Documentary Screening: Transforming America's Segregated Hospitals

Join us for a screening of a powerful new documentary based on David Barton Smith's book The Power to Heal: Civil Rights, Medicare and the Struggle to Transform America's Health Care System (2016).

The Power to Heal, premiering on PBS later this spring, portrays a poignant chapter in the historic struggle to secure equal and adequate access to healthcare for all Americans. Central to the story is a tale of how a new national program, Medicare, was used to mount a dramatic, coordinated effort that desegregated thousands of hospitals across the country in a matter of months. Using Medicare dollars, civil rights activists pressed and worked with the federal government to achieve health care justice for African Americans.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring David Barton Smith, PhD, C. Eileen Watts Welch and Brenda Armstrong, MD. The fathers of both Welch and Armstrong played a central role in the movement to desegregate hospitals first in North Carolina and then nationally.

Free and open to the public. Refreshments served.