Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership was a seismic force behind the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, but many people don’t realize how much of his advocacy centered around equitable health care and housing access.
Dr. King was famously integral to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. One provision of the law authorized federal intervention to ensure the desegregation of public health and housing facilities — a major win for those who envisioned and advocated for an equitable, community-based model of health care.
This advocacy led to the creation of the federal Health Center Program, initiated as part of Pres. Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, launched earlier in 1964.
The first Community Health Centers (originally called Neighborhood Health Centers) were opened in Mississippi and Massachusetts to target local health needs with the help of patient-majority governing boards. CHCs provided comprehensive, affordable healthcare services regardless of a patient’s ability to pay.
Today, CHCs provide comprehensive primary and preventive healthcare services to communities across the U.S. through their operations at more than 17,000 service delivery sites nationwide, with health centers in all 50 states.
The National Health Care for the Homeless Council proudly supports CHCs and other programs serving patients experiencing homelessness through training, technical assistance, and advocacy in the movement to end homelessness. Learn more about Council membership here.
Pushing the System Toward Equity
On March 25, 1966, Dr. King spoke at a press conference before the annual meeting of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in Chicago.
He pointed out in particular the continued segregation in hospital and medical settings and the inferior care afforded to Black people despite federal laws prohibiting such discrimination.
“We are concerned about the constant use of federal funds to support this most notorious expression of segregation,” he said. “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman because it often results in physical death.”
There’s some dispute about the exact words he used, but in all of the versions of his quote, Dr. King’s frustration is clear. The Civil Rights Act had been law for a year and a half by then, but many white Americans remained vehemently, violently committed to upholding segregation.
Dr. King called for lawsuits as a way to up the pressure on doctors and hospitals to treat their Black patients equitably, as the law required. He knew direct action would always be needed to move toward equity.
“I see no alternative to direct action and creative nonviolence to raise the conscience of the nation,” he concluded.
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