We’ll Fight It Out Here: A History of the Ongoing Struggle for Health Equity

How a coalition of Black health professions schools made health equity a national issue.

Winner of the Phillis Wheatley Award from the Sons & Daughters of the United States Middle Passage

Racism in the US health care system has been deliberately undermining Black health care professionals and exacerbating health disparities among Black Americans for centuries. These health disparities only became a mainstream issue on the agenda of US health leaders and policy makers because a group of health professions schools at Historically Black Colleges and Universities banded together to fight for health equity. We’ll Fight It Out Here tells the story of how the Association of Minority Health Professions Schools (AMHPS) was founded by this coalition and the hard-won influence it built in American politics and health care. David Chanoff and Louis W. Sullivan, former secretary of health & human services, detail how the struggle for equity has been fought in the field of health care, where bias and disparities continue to be volatile national issues.

Chanoff and Sullivan outline the history of Black health care, from pre-Emancipation to today, centering on the work of AMHPS, which brought to light health care inequities in 1983 and precipitated virtually all minority health care legislation since then. Based on extensive research in the literature, as well as more than seventy interviews with the people central to this fight for legislative and policy change, We’ll Fight It Out Here is the important story of a vital coalition movement, virtually unknown until now, that changed the national understanding of health inequities.

The work of this coalition of Black health schools continues, both in supporting the training of more doctors and health professionals from minority backgrounds and in advancing issues related to health equity. By highlighting these endeavors, We’ll Fight It Out Here brings attention to a pivotal group in the history of the health equity movement and provides a road map of practical mechanisms that can be used to advance it.

David Chanoff (SOMERVILLE, MA) is the coauthor of more than twenty books, including Seeing Patients: Unconscious Bias in Health Care, and has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and more. Louis W. Sullivan (ATLANTA, GA) is a former secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services and the founding dean and president emeritus of Morehouse School of Medicine.