On the Road
While away in the archives, these are the stories we’re following back in Baltimore
While on the road this week, in the archives, here are the stories we’re following at #HardHistoriesJHU.
We’re often asked about how Johns Hopkins is reckoning with the life and legacy of Mrs. Henrietta Lacks. Here’s the latest from the JHU Hub: “Johns Hopkins Names Design, Construction Firms for Henrietta Lacks Building.” For more on the Lacks family quest for justice, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the National Health Law Program, and the National Women’s Law Center, last week joined the litigation in The Estate of Henrietta Lacks v. Thermo Fischer Scientific by filing an amicus brief. The Johns Hopkins News-Letter covered the Lacks estate suit here.
Our colleagues in the history of medicine are asking their own hard questions about health and racism. From the Bloomberg School of Public Health, their podcast “Public Health on Call” featured Dr. Rachel Thornton and Dr. Alexandre White in conversation with Dean Josh Sharfstein on “Recognizing W.E.B. Du Bois and his Seminal Work on Racism and Health,” a deep dive into the article “Remembering Past Lessons about Structural Racism — Recentering Black Theorists of Health and Society” published last August in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Hard histories have entered Maryland’s gubernatorial contest. The JHU News-Letter covered a talk with Wes Moore, Maryland gubernatorial primary candidate. A JHU alum, among Moore’s topics were “Maryland’s history of slavery, redlining, recidivism rates and incarceration.”
We’ll be talking hard histories live later this month. Baltimore’s CityLit Festival is here and the 19th annual celebration of readers and writers kicks off March 1st. On the schedule is a keynote conversation — live — between 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones and #HardHistoriesJHU director Martha S. Jones on Saturday, March 12.
— MSJ