page_title: Algernon B. Jackson
section_title: Personal beliefs concerning race
hierarchical_section_title: Algernon B. Jackson / Personal beliefs concerning race
caption_attribution_description: English: Dr. Algernon B. Jackson
context_page_description: Algernon Brashear Jackson was a prominent African American physician, surgeon, author, and columnist who contributed profoundly to the National Negro Health Movement, an organization which sought to uplift the race by means of educating the African American community on preventative medicine and public health. He was also well known for being a founding member of the Sigma Pi Phi fraternity and pioneering an effective treatment for rheumatism.
context_section_description: In his article “The Need of Health Education Among Negroes,” he underscored the notion that “no man, whatever his motive may be, can help lift up his brother without lifting up himself.” In other words, educating the African American community in public health and hygiene would not only lift the race itself by reducing rates of mortality and illness, it would also benefit the whites who would inevitably find themselves in contact with blacks. However, it was abundantly clear that, in Jackson's eyes, not all African Americans shared equal responsibility for the sub-par health of the race as a whole. Most often, the blame for harmful ignorance of public health issues fell on the shoulders of the poor Southern blacks. In turn, Jackson asserted that it was up to black medical leaders to “save a great people who really know very little about how to save themselves.”
  Most of Jackson's writing—both for the lay public and medical community—included implications of classism and elitism that set Southern blacks lower on the hierarchy than wealthier blacks in cosmopolitan northern cities. On at least one occasion in “Week-End Mosaics,” Jackson assured his largely educated Northern readership that their illness and death rates were no worse off than those of Northern whites, and that they were thusly not to blame for high Negro mortality. Southern blacks, on the other hand, he claimed “have no appreciation of [life] and use it to no more purpose than does the dumb animal.” As such, he called upon the educated black masses—much like he did with the black medical community—to reach the “poor unfortunate neglected members of our race” and teach them “that better living means better health, longer life, a finer happiness and a greater power for doing the things which we all as a race want to do…[to] make us unafraid and unconquerable.”
  In 1928, he reported for the Philadelphia Tribune on a German study in which the blood of Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians was tested and analyzed for differences. Jackson wrote that variations were observed (like how quickly the blood reacted with different chemicals, which they chalked up to “oxidation”) but the implications and significance of these findings was left simply at the fact that people of difference “races” or ethnicities are, in fact, “chemically different.” Regardless of the vagueness of the study and its probable ties to Nazi-backed eugenic exploration, Jackson clearly took a great interest in the experiment and hopefully suggested that “racial identity may be fixed by chemical analysis” in the future. He additionally implied that determining racial makeup through objective measures could potentially prove “more unpopular with whites than with Negroes,” either because it will reveal less pure bloodlines in whites, or chemical superiority in blacks.
  Despite his occasional favoritism of Northern African Americans and apparent eugenic interests, Jackson did not spare even the most refined and economically advantaged blacks personal hygiene advice, particularly in his “Afro Health Talk” column. Although he was touted in this publication specifically as a “Health Authority and Stomach Specialist,” his column explored all matters of preventative medicine, and often linked health issues with the societal perceptions or stereotypes of African Americans. For example, in a column about tuberculosis prevention, Jackson blamed “ignorance, carelessness, indifference, immorality, vicious living and unwillingness to accept advice” for the “untutored” black community's mortality rates from tuberculosis. But even more so, it was the fault of “the social and economic maladjustment born of a slimy race prejudice indigenous to America” that prevented “all citizens, black and white, [from facing] life and death on equal terms.”
caption: Dr. Algernon B. Jackson
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