A City without Care: 300 Years of Racism, Health Disparities, and Health Care Activism in New Orleans with Kevin McQueeney
Join us for an evening with Kevin McQueeney as he discusses his new book, A City without Care: 300 Years of Racism, Health Disparities, and Health Care Activism in New Orleans (UNC Press, 2023). This program is sponsored by the Friends of the Cabildo as part of the Second Thursday Lecture Series. It is free and open to the public but registration is required. The program will take place on Zoom on Thursday, June 8, 2023, 6:00–7:30 p.m. CDT. Please register here: https://forms.gle/JVd8M1wpu7dg7kY16
About the Book
New Orleans is a city that is rich in culture, music, and history. It has also long been a site of some of the most intense racially based medical inequities in the United States. Kevin McQueeney traces that inequity from the city's founding in the early eighteenth century through three centuries to the present. He argues that racist health disparities emerged as a key component of the city's slave-based economy and quickly became institutionalized with the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. McQueeney also shows that, despite legislation and court victories in the civil rights era, a segregated healthcare system still exists today.
In addition to charting this history of neglect, McQueeney also suggests pathways to fix the deeply entrenched inequities, taking inspiration from the "long civil rights" framework and reconstructing the fight for improved health and access to care that started long before the boycotts, sit-ins, and marches of the 1950s and 1960s. In telling the history of how New Orleans has treated its Black citizens in its hospitals, McQueeney uncovers the broader story of how urban centers across the country have ignored Black Americans and their health needs throughout the nation’s history.
About the Author
Kevin McQueeney is an assistant professor of history and coordinator of the Black studies certificate program at Nicholls State University. In May 2023, the University of North Carolina Press published his book A City Without Care: 300 Years of Racism, Racial Health Disparities, and Black Health Activism in New Orleans. He has published articles in the Journal of African American History, Louisiana History, Federal History, and Safundi: the Journal of South African and American Studies, as well as two book chapters in edited volumes. Prior to his career in academia, Kevin worked as a construction site supervisor with the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity.