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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 15. The Negro in the Public Economy - 4. Public Health - 5. Recreational Facilities
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346 An American Dilemma
cases no discrimination at all—in respect to the so-called “out-patient”
services of public health institutions. For this there are several reasons.
These services usually cannot be apportioned beforehand between Negroes
and whites in the strict manner in which hospital wards are segregated.
The federd government has given considerable assistance on a permanent
basis to certain important aspects of this medical work. Much of the work
concerns venereal diseases, and white people everywhere seem to have
become aware of what the high rates of venereal diseases among Negroes
mean to themselves.^^
The building up of a system of general public health clinics, as well as of
maternal and child health clinics, is far from completed in America,®® but
there is no doubt that tremendous improvements have been achieved in
recent years, and that Negroes have shared in the benefits. One criticism,
however, is that too much of the work has been organized on a “categorical”
basis. Drives are started against one disease after another,® and the objective
of rendering assistance to those most in need, regardless of the type of dis-
ease they have, has often been almost forgotten. This has sometimes been
unfortunate from the point of view of the Negro.®®
5. Recreational Facilities
America is probably more conscious than any other country of the great
importance of recreation. The need for public measures to promote whole-
some recreation has been shown to be particularly great for youth in cities
and especially in such groups where housing conditions are crowded and
unsanitary, where incomes are low and consequently opportunities for
enjoying sound commercial entertainment restricted, where many mothers
have to leave their homes for gainful work during the day, where the
proportion of disorganized families is great, and where juvenile delin-
quency is. high. This all means that, on the average, Negroes have greater
need for public recreational facilities than have whites.
In the North there is, occasionally, segregation and discrimination not
only in commercial enterprises for entertainment but also in public facilities,
as, for instance, in swimming pools.** In the South segregation and dis-
crimination are the general rule for all recreational facilities. The visitor
finds everywhere in the South that not only beaches and playgrounds, but
also public parks, are often entirely closed to Negroes, except for Negro
‘During his field trip in Mississippi (December, 1939-January, 1940), Sterner heard
public health officers and nurses talk about the syphilis campaign which had started about a
year earlier (before then little, if anything, had been done about it by public health agencies)
.
But he heard nothing about gonorrhea until one public health officer explained that available
appropriations were insufficient for treatment of gonorrhea on a large scale in his county.
® See Chapter 29. We shall include among public recreational fadlities those organized
by dvic groups and by philanthropists^
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