ATLANTA — When Melvin McCluster was a child in Middle Georgia, going to the doctor meant first going to a “colored” waiting room. After all the white patients were seen, then the doctor would admit the first African American in line. So McCluster and his family waited, usually several hours, and watched, as sicker patients lost strength.
“I can remember grown-ups getting upset,” said McCluster, now a bishop at a Baptist church in Americus. “But there was nothing we could do. It turned a lot of us to using home remedies, because we knew we wouldn’t get the same treatment they had.”
Race has played a prominent role in the history of Sumter County, which is currently just over half African American. The county serves international visitors to President Jimmy Carter’s hometown of Plains, the Andersonville Civil War prison site and the historic racially integrated Koinonia Farm. But it’s also just another Southern community that was divided during the civil rights movement and lives with racial divisions now.
And according to health experts, the struggles against racism and against the coronavirus pandemic are fused.
Historic racial inequities in health care and environment have more often left people of color with higher rates of conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure and asthma that leave a person more vulnerable to severe illness or death from COVID-19. If Black people in Georgia died of COVID-19 at the same rates as white Georgia residents do, as of early August 716 Black Georgians would still be alive.