Margo Jefferson in conversation with Professor Karen Hunter
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With: Georges C. Benjamin Executive Director, American Public Health Association; Joan H. Tisch Distinguished Fellow in Public Health 2010-2011Georges C. Benjamin, MD, FACP, FACEP(E), FNAPA, Hon FRSPH, is the executive director of the American Public Health Association, the nation's oldest and largest organization of public health professionals. He previously was the secretary of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, from 1999 - 2002 following four years as its deputy secretary for public health services. For the last 20 years he has been actively practicing public health at the local, state, and national level with expertise in the areas of emergency preparedness, administration and infectious diseases. Dr. Benjamin serves as publisher of the field's premier journal, the American Journal of Public Health, The Nation's Health Newspaper and the APHA's timeless publication on infectious diseases, the Control of Communicable Diseases Manual.Theodore Brown Professor, Department of Health Sciences University of Rochester Medical CenterTheodore Brown is a historian of medicine, public health, and health policy. He has conducted research on the history of the biopsychosocial approach and on translational medicine; the history of twentieth and early twenty-first century U.S. health policy; the influence of organized philanthropy on medical research, health policy, and medical education, and the history of American and global public health. He is a Contributing Editor for History of the American Journal of Public Health.Clay Bennett Editorial Cartoonist, Chattanooga Times Free PressClay Bennett is an American editorial cartoonist. Currently drawing for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, Bennett is the winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.
Margo Jefferson in conversation with Professor Karen Hunter
Margo Jefferson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, spoke about her childhood in upper-crust black Chicago — her father was head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation’s oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite, as well as her life among “the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society.” Jefferson discussed the way in which these inhabitants of Negroland, have stood apart since the 19th century, “a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.”
Hilton Als has called Negroland a “masterpiece—a phenomenal study-cum-memoir about the black bourgeoisie… Jefferson has lived and worked like the great reporter she is, traversing a little-known or -understood landscape peopled by blacks and whites, dreamers and naysayers, the privileged and the strivers who make up the mosaic known as America.”
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