Up one level
Bill and I both came to the University of North Carolina School of Public Health during the early 1970s, but our paths crossed only after fall 1977, when I enrolled in the Dept of Epidemiology, where Bill was one of the first African American doctoral students.
Bill was a huge asset to the school, teaming up with Biostatistics graduate student Jim Murrell to put on a “survival course” that for three years helped minority students succeed in their required introductory and biostatistics courses. Bill was also a founder of the Annual Minority Health Conference, proposed by Bob Kelly and led by the Minority Student Caucus, for which Bill had served as president when it was named the Black Student Caucus.
But Bill could also be a challenge. During his interview to become a teaching assistant, when the outgoing teaching assistant asked what made him think that he was qualified for the position, Bill suggested that he was more qualified than she was when she got it. As he later explained, “Sometimes I had these days when I just want to mess with people …, and she just looked like somebody I could mess with.”
Once an administrator sought his assistance in avoiding an uproar over a faculty member’s racist remark which Bill had not heard about. Bill elicited the details and then prepared to trigger the uproar, as he gleefully recalled in a conversation with Jim Murrell that I recorded last May.
One morning, some months after I enrolled in Epidemiology, with three chapters of his dissertation written, Bill decided “this place is just too strange” and drove back to Atlanta. He taught high school, worked on the back of a truck, and carried out statistical analyses for the State of Georgia, returning to finish his dissertation only after Gladys Reynolds recruited him to CDC to work for her. He was then one of a handful of African American epidemiologists with a doctoral degree.
Bill periodically spoke at UNC’s Annual Minority Health Conference and in the Annual Summer Public Health Research Videoconference, which he later helped to fund and to plan. He also came back to accept a Distinguished Alumnus Award from UNC, which almost didn’t happen because he hadn’t responded to the email from the UNC Chancellor’s Office.
After leaving the CDC and then the Morehouse College Research Center on Health Disparities, Bill came back to Chapel Hill, where Diane Rowley had taken a faculty position in the Department of Maternal and Child Health. Bill rejoined UNC, becoming a Senior Scholar at the Institute of African American Research, co-director of the Minority Health Project, an adjunct professor in the Department of Epidemiology, and a community elder-in-residence to students, faculty, and administrators.
A devoted teacher and mentor, he regularly met with students, individually and in groups, to share his extensive knowledge, experience, and wisdom - and above all, to teach us to ask questions. Experts in creating community, Bill and Diane hosted an Annual Minority Health Conference after-party, where dozens of alumni and friends, old and new, spent many hours enjoying stories, fellowship – and Samuel Wilson’s cooking.
Bill co-taught a seminar course with me, most of which I recorded. My hope is that biographers and documentary filmmakers will make use of my recordings of his classes, professional meeting presentations, interviews, and conversations to share Bill’s stories and wisdom with an even wider audience. Please visit http://go.unc.edu/BillJenkins to see the ones I have posted publicly.