Psychiatrist / City Mental Health Chief
Her adult professional strategy was individualistic, invoking a proverb – “Each one, teach one” – rooted in American slavery when Black people were denied a school-based education, so literacy was conveyed from one person to another.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
June Jackson Christmas (JJC) was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother was a homemaker who had worked at a Navy Yard facility and later as a state tax assessor. Her father was a postal worker who fought for the advancement of Black workers in the union and civil service hierarchy.
CHILDHOOD
One year, JJC and a classmate who was also Black, sold more Girl Scout cookies than anyone else in their troop, but the minister’s wife who headed the troop informed her that she would not be able to claim her prize in another town because “those camps really never took any Negroes.”
JJC recalled that her father would always get the highest score in the postal worker’s civil service exam for promotions, often a perfect score, but he was never offered the position he sought.
Her father’s advice when he heard about the Girl Scout snub: “Be twice as good as everyone else.” But looking back at her childhood through adult life challenges, JJC said, “It seems to me that I’ve often been in places where if you wanted to make life better for yourself, you had to work to make life better for everybody.”
At age 14, JJC publicly championed civil rights by staging a sit-down strike at a segregated roller-skating rink in Cambridge, a Boston suburb. Her efforts helped eventually lead the way to skaters of all ethnicities being welcomed to participate.
EDUCATION
At elementary school, JJC and other Black students were never asked to identify their ancestry on “I Am an American Day” – a snub she never questioned because “I thought it was the reality of how we just accepted racism in the U.S. (in the 1920s and 1930s).”
JJC worked hard at her school studies and was admitted to Vassar College, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology, where she was one of the first three women who identified as Black to graduate.
She proceeded to medical school, earning her doctorate degree in psychiatry, followed by an internship and residency at two New York city hospitals, where she began to focus on working with mental illness. She then received a certificate in psychoanalysis.
WHY SHE CHOSE THIS CAREER PATH
Having been exposed to racial discrimination since childhood, JJC said she set a personal goal: a commitment to minimize prejudices. So, she became a psychiatrist because she believed that “maybe if I went into psychiatric medicine, I could teach people not to be racist.”
CHALLENGE – RACISM
While interviewing for a medical residency program, the male interviewer said he was concerned that as an African American woman, JJC would be too sexually stimulating to male patients.
Later when looking to rent an office in Manhattan (the middle borough of New York city) in the 1960s, at least a third of the real estate agents she spoke with on the telephone said they could guarantee that there were no Blacks or Puerto Ricans in the building – obviously the rental agents couldn’t see the color of JJC’s skin when speaking with her by telephone and her accent did not identify her as a minority person.
FIRST JOBS MAY LEAD TO EXPANDED OPPORTUNITIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
Dr. JJC’s first job providing psychiatric services to patients was the sole employee of her own medical practice. But it was difficult to be the doctor, receptionist, and bookkeeper at the same time, so JJC then worked as an employee psychiatrist for the Riverdale Children’s Association in New York for the next 12 years.
Wanting to expand her ability to help as many people as possible, JJC founded the Harlem Rehabilitation Center, a Harlem Hospital program, which gained a national reputation for providing vocational training and psychiatric help to psychiatric hospital patients who had returned to their communities after being discharged.
At the same time, after fellow professionals got to know and appreciate JJC’s commitment to improving mental health services FOR the public, she agreed to serve as the principal investigator on research projects for the National Institute of Mental Health.
Soon, JJC’s expertise and community service reputation became known to political leaders at both the local and national levels of government. She was appointed Commissioner of the New York City’s Department of Mental Health and Retardation Services by the Mayor (Lindsey) and reappointed by successive city mayors (Beame and Koch). During this public service, JJC once took a two-month leave to head President-Elect Jimmy Carter’s 12-member transition team following his election as U.S. President.
In addition to her influential role within political circles, JJC served as a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and as a professor of behavioral science at several other academic institutions, both in New York and Massachusetts.
Editor’s note – The 14-year-old girl who staged a sit-in protesting segregation at a Boston area skating rink several decades earlier had traveled a long road to greater influence to serving the public.
CAREER SATISFACTION
In 1980, JJC became the first Black woman President of the American Public Health Association. She was also a founder of the Urban Issues Group, a research institute, serving as its Executive Director for seven years.
JJC’s priorities included improving mental health services for older people, helping people cope with alcoholism, and assisting children ensnared in the bureaucracies of foster care within the legal system. She also sought to ease the transition of patients from being warehoused in state mental hospitals to living independently.
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This career story is based on an obituary written by Sam Roberts, published within The New York Times in late 12/23 or early 1/24.
