Nearly all US Black children born before 1910 were born in the American South. We use a mixed-methods design to examine Black children’s survival disadvantage over the twentieth century’s turn under the rising regime of Jim Crow. We focus on 1910 Arkansas, taking advantage of within-state heterogeneity in agriculture (plantation vs. subsistence farming), disease environments, and geographic racial concentration (macro-segregation). This one-state focus allows purposive sampling of Works Progress Administration and Behind the Veil oral interviews of Arkansan Black Americans who were born or lived under the state’s Jim Crow regime. We also use the 1910 complete-count Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) linked to US Decennial and 1916 Plantation Censuses to examine race-related differences in child mortality rates among ever-married, parous Arkansas women (n=234,811). Count regression models find the Black-White child mortality gap widest among Arkansas mothers economically tied to plantation vs. subsistence agriculture; exposed to worse health environments; living in tenant farm vs. owned-farm households; and with limited individual resources such as literacy. Oral accounts illustrate how Black children’s lives reflected contextual, living standard, psychosocial, and other health risks associated with the racialized policies and practices of the Jim Crow South; they capture otherwise hidden historical processes that linked the era’s institutional racism and child mortality.

The twenty-first century COVID-19 epidemic revealed a U.S. public health system that countenanced health inequities and a U.S. public that resisted disease containment policies. This crisis, however, was only the most recent chapter in a longer struggle in the United States to institutionalize public health. We focus on two early twentieth-century public health campaigns in the American South, the unhealthiest U.S. region at the time. Black southerners—denied basic health, political, economic, and social rights under a rising Jim Crow regime—self-organized health services networks, including through the Tuskegee Woman’s Club, the Negro Organization Society of Virginia, and the Moveable School (1890s–1915). Around the same time, a philanthropic project, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission (RSC, 1909–1914), seeded state-level public health agencies in eleven southern states, thereby installing public health in a top-down manner. We use archival data sources to explore key similarities and differences in the public health concerns and coalition-building approaches of each campaign and southern resistance to their efforts. We find Black-led campaigns often blurred the color line to form coalitions that provided services to the underserved while tackling environmental health risks at the community level. In contrast, RSC affiliates in southern states, as directed by RSC administrators, provided health services as short-term public dispensaries. Services reached Black and White communities willing to participate but in a manner that did not overtly challenge Jim Crow-era practices. Southern resistance to public health expansion persisted under each approach. The legacies of these struggles remain; the political-economic and ideological forces that limited public health expansion while marginalizing Black community health efforts reverberate in public health inequities today.

Plants and animals play a vital role in the human experience, from providing basic sustenance to creating unique social practices that may govern familial, political, or religious experiences; reconstitute identities; or forge social relationships. In this article, we present analyses on the ethnobotanical and zoological remains recently recovered from the Spring Lake Tract, Cahokia, a neighborhood populated from approximately AD 900 to 1275. The assemblage represents a variety of plants and animals that demonstrate the diverse utility of the biota from the region. We conclude that this assemblage indicates that this neighborhood community participated in an array of practices not easily dichotomized into “ritual” or “domestic.” From the perspectives of “Place-Thought” and locality, we emphasize the agency of these entities (plant/animal/human) in the process of creating and sustaining this Cahokian neighborhood.