Disrupting the Narrative of Race and Malnutrition: Black Women Activists and Medical Researchers in 1960s' Memphis

America “discovered” hunger within its own borders during the mid-1960s. Following the Second World War, most Americans understood hunger and malnutrition as problems in underdeveloped, war-torn countries, not the world's most affluent nation. In the mid-1960s, however, black civil rights activists dramatically confronted journalists, physicians, and politicians with the persistence of outright hunger. This paper explores multilayered struggles against hunger and their impact on public health by focusing on a specific program in Memphis. Beginning in 1968, pediatric researchers at St. Jude Hospital joined forces with black women activists at Memphis Area Project-South, a community organization advocating the self-determination of poor African Americans. By tracing the groundbreaking path hewed by this coalition, I show that in the 1960s-70s, some prominent physicians and policymakers altered their understandings of malnutrition, and infant mortality as a result of their interactions with black community activists. St. Jude doctors, in fact, classified malnutrition as a catastrophic childhood illness. The paper also follows the project's road to Washington, D.C., where it became the prototype for the federal WIC program (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children). I discuss this dynamic in light of recent literature in the medical humanities, which analyzes the production of medical knowledge and racial identities by public health officials. Discussing this grassroots movement, and competing ideologies and solutions surrounding it, opens a new window into this study of race and medical knowledge. Most importantly, it analyzes historical implications of social justice movements for public health.