Griots – The Jillikea – Singing men. Writer Alex Haley introduced the American public to these fascinating oral historians – the keepers of black history with the landmark television series, Roots in 1977. Famed writer and scholar, W.E.B. Dubois, became known as a symbolic griot in the “New Century” when he kept the state of black health – the color of health – as a prominent American question. Confident that race directly affected health status, Dubois charged that the genetic beliefs and cultural practices dramatically contributed to the alarming disease and death rates of American blacks. He believed the complex interplay of these factors began during the Middle Passage, the era where The Color of Health begins.

The Color of Health opens with a prominent African-American woman celebrity standing on a large golden disk in the middle of the African Burial Ground Memorial in New York City. Traditional Gambian griot music plays in the background as she recounts how the ornate landmark in the shadow of the Ted Weiss Federal Building covers what was once an unknown cemetery of crusty soil, African artifacts, and the remains of an estimated 20,000 enslaved Africans. She further relates how finding over 400 skeletons during construction of the Weiss Building spawned passionate arguments regarding the necessity of preserving the memory of the lives, health and deaths of the African’s interned there.

Against this compelling backdrop, she invites viewers to journey with her across five centuries as she, the documentary’s narrator or “ceremonial griot” unfolds the turbulent story of the The Color of Health: Reaching into the past to heal the present.

The narrator is standing in front of a Museum display of a golden Sankofa, a mythical, backward-looking bird with an egg in its mouth. She explains that the documentary will use the African concept of Sankofa, the idea of reaching back into the past to physically, socially, culturally, historically and spiritually heal the present and future generations of African Americans. By exploring the path we have taken we can help understand today’s African American health crisis.

The Color of Health is comprised of six 12-15-minute event-driven “chapters”. Narration, interviews, and biography/journal entries are strategically intertwined with archival photos, artwork, film footage and emblematic African-American, American and classical music, i.e. such as the spiritual “Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child”. Pertinent historic and contemporary quotes along with image-rich, thought-provoking poetry will add a resoundingly visceral and memorable quality to each of the chapters.

The chapter opens with our narrator strolling down a quiet, historic street in Albany, New York. Soft period music from the early 1600s, the year of the founding of Albany, plays behind her.

NARRATOR: Welcome to Albany, New York, America’s oldest chartered city. An Oregon-based research firm ranked the city as America’s least stressful city in which to live.

But what does this kind of ranking really mean? Could it be that people in Albany are more relaxed? Or does the absence of significant stressor mean they are healthier than residents of other cities?

Our narrator standing in front of the historic Cathedral Basilica of Saint Joseph, the site of San Jose’ first mission. The sacred missions music of Mexican composer, Francisco Lopez Capillas, plays behind her.

NARRATOR: Wyeth Company, the makers of Centrum vitamins and other researchers found that San Jose, also noted as America’s safest city, had residents with a just-right mix of good health, regular exercise, a healthy outlook, and nutritious eating to cause this world-class city to be America’s healthiest. But would black San Jose residents agree? Since the survey used only public data and not warm bodies, we may never know. But of one thing, we can be sure. Since America’s founding, its African-Americans residents have historically become sick or have died more frequently than American whites. Especially those who were slaves. So let’s return on the wings of the Sankofa to the African Burial Ground for a moment.

Our narrator is standing in front of the “Unearthed” bronze sculpture located in the Ted Weiss Federal Building near the Memorial. She looks at the faces rendered in the sculpture, that of a male and two female slave .

NARRATOR: They look so alive, don’t they? Humph. Too bad we’ll never know their names. (She turns to the camera). Many of the skeletons of men and women like these were found at the site riddled with signs of disease and infection. And unfortunately their deaths to diseases like dysentery, malaria or typhoid fever were not the exception, but the rule.

There is great scientific and historical evidence to support the obvious, the traumatic, brutal rigors of slavery seriously hindered the health and life quality of enslaved Africans. A fact that leads us to the following questions. “What does good life quality entail? Is it shaped by where a person lives or works? What he or she does for a living? Is it shaped by leisure activities or habits? Or, to get directly to the point, is a person’s life quality or health status shaped by race? The color of their skin…

Daniel Stokols, Ph.D. - Social Ecologist, School of Social Ecology, UNC-Chapel Hill, Co-editor of Promoting Human Wellness: New Frontiers for Research, Practice and Policy;

The chapter opens with our narrator standing on the grounds of the Charles Pinckney Plantation (also known as Snee Farms) on South Carolina’s Sullivan Island. The plantation main house can be seen just beyond her. She is listening to the vocal version of the spiritual “Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child” playing in the background.

NARRATOR: Have you ever heard a song that just speaks to your core, your soul’s experiences or those of your family? Now imagine if that song, that haunting, plaintive wail, was your mother’s voice. The way she sounded or her actual words before you and other members of your family were stolen away from her. Never to see her, your family, your home or your birthplace again.

African-American spirituals such as “Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child” are a perfect reminder of the dislocation, the sense of fear and loneliness enslaved Africans felt upon reaching American shores.

Welcome to Sullivan Island in South Carolina. Known as the “Ellis Island for Blacks”, Sullivan is where 40% of all enslaved Africans landed and were quarantined before being sent to America’s mainland to work on a plantation like this one.

Here, on Snee Farm and countless others, enslaved Africans by the millions were forced to live after being ripped away from their homeland. Many of them, distraught and heartbroken, mentally distanced themselves from the pain, turning inward or retreating to folklore, loved ones, spirituality, escape, or in the worse cases, suicide to cope and endure. Others became physically ill. Some even used available herbs and ancient rituals to heal the sick. But the slave doctor or kitchen physick, as they were known, weren’t the plantation’s sole healers. There were others – plantation owners, overseers and local doctors who used bad science to target unhealthy slaves for inhuman research.

One of worst perpetuators of bad medicine was the father of Gynecology, Dr. J. Marion Sims. It is a quintessential story of power and pain that Americans and modern medicine will never forget.

A mini-profile and discussion of J. Marion Sims, MD, the “Father of Gynecology”, founder of Woman’s Hospital of New York, and his research on slave women, Anarcha and her two peers will follow and may include the following sample narrative. Classical music from the 1845-1850 period should play beneath the profile segment.

NARRATOR: …Doctors in antebellum America claimed and believed blacks had physiological and anatomical features - small brains; thick skin; high tolerances for heat, sun and pain - that made them well suited to be not only be slaves, but medical research subjects. Their faulty assertions spur African-American mistrust of the medical system even into the 21^st century…

Commentators to address the bad medicine, bad science issue during this chapter include: Michael Byrd, MD, MPH – Senior Research Scientist, Harvard School of Public Health, and co-author of American Dilemma; Todd Savitt, Ph.D. - Medical Historian, Brody School of Medicine, East Carolina University; Deborah Kuhn McGregor, Ph.D., Historian and Professor, University of Illinois-Springfield and author of From Midwives to Medicine: The Birth of American Gynecology; and Sandra Gadson, M.D. – President of the National Black Medical Association or its assigned historian.

The chapter opens with our narrator in sitting at a huge antique desk in the bright yellow den of “The Oaks,” the elaborate Queen Anne style home of Booker T. Washington. The Oaks is located at the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site in Tuskegee, Alabama. As she sits at the desk she slowly turns pages of a book of clippings covering Washington’s life, and stops at an elegant photo portrait of him. As the camera zooms in on the photo the medley “Roll Jordan Roll/I want Heaven to be Mine” by the Tuskegee Institute Singers or a like song plays behind her. To follow is a sample of possible narration.

NARRATOR: Booker Taliaferro Washington. Some know him as an educator and founder of Tuskegee Institute now Tuskegee University, a historically black college located in Tuskegee, Alabama. Others may know the former slave as a civil rights and public health activist who founded not only an esteemed college, but America’s first African-American health promotion and health protection movement. The National Negro Health Movement.

Long before its founding in 1914, a year soaked with over 50 African-American lynchings in the Black belt, Booker T. Washington and his personal physician, Dr. John Kenney, realized there is a strong relationship between positive health status, socioeconomic status and the life quality of blacks. And that link was community. Organized community: schools, churches, businesses, professional and civic groups, medicine, public health, private citizens, and mass media uniting to develop programs to kill exorbitant disease and death rates in the black community.

The chapter continues with our narrator introducing viewers to the successes and setbacks of the Movement, and how since Washington died a year into it, he wasn’t privy to seeing the Movement and the fullest impact it had on black America for 30 plus years.

Commentators for this chapter include: W. Fitzhugh Brundage, PhD, Historian, Department of History, UNC-Chapel Hill, and editor of Reconsidering Booker T. Washington and Up from Slavery; Shawn Bediako, PhD, Community and Social Psychologist, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland – Baltimore; Susan L. Smith, Ph.D. – Historian, University of Alberta, author of Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women’s Health Activism; and David Barton Smith, PhD, Health Policy Researcher, Department of Health Administration, Temple University, and author of Health Care Divided: Race and Healing a Nation.

The chapter opens with our narrator standing in Sweet Pilgrim Cemetery in Macon County, Alabama at the gravesite and headstone of the last Tuskegee Syphilis Study survivor to die, Ernest Hendon. The camera zooms in on the headstone so the viewer can see its writing, then zooms out to a medium wide shot of our narrator who holds a single rose in her hands. Potential narration follows.

NARRATOR: In cemeteries like this one across the South lay the graves of more than 400 black men who once lived and loved and worked in Macon County, Alabama. Men like Ernest Hendon, a patient in the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Research Study.

Managed by Eunice Rivers, a black nurse, the Tuskegee experiments serve as one of the worst examples of pride, racism and deceit in American and international medicine.

But how did such a devastating loss of life and innocence occur? And who should be held responsible? Nearly 400 men infected with syphilis were deprived of proper medical treatment for 40 years until they were only cadavers. Was it the U.S. government who funded and staffed the study? Or Nurse Rivers who knew the study’s real intent and recruited 600 unsuspecting men into anyway? Or frankly, do we blame the dead? Poor, uninsured men like Ernest Hendon who believed in free, “compassionate” health care? Health care that promised to treat and bury them with dignity?

In 1996, the University of Virginia sponsored a five-hour symposium that posed these and similar questions. The lectures given were so provocative and timely they led to the creation of a committee to investigate how America could unearth and publicly address the lasting impact of the experiments 24 years and 400 plus lives after they ended.

This chapter will continue with discussion of how the Experiments had an indelible impact on national Black health status and the contemporary Health Disparities movement, particularly in light of the study’s implications for the AIDS epidemic in black America, the development of the controversial Institute of Medicine Unequal Treatment Report, and the fact that the health disparities movement has burgeoned into America’s newest civil rights movement.

Commentators for this chapter include: Fred Gray, Civil Rights Attorney and attorney for Hendon and fellow survivors, and author of The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The Real Story and Beyond; Vanessa Northington Gamble, MD, PhD - Medical Historian, and Director of the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care; and Stephen Thomas, Ph.D. – Director of the Center for Minority Health in the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.

This chapter opens with our narrator standing on the Tallahatchie Bridge in Tallahatchie, Mississippi overlooking the Tallahatchie River. Bob Dylan’s “Death of Emmett Till” plays softly underneath.

NARRATOR: In 1955, the murder of 14-year old Chicagoan Emmett Till spurred the Civil Rights movement, as we know it historically. A 15-year period steeped in sit-ins, burnings, billy clubs and hoses, and blood. Red, viscous, noble, innocent blood. The blood of Emmett Till; Martin Luther King; Viola Luizzo; Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman… The blood of Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy. The blood of the thousands and thousands of nameless…Today the Movement in which so many rights were gained including the right for African-Americans to feast unfettered and comfortable, proud at America’s massive table, has become an impassioned quest for another set of rights. The right to good healthy and longevity among them.

Yet rights to protect the color of health cannot be attained by laws alone. They are result of changed behavior. Strategic behavior that health professionals, health activists and African-Americans create, support and engage in. And even then, like at the crest of America’s first Civil Rights Movement, there are some who live among us who disagree….

Commentators for this chapter include: Clovis E. Semmes, Sociologist and professor of African-American Studies, Eastern Michigan University and author of Racism, Health, and Post-Industrialism: A Theory of African- American Health; Thomas Perez, JD, MPP, University of Maryland Law School and co-author of the IOM’s Unequal Treatment report; Nathan Stinson, director of Meharry Medical College’s National Center for Optimal Health and former director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health; Maxwell Gregg Bloche, Professor of Law; Co-Director, Georgetown-Johns Hopkins Joint Program in Law and Public Health and writer for New England Journal of Medicine’s article on IOM controversy; and Sally Satel, MD Psychiatrist, Commentator and Author of How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine

The chapter opens with our narrator walking amongst and studying the exhibits located in Big Rapids, Michigan’s Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia on the campus of Ferris State University. The sound of a poet reciting significant lines of the Margaret Burroughs poem “What Shall I tell my children who are Black” plays underneath for a few moments before she begins.

NARRATOR: Racism in America has many forms, many insidious, popular manifestations. Such as the items displayed here at the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. Mammy cookie jars; degrading bumper stickers; bug-eyed, big-lipped dolls, Ku Klux Klan paraphernalia… Researchers and psychologists are more aware than ever that black health status, the color of health, is impacted by a psychology of “blackness”. The fact that the stigma of dark skin, African features; a fear of black pride; and the reality that African-Americans have long mistrusted modern medicine, has an untold impact on health and health care delivery. And the psychology, particularly as it relates to a terrifying gap between black and white health statuses, if left unaddressed, threatens African-America’s future….

Once select chapter commentators speak to above issues, the chapter shifts locations and closes with her sitting in a nursery of what was once the first black hospital in the Nation, Chicago’s Provident Hospital. The Curtis Mayfield song “I had a Choice of Colors” plays behind her. She cuddles a black infant in her arms.

NARRATOR: This child and others like him are the hope of this country, and it is up to all of us to assure our tiniest citizens will have the brightest and healthiest future possible. America, black or white, yellow or brown, cannot survive without them.

Ready to do your part to protect the color of health? Health and medical practice changes and lifestyle changes are best ways, the only ways, to prevent illness and early deaths in the black community. This baby, this precious baby girl, the mother of generations in years to come, is depending on it. (Our narrator gently turns the baby’s face toward the camera a bit.) Look into the camera sweetie. Yeah. That’s it. That’s it. I’m (narrator name here) for The Color of Health. Can I, I’m sorry honey, I mean, we, yeah, (she kisses the baby lightly on the cheek and smooths her hair) count on you?

Commentators for this chapter include: Ronald Hall, PhD, Professor of African American Studies, Michigan State University, and co-author of The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color among African-Americans; and Senator Barack Obama, Democrat-Illinois.

As an added method of extending the viewers learning beyond initial screenings of the completed film, a Color of Health web site will be developed to circulate information on its topics and the production. A production journal, news releases, video clips, a guest book, and other pertinent data will be posted for use and downloading on a general basis. This educational device will serve as yet another method to convey that the information shared within The Color of Health can be used to change the life quality of all populations, and ultimately lift them to a healthier state of existence cross-culturally and throughout humankind.