When we tell the story of the American civil rights era, we often leave out a crucial element: the movement for social medicine and community health. Funded by Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty and influenced by innovations in social medicine in South Africa, this new health care movement recognized that good health played an integral role in social equality.

In 1964, a group of New York doctors organized the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) to provide first aid to activists in Mississippi during Freedom Summer. Historian John Dittmer writes about the MCHR and its precursor, the Medical Committee for Civil Rights (MCCR), in The Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care.

That same year, the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) provided almost a billion dollars for federal programs aimed at helping the poor. H. Jack Geiger, who participated in the MCHR, managed to direct some of that money to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, a rural community with staggering unemployment, little access to education, and crumbling medical facilities. Thomas J. Ward Jr’s new book, Out in the Rural: A Mississippi Health Center and Its War on Poverty, documents the legacy Geiger and his comrades left in this tiny Mississippi town.