In 2021, a coalition of national museum and library associations awarded the Peale (Baltimore, Maryland) a Communities for Immunity grant. The goal of the project is for trusted, local institutions to engage their communities in order to boost COVID-19 vaccine confidence. Since being awarded the grant, we've been gathering stories from people about their experiences with COVID and getting the vaccine. This webinar was created by Peale artist fellow and educator, Chrys Seawood.
Chrys Seawood: [Slide 1] (00:01) Hello, and welcome to a webinar about COVID -19 and the Black community. I am your facilitator, Chrystal Seawood. I am an educator and artist fellow at the Peale Museum of Baltimore. Many sources were used to design this webinar and can be found on the last slides at the end of the presentation.
Chrys Seawood: [Slide 2] (00:22): Let’s look at some COVID-19 Data in the Black Community. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Black Americans are more likely to become severely ill or die due to complications of COVID-19 than other populations. In fact, Black individuals account for 15% of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S., though they make up only 12% of the overall population and are nearly three times as likely to be hospitalized due to COVID-19 as white people. (Dec. 2021)
As of Jan. 10, 2022, 54% of Black individuals across a majority of states in the U.S. had received at least one vaccine dose – a lower rate than among white, Hispanic and Asian populations, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. (Jan. 2022)
Chrys Seawood: [Slide 3] (01:13): When researching information about the impact of COVID 19 on the Black community, a common thread emerged: there appears to be a relationship between vaccine hesitancy and a history of medical mistrust. In this webinar, we’ll unpack that relationship, explore the contributions Black people have made in vaccine development, common questions about vaccine safety, and the current vaccine trends in the Black community.
Here’s our outline of the webinar: We will begin with the History of medical mistrust in the Black community, explore Black pioneers in vaccine development, address vaccine hesitancy in the Black community, explore questions about vaccine safety, and look at current trends in the Black community.
Chrys Seawood: [Slide 4] (02:08): Now let’s pry into history, and review how Black people have been subjected to medical abuse in the past. During the formative years of medical colleges, there was a shortage of cadavers, aka “dead bodies,” to supply dissections materials to medical students.
Medical colleges were fairly new and there weren’t enough legal cadavers to supply the growing interest in this field of study. Well, guess how they acquired cadavers? They stole bodies from Black cemeteries. Everyone from Medical students to janitors of medical colleges, and sometimes professors themselves participated in the practice called, “body snatching,” or “grave robbing.”
Baltimore became the epicenter of this unethical practice with the invention of the railroad. Bodies were eventually shipped outside of Baltimore, hidden, in whiskey barrels, to hide the smells of the rotting dead bodies— and get this, the same whiskey used to mask the odor, was the same whiskey sold in bars as “stiff drinks”.
Asset ID: 2022.05.31
Find a complete transcript on the Peale's website and a video-based version of this presentation on the Peale's YouTube channel.
Photo courtesy Chrys Seawood
