Introduction
Gloria Johnson-Powell, MD, retired from the UW School of Medicine and Public Health in July, 2007. She was the first director of the Center for the Study of Cultural Diversity in Healthcare and the school's first associate dean for cultural diversity. She was also a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics.

Dr. Johnson-Powell’s career has included numerous appointments to mental health, health policy, and drug and substance abuse organizations at the state and national level. She has served as a consultant to community health and mental health service organizations, and has received numerous awards for her community service.

Her research and publications demonstrate a keen sensitivity to the myriad issues associated with multicultural context and cultural competence in preventive health care, access to health care, and differential health outcomes.


A Commitment Sprung From the Civil Rights Movement
Underlying all of Dr. Johnson-Powell’s accomplishments, however, is a deep personal commitment to social justice—a commitment first defined and sharpened by the civil rights movement in the segregated South.

After growing up and attending college in Boston, Johnson-Powell attended Meharry Medical College in Nashville. Having never been to the South or an all-Black setting, she was appalled by the segregation. As she completed her studies, she was swept up in the beginnings of the civil rights movement in Nashville.

With the principles of nonviolence, the backing of groups such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the encouragement of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Johnson-Powell and her fellow students endured taunts, physical abuse, and jail as they protested racism.

As the movement gained momentum, Johnson-Powell considered postponing medical school in favor of continuing her commitment to social justice. But when she told Dr. King about her plans, he encouraged her specifically to stay in school and follow through on her desire to be a child psychiatrist.

A Career Dedicated to Improving Minority Children’s Lives
Later, in the mid 1960s, Johnson-Powell served as a staff physician at two hospitals in Addis Adaba, Ethiopia, and lived for two years in Tanzania. One of the most devastating clinical experiences was seeing thousands of children suffering from severe malnutrition and infections for which no medication was available.

After returning to the US, Dr. Johnson-Powell joined the faculty at the University of California at Los Angeles. In her research and clinical practice, she focused on the formative effect culture can have on the development of children, and taught her staff how to perform culturally sensitive psychological assessments of children. Her 1983 book, The Psycho-Social Development of Minority Group Children, was the first textbook written on the subject.

Her earlier first book, Black Monday’s Children, was about the first children to be integrated into Southern Schools. A national expert on segregation, she has helped 30 schools work through the desegregation process.

In the 1980s, Dr. Johnson-Powell’s work expanded into ways to conduct evaluations to determine whether very young children have been sexually abused. She began a sexual evaluation training program for healthcare professionals, and co-authored The Lasting Effects of Sexual Child Abuse, published in 1990.

Dr. Johnson-Powell then joined the Harvard Medical School faculty as professor of child psychiatry. During that time, she served as senior advisor for the Judge Baker Children’s Center, which provided psychiatric care to inner-city children in Boston.

Joining the School of Medicine and Public Health in 2000 offered a final opportunity to contribute to academic medicine and research. As the then Associate Dean for Faculty Development, Dr. Johnson-Powell founded the CDH, recognizing that programming focused on minority health and disparities in health and health outcomes was not only needed in Wisconsin, but also would likely attract diverse scholars to the campus.

For Dr. Johnson-Powell, her work with the CDH allowed her to bring together all of her lifetime experiences: public health in Africa, working with minority children and families, and teaching cultural competency.

Furthermore, as she notes, “This has been an exciting way to do what Dr. Martin Luther King wanted me to do. He told me many years ago to stay in school, because one day I was going to be needed.”