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DURHAM — Ted Parrish was lecturing on parliamentary procedure.
“Never say, ‘I make a motion,’ ” Parrish told 21 attentive students in a classroom at N.C. Central University’s Miller-Morgan building. “Always say, ‘I move.’ That’s the appropriate term.”
Parrish was not lecturing in a political science or government class. He was talking to future health educators. The class on “Group Leadership” was part of NCCU’s Department of Public Health Education curriculum, and the students, Parrish reminded them, will be working with different organizations and agencies “and if you don’t have the skills to facilitate a meeting, you can be in deep trouble.”
The department, celebrating its 60th anniversary this week, has been doing much more than keeping its students out of deep trouble for six decades. Among the very first programs of its kind at a historically black school, the department has produced more black health educators than any other university in the country, including a number of prominent alumni in the field.
It has led prevention initiatives to address heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases in African-American communities.
It also has played a significant role in integrating the public health sector and academia.
The program was the brainchild of the university’s founder, James Shepard, who was concerned with disparities in health status between black and white Americans, and the fact there were very few black public health workers, especially in the South.
Since his school, then called the North Carolina College for Negroes, didn’t have an appropriate program, Shepard partnered with the School of Public Health at UNC Chapel Hill to develop a curriculum that would prepare black public health educators.
“Black students could not attend classes in Chapel Hill,” explained David Jolly, the current chairman of the NCCU department. “So a number of the UNC faculty came here to teach. They taught the exact same courses to black students here as they taught to white students there.”
Organizers established a journal club for both white and black health education students and the students got together, once a month, alternating locations.
“When they went to UNC, and met at the School of Public Health, they would have to draw the curtains in their classrooms, so no one would see black students there,” Jolly said. “But the students from both schools did summer field work and trainings together. They worked at the same agencies, at the same health departments. They worked together, and that was simply not done at the time. They pushed racial integration when Jim Crow laws were very strong.”
Since those days, the department has graduated at least 500 students, said Mary Hawkins, a longtime professor at the school. “And it has become the only program at a historically black school to receive national certification from the Society for Public Health Education and the American Association for Health Education,” she said.
More growth is expected.
“Huge health disparities still exist in this country,” Jolly said. “Heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes still disproportionally affect African-Americans. We still need more black health educators to be working on these issues.”
