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Former US Surgeon General: Eliminate Gaps in Health Care for Minorities

Carol Pearson

   WASHINGTON - Fifty-seven years ago, Martin Luther King Jr., president
   of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led a March on
   Washington to bring attention to Black Americans' racial and civic
   inequality in society.

   A few weeks ago, in late August, a racially diverse crowd also marched
   through Washington with the hope of rekindling the spirit of the 1963
   march.

   Like King, Dr. David Satcher has devoted his life to civil rights, with
   one difference -- Satcher has pushed to ensure that African Americans
   and other minorities have the same access to health care as their white
   counterparts.

   Satcher was born in poverty in what is called "the deep South" --
   cotton-producing states that depended on enslaved labor before the U.S.
   Civil War in the mid-1800s. Even after the war and emancipation, Black
   Americans were subjected to harsh discrimination throughout the U.S.,
   but especially in the South.

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