Black doctors’ medical association advocated nationalized medicine by 1900

Evidence

As the founding editor of the organization’s journal wrote, the NMA was “conceived in no spirit of racial exclusiveness, fostering no ethnic antagonism, but born of the exigencies of the American environment.” And one of the best ways to improve health outcomes, the NMA understood, was through increased access to healthcare. At the start of the twentieth century, the group began to argue for nationalized medicine. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1169

Categorization

• SEED: An article angle: the first institutional American push for single-payer health care came from Black doctors in 1900, not from 20th-century progressive politics.