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Richmond, who held several prominent positions at Harvard, was a giant in child health and development
October 8, 2021 – When Linda Villarosa met Julius Richmond at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health 30 years ago, they struck up a conversation about Head Start, the federal program to break the cycle of poverty through care and to the education of young children. from low-income families.
The conversation made them both cry.
At the time, Villarosa was spending a year as a health communication researcher at Harvard Chan School and Richmond was professor emeritus. The emotion in their conversation long ago had to do with the fact that Richmond, who died in 2008, was the first director of Head Start, and Villarosa, a journalist and author who writes on race, inequality and health, was among 561,000 children in her first cohort in 1965, when she was five years old.
“It was a big deal to get into Head Start,” recalls Villarosa, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, a predominantly black community that declined over time due to discrimination, neglect. and divestment. “I remember my mother talking about [Head Start] in really glowing terms. Villarosa told Richmond how much it meant to her family that she was part of the first Head Start group. This allowed her mother to work knowing that her young daughter was gaining valuable education and skills.
October is National Head Start Program Awareness Month, when the nation marks the program’s contributions. Reflecting on Richmond’s contributions to Head Start, the field of early childhood development at Harvard and beyond, and the public service, colleagues who knew and worked with him speak of superlatives.
“It was a hurricane with a gentle, gentlemanly voice,” recalls Jack shonkoff, Professor Julius B. Richmond FAMRI of Child Health and Development, who for 15 years led the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, which focuses on building and harnessing the science of early childhood development to help improve real-world outcomes for young children facing adversity. Richmond was the driving force behind the creation of the Center at Harvard and the recruitment of Shonkoff, who was previously Dean of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.
“He was so fiercely dedicated to the welfare of children,” said Shonkoff. “Out of necessity, he operated in an environment with a lot of very powerful aggressive people, and he was always the voice of calm, wisdom and guidance. He was as relentless in his commitment to making an impact as anyone else, but had an incredible way of elevating himself as a leader in a group to get things done.
The highest honor of Harvard Chan School bears the name of Richmond. The Julius B. Richmond Award recognizes individuals who, like Richmond, have promoted and achieved high standards of public health in vulnerable populations.
Intellectual power, social reformer
Richmond’s career path reflects his commitment to scientific research and public service. Trained in pediatrics and child development, he became director of the pediatrics department at SUNY Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse in 1953 and then rose to the post of dean. While at SUNY Upstate, Richmond conducted research on the cognitive development of young children growing up in poverty, finding that poor children fall behind after the age of one. This work led to the appointment of Richmond in 1965 as the first director of Head Start, which was established as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty”. Richmond has also served as the Deputy Director of Health Affairs for the Office of Economic Opportunity.
After his first stint in government service, Richmond returned to Syracuse, then moved in 1971 to Harvard University, where he held several senior positions over a period of nearly 20 years. At Harvard Medical School, he held faculty positions in two departments, Child Psychiatry and Human Development, and Preventive and Social Medicine. At Harvard Chan School, he was professor of health policy from 1981 to 1988. He also held other positions, including as director of the Judge Baker Guidance Center in Boston, a nonprofit mental health organization. who works with Boston Juvenile Courts, and as Chief of Psychiatry at Children’s Hospital Boston.
From 1977 to 1981, Richmond returned to the public sector, as US Surgeon General and Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. As Surgeon General, he published the 1979 report Smoking and health and set goals for the health of the American public with the Healthy people report, first published the same year.
Historian Allan BrandtThe office had once been located down the Richmond corridor on Huntington Avenue in Boston’s Longwood Medical District, and for about two decades the two met almost every morning for coffee. Calling Richmond “one of my most important mentors,” Brandt said Richmond was unusual in his ability to switch between government and academia. “He became a real Washington insider, a political thinker and a policy maker, and this is quite unusual for someone who was in many ways an intellectual and researcher,” Brandt said. “He would draw on his own research and reflect on their implications for major social reforms and public programs. He was incredibly savvy from a political point of view.
Life changing program
In Shonkoff’s view, Richmond’s efforts during the early days of Head Start served as an anchor for the entire field of early childhood intervention. “Head Start was a magnificent example of bringing together the best minds in the country in terms of the underlying science of child health and development at the time and a critical mass of advocates and government leaders who brought together all their perspectives and created a new program and in that sense created a new area of intervention with early childhood that still exists half a century later, ”he said.
“Julie,” as Richmond was nicknamed by her friends, loved hearing from people whose lives had been improved by Head Start, Brandt recalls. “Every now and then Julie would receive a letter from someone in their twenties or early thirties, writing them personally to thank them, telling them how the opportunities Head Start had created for them had radically changed their lives and their lives. situation, ”Brandt said. “It was incredibly empowering for him to have done something that people believed and understood was so important to who they had become.”
Villarosa is one of those people. She said, “I write about communities of color and black communities in the United States, and look at how they have been hurt or helped by government policies, and for me, Head Start is a personal and professional achievement. I am proud to be the product.
Pictures
Julius Richmond: Kris Snibbe / Harvard University
Linda Villarosa: Nic Villarosa
Jack Shonkoff: Fred Field
Allan Brandt: Kevin Grady / Radcliffe Institute
Head Start Program: Thomas J. O’Halloran / Granger Academic
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