Lessons in Community Health Activism: The Maternity Care Coalition, 1970-1990

This study employed historical methodologies to explore the means through which the Maternity Care Coalition used grassroots activism to dismantle the power structures and other obstacles that contributed to high infant mortality rates in Philadelphia’s health districts 5 and 6 during the 1980s. Infant mortality within the black community has been a persistent phenomenon in the United States. Refusing to accept poverty as a major determinant of infant mortality within marginalized populations of women, activists during the 1980s harnessed momentum from a postcivil rights context and sought alternative methods toward change and improvement of infant mortality rates.