With Roots In Civil Rights, Community Health Centers Push For Equity In The Pandemic

In the 1960s, health care for Black residents in rural Mississippi was meager. Most health systems were segregated. Although some hospitals did serve Black patients, they struggled to stay afloat. At the height of the civil rights movement, young Black doctors decided to launch a movement of their own.

"Mississippi was third-world and was so bad and so separated," says Dr. Robert Smith, "The community health center movement was the conduit for physicians all over this country who believed that all people have a right to health care."

In 1967, Smith helped start Delta Health Center, the country's first rural community health center. They put the clinic in Mound Bayou, a small town in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, in the northwest part of the state.

The center became a national model and is now one of nearly 1,400 such clinics across the country. These federally-funded health clinics (often called FQHCs) are a key resource in the states of Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama, where about 2 in 5 Americans live in rural areas (throughout the U.S., about 1 in 5 Americans live in rural areas.)