June Jackson Christmas, Pioneering Psychiatrist, Dies at 99

June Jackson Christmas, a psychiatrist who broke boundaries as a Black girl by heading New York City’s Department of Mental Health and Retardation Services below three mayors, died on Sunday within the Bronx. She was 99.

Her daughter, Rachel Christmas Derrick, mentioned she died in a hospital of coronary heart failure.

As a metropolis commissioner, as chief of rehabilitation providers at Harlem Hospital Center, and in her function overseeing the transition of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare to a Democratic administration for President-elect Jimmy Carter, Dr. Christmas ardently superior her skilled agenda.

Her priorities included enhancing psychological well being providers for older individuals, serving to individuals deal with alcoholism, and aiding youngsters ensnared within the bureaucracies of foster care and the authorized system. She additionally sought to ease the transition of sufferers from being warehoused in state psychological hospitals to dwelling independently.

Dr. Christmas publicly championed civil rights from an early age. She staged a sit-down strike at a segregated curler skating rink in Cambridge, Mass., when she was 14, and she or he later broke floor as a Black girl in schooling, employment and housing.

June Antoinette Jackson was born on June 7, 1924, in Boston. Her mom, Lillian Annie (Riley) Jackson, was a homemaker who had labored on the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston throughout World War II and as a state tax assessor. Her father, Mortimer Jackson, was a postal employee who fought for the development of Black employees within the union and civil service hierarchy.

At faculty, June and different Black college students have been by no means requested to establish their ancestry on “I Am an American Day” — a snub she by no means questioned, she mentioned in an interview carried out in 2016 for StoryCorps by her son Vincent, as a result of “I think it was the reality of how we just accepted racism.”

Her father, she recalled in the identical interview, “would always get the highest score, often perfect, and never be offered the position.”

One 12 months, she mentioned, she and a classmate who was additionally Black offered extra Girl Scout cookies than anybody else of their troop, however the minister’s spouse who headed the troop knowledgeable her that she wouldn’t have the ability to declare her prize in one other city as a result of “those camps, they’ve really never taken any Negroes.”

Her father’s recommendation? “Be twice as good as everybody else,” she recalled.

But, she added, “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.”

She earned a Bachelor of Science diploma in zoology in 1945 from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., the place she was one of many first three ladies who recognized as Black to graduate. She went on to obtain a medical diploma in psychiatry from the Boston University School of Medicine in 1949.

She did her internship at Queens General Hospital and her residency at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. She acquired a certificates in psychoanalysis from the William Alanson White Institute, additionally in Manhattan.

In 1953, she married Walter Christmas, a founding father of the Harlem Writers Guild, who dealt with publicity for a variety of corporations and organizations and at one level was public relations director for the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New York. He died in 2002.

In addition to their daughter, a journey author, she is survived by their son Gordon, a photographer, and 4 grandchildren. Their son Vincent, who labored for the town psychological well being company his mom as soon as headed, died in 2021.

Dr. Christmas initially practiced privately, then labored as a psychiatrist for the Riverdale Children’s Association in New York from 1953 to 1965.

In 1964 she based Harlem Rehabilitation Center, a Harlem Hospital program, which gained a nationwide fame for offering vocational coaching and psychiatric assist to psychiatric hospital sufferers who had returned to their communities after being discharged. From 1964 to 1972, she was additionally the principal investigator on analysis tasks for the National Institute of Mental Health.

In 1972, after serving briefly as a deputy commissioner, Dr. Christmas was appointed commissioner of the Department of Mental Health and Retardation Services by Mayor John V. Lindsay. She was reappointed in 1973 by Mayor Abraham D. Beame (she took a two-month depart to go Jimmy Carter’s 12-member transition group) and once more in 1978 by Mayor Edward I. Koch.

She was a scientific professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, a professor of behavioral science on the City University of New York School of Medicine and resident professor of psychological well being coverage on the Heller Graduate School of Social Welfare of Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

In 1980, Dr. Christmas grew to become the primary Black girl president of the American Public Health Association. She was additionally a founding father of the Urban Issues Group, a analysis institute, and served as its govt director from 1993 to 2000.

Reflecting on her profession in 2020, Dr. Christmas concluded that “the barrier of racism is greater than being a woman.”

“I interviewed for a residency, and the man who was interviewing me said he was concerned that I, as an African American woman, would be too sexually stimulating to men patients,” she informed The Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation.

“When I was looking for an office in Manhattan in the 1960s, at least a third of the agents I spoke with on the telephone said they could guarantee me that there were no Blacks or Puerto Ricans in the building,” she added. “It was so hard to find a place to live that my husband and I wound up going to court, where we prevailed.”

Having been uncovered to racial discrimination since childhood, Dr. Christmas mentioned, she was imbued with a dedication to attenuate prejudice. She grew to become a psychiatrist, she recalled, as a result of she believed that “maybe if I went into psychiatric medicine I could teach people not to be racist.”

Her technique was individualistic, she mentioned, invoking a proverb — “Each one, teach one” — rooted in American slavery when Black individuals have been denied an schooling and literacy was conveyed from one individual to a different.