The health care workers who pricked and probed Demetrius Norman jotted his sky-high cholesterol count and blood pressure on a slip of paper he planned to share strategically.
“I’ve made a doctor’s appointment for Monday,” said Norman, 39, during Black Men’s Wellness Day at Fourth Bluff Park earlier this month. His last visit to a physician’s office was so long ago he couldn’t pinpoint the date.
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“I don’t have a primary doctor,” said Anthony Lipford, 37, standing beside Norman.
“Make that two of us,” interjected Norman, a safety manager at J.B. Hunt and one of four colleagues from the trucking company attending a weekend health fair whose organizers urge Black men to ramp up their nutritional habits, regular exercise and medical self-care.
It’s a critical message for Norman, his co-workers and Black men throughout the region. Black Memphian men die disproportionately from injury and potentially lethal illnesses such as cancer but also from preventable, chronic conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. For example, in Shelby County, where Black people comprise 52% of the population, Black men accounted for 66% and white men for 31% of deaths from strokes, aneurysms and other cerebrovascular diseases in 2022, the last year those Tennessee Health Department data were available.
Statewide, in 2022, Black men accounted for 57% of deaths related to 13 causes, including heart disease, COVID-19, diabetes, cancer, liver disease, suicide and homicide, according to the state’s health department. And what’s happening in Memphis mirrors national trends showing, among other gaps, that Black men, on average, live 5.8 years less than white men.
Several realities have fueled that divide. Many “Black men are dealing with so many other societal stressors that health gets put on the back burner,” said epidemiologist and medical anthropologist Joseph Richardson, a professor at the University of Maryland Medical School and a lead researcher for the Black Men’s Health UMD project.
For too many, he said, “particularly for young Black men who live in low-income communities where it’s about everyday survival — how will I eat, keep a roof over my head, keep the light on, take care of my children — all of these things become a priority before health care.”
Some of them, Richardson added, may have been taken to physicians up through their teen years. But that hasn’t always carried over into their adulthood; the health care system has not managed to retain them in care, he said. And some men, for various reasons, have opted out.
“Young men, middle-aged men, old men, men who live in medical deserts,” Richardson said. “We just haven’t been socialized to go to the doctor.”
Living a bit longer; still dying too soon
From insufficient medical insurance and medical access to a lack of clinicians whose practices respect and accommodate cultural differences and needs among patients, systemic barriers account for some of the racial divides in health status and outcomes. So do lifestyle-dictated diseases such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension, which are leading causes of heart disease and stroke. The emotional and mental traumas imposed by people and situations both inside and outside of Black communities, and the daily stresses of trying to thrive in U.S. society also affect those outcomes, researchers contend.
Like other aspects of Black health, what ails Black men and why hasn’t been adequately studied. The Black Men’s Health project at the University of Maryland is exploring the health impacts of not just diet and exercise, but also of police violence, incarceration, employment, joblessness, domestic and gang violence, childhood history and other influences on participants in the study.
In addition to UMD’s research and outreach endeavors, the Johns Hopkins University-based Black Men’s Health Project, which includes researchers at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, is exploring how Black men view and treat their health and what drives their varying levels of engagement or disengagement in health care.
That research project aims to uncover more details about why Black men, compared to non-Hispanic white men, are 75% less likely to have health insurance; 60% more likely to die of a stroke; 30% more likely to die from heart disease; and nine times more likely to die from HIV-related conditions. “Our findings,” according to the project’s website, “will help identify strategies to address the racial disparities in health that negatively impact Black men across the country.”
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s November 2023 estimates did show life expectancy for Black people, overall, rising from 71.2 years to 72.8 years from 2021 to 2022, reflecting a rebound from disproportionately high death rates during COVID-19. Nevertheless, Black people, as a group, still died sooner than non-Black Latinos, Asians and white people; yet, Black people outlived Native Americans, whose life expectancy increased from 65.6 years to 67.9 years.
By gender, during those two years, Black women were expected to live 76.5 years and Black men 69.1 years.
Upending family histories of illness
Last year, said Lipford, a senior manager at J.B. Hunt, his mother died after suffering a stroke. In 2001, a stroke also felled his physically fit-looking father. “He was 45,” said Lipford. Memphis’ event, one of 17 in cities affiliated with the Ohio-based national African American Male Wellness Agency, included health screenings, yoga classes, DJ-pumped line-dancing and a 5K walk-run from Fourth Bluff.
“Last year, we screened 5,000 Black men,” said Duane Reid, associate director of national policy and advocacy for health equity for pharmaceuticals and medical products maker Johnson & Johnson, which co-sponsors the event. “And of those 5,000 Black men, nationally, 85% had high blood pressure. Of those 5,000, 56% had no idea that they were walking around with hypertension. Ten percent of our men that come to our events, literally, have to go to the emergency room because their numbers are off the charts.”
Hypertension he was diagnosed with a few years ago was a consequence of overworking himself and not finding the right work-life balance, said Leonard Watkins, coordinator of Memphis’ arm of the wellness agency. At 6 feet, 2 inches tall and 235 pounds, the former athlete is not obese. Hypertension “doesn’t run in my family. It isn’t hereditary,” said Watkins, owner of a private security company. “So, I changed, got more sleep, changed my eating habits and just learned how to better cope. We need to educate other Memphians on healthy eating and going to the gym.”
Yet, the issue is more complicated than just hitting the gym, he added: “So much of this is based on economics and how we are raised, how we think and lack of resources. People need to know much more health information and more about their health. That’s why we bring the hospital, so to speak, to the community.”
Getting medical check-ups when nothing seems wrong
“I don’t go to the doctor as often as I should,” said Davarus Jones, 31, a J.B. Hunt senior manager, who does have a primary care physician. “When there ain’t nothing wrong, you don’t see the need.”
Health fair attendee James Wright, 72, of Wright Solutions accounting firm, said health, as far as he can see, isn’t an issue Black men discuss often enough among themselves.
Of the Black men at, say, his Memphis church, many don’t physically appear to be in good health. “This is a southern city — and the South’s gone do what the South’s gone do in terms of fried food and so forth,” Wright said. “But, at my age, I’m not fooling around. There’s a certain determination that has to come with living this life.”
“The one thing that I’ll say is we just need more people here … ” University of Memphis basketball coach and former NBA athlete Penny Hardaway said into the mic as he addressed those at Fourth Bluff. “I’ve been here every year because this is so important to us. We’re saving African American men’s lives. I mean, how deep is that?”
Reid, the Johnson & Johnson’s representative, told the audience that it wasn’t an unusual experience for him to meet Black men at these events who hadn’t been to the doctor for 15 years. “You owe it to yourself. You owe it to your family members to make sure you know what’s going on with you. And don’t just take care of you; grab another brother,” he said.
Through J.B. Hunt’s intra-office channels, Lipford said he’d invited all of the company’s roughly 200 Black men employees to the free health fair. By its third hour, only he and three others were at Fourth Bluff. He’d been disappointed by the lack of turnout but planned to nudge his colleagues to mind their wellness.
“We’re trying,” Lipford said, “to be better about our health.”
Health and criminal justice journalist Katti Gray’s news coverage has appeared on ABC.com, CBS.com, and in The Guardian US, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Reuters, The Washington Post and other publications.
