiquitous messaging that they should endlessly sacrifice their own needs for others.
“It taught us not to be ashamed of our bodies, to not to be ashamed of pleasure,” Smith said. “That health was not the currency that we had to pay for our family or our communities’ well-being.”
The event gave rise to a national organization — the National Black Women’s Health Project, now the Black Women’s Health Imperative — as well as dozens of local chapters across the country that would go on to hold conferences of their own.
The circumstances that led so many Black women to Spelman in 1983 remain as relevant as ever. In 2018, nearly two decades after Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported for The Times on the astonishing rate at which Black mothers were dying during or after giving birth, Linda Villarosa chronicled in deep and intimate detail what was known about the persistence of Black maternal and infant mortality.
Years of careful studies and academic reviews reinforced a conclusion that would have been resonant on that stage in Georgia 40 years ago. As Villarosa put it in her article: “For Black women in America, an inescapable atmosphere of societal and systemic racism can create a kind of toxic physiological stress, resulting in conditions — including hypertension and pre-eclampsia — that lead directly to higher rates of infant and maternal death. And that societal racism is further expressed in a pervasive, longstanding racial bias in health care — including the dismissal of legitimate concerns and symptoms — that can help explain poor birth outcomes even in the case of Black women with the most advantages.”
Matt Thompson, Editor of Headway
Links we liked
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The political divide between left and right can feel jagged and irreparable. So it was heartening to read this tale by Jonathan Weisman about Silverton, Colo., where a consultant who had come to draw up a master plan ended up helping the town mend by “bringing residents together in the smallest of groups, away from microphones and public spaces.”
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Earlier this year, Montana’s legislature passed laws to make it easier to build housing, efforts that researchers say could restrain skyrocketing housing costs by increasing supply. Headway fellow Susan Shain, who lives in Montana and writes for High Country News, reports on how the law works, and on criticisms from Montanans who feel the state didn’t go far enough to spur construction of affordable housing.
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LAist reporters Brianna Lee and Nick Garda are engaged in a project close to our housing-focused, progress-tracking hearts at Headway: diligently keeping tabs on Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s promise to house 17,000 unhoused Angelenos within her inaugural year in office. We previously delved into Houston’s remarkable decade-long journey, successfully housing 25,000 individuals and slashing homelessness by 63 percent. The LAist project provides us with a front-row seat to witness — or question — the unfolding progress in real-time.
Your turn
We’d love to hear from you. Where have you seen progress in your own community? Where are you not seeing progress, but wish you were? What links do you recommend to the Headway team? Let us know at dearheadway@nytimes.com.
