Black Amputation Rates Are High. Knowing Your Risk Can Lower It.

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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April 23, 2024

By Jennifer Porter Gore, Word in Black

Everyone knows diabetes, high blood pressure and smoking are health hazards, but few know they could lead to peripheral artery disease.

People with high blood pressure, as well as diabetics and former smokers, are all at risk for peripheral artery disease, a vascular disorder that often leads to amputation (Credit: ProStock Studios-Getty Images).

It’s a common cardiovascular disease that leads to some 400 amputations performed each day in the United States. It is a serious medical condition, prevalent in the Black community, that can also lead to stroke, heart attacks and, in some cases, death.

Yet a recent survey has found that while millions of Americans have cardiovascular disease or diabetes, very few are aware of peripheral artery disease, and even fewer have ever had a discussion about it with a medical professional.

PAD causes blockage in the vessels that carry blood from the heart to the legs and affects more than 12 million Americans. Leading risk factors for PAD are the common chronic health conditions that disproportionately impact underserved communities.

“These new insights are particularly concerning among those most at risk and come at a time when a staggering 1 in 20 Americans over 50 years of age experience PAD,” said Dr. George D. Dangas, president of the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography & Interventions, and a professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

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