Looking Back on the Evolution of Black Women’s Wellness Efforts: Black Resilience (Part 1 of 2)
Lisa Peyton founded The Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness in 2012 as the first sustained and continuous movement to improve the wellness of Black women and children.
by Jonathan Gramling
On February 21st, the Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness celebrated its 15th Wear Red Day observance to highlight the impact heart disease has on Black women and to point the way to a holistic approach to the well-being of Black women. While Lisa Peyton started the first Wear Red Day observance in Madison at the Urban League in 2012, the seeds for it had already been planted when her mother died of congestive heart failure at the age of 64 and Peyton started observing Wear Red Day in honor of her several years before she moved back to Madison.
Between family life and helping out in her mother’s beauty salon, Peyton had a bird’s eye view of the struggles of Black people growing up.
“I’m one generation removed from segregation, Jim Crow and black codes, one generation away,” Peyton exclaimed. “I grew up in my mother’s hair salon. She was an entrepreneur, a business owner who thrived even during the earlier part of her life. You have to realize that segregation didn’t just end until the late 1960s. I was fortunate to see a Black jewelry store, a Black record shop, a Black show hop and delis and restaurants. I grew up in that. And so that was part and parcel. And my father was an independent contractor. So I saw that.”
Peyton grew up in a matriarchal family and society where women took on the burden of not only raising children, but also working and supporting the community in the repressive environment of racism.
“The role that Black women played in that was significant, in the economic, spiritual and educational strength and vitality of our families and our communities,” Peyton said. “They built the blueprint with Black men, not behind them. And sometimes, they had to be out front. And to see that dynamic unfold and to see these women getting sick before they reached old age, to be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor or to see their children whom they sacrificed so much for carry on beyond age 40-60. When my mother died at age 64, I had seen that happen so many times among her customers who I grew up shampooing their hair. I knew the whole story of their lives. And I understood all of the things underneath the surface, how policies and systems
created repressive ways of living and how we were surviving racism and economic policies that didn’t work. How we were surviving redlining and gerrymandering and discrimination at work. All of that was eating into the stressors that my mother faced, that she was trying to overcome for her family and stressors that my father was facing trying to be a self-employed Black man who could feed his family. That was a whole community that I was a part of. They were fighting always against this onslaught on attacks to not honor civil and human rights.”
In essence, Black women were getting worn down by the burdens that they carried.
“The burden on Black women — mentally, physically, spiritually — is this pattern of early illness,” Peyton emphasized. “We call it health disparities. It’s why conditions like heart disease, stroke and diabetes disproportionately impact Black women at younger ages with higher mortality rates. It’s all tied to the social and economic things that we contend with.”
When she came back to Madison in 2011, Peyton immediately began to network with other women and health care providers because she wanted to continue the work she began in Maryland without stepping on anyone’s toes.
“I wasn’t only talking with health system partners,” Peyton said. “I started with meeting every Black woman I knew from previous relationships and new relationships to say, ‘I want to build a movement here that is focused on our health and our well-being. And I want everyone’s input. I want to know who is doing what and where. I don’t want to replicate what anyone’s doing. I have a very specific passion about this work that is very personal. I know it has a place in Dane County and Wisconsin because we all know the disparities that have been well-documented for many decades.’”
And so that first Wear Red Day observed in Madison was the start of something bigger, a movement for Black women’s well-being and not just their health.
“There were maybe 20 women who came out over the course of the day to acknowledge what I was trying to build,” Peyton said. “The message, even at that fledgling stage, was resonating with women. Even though a small group of women came and even on that very day, they recognized that Black women needed a space to specifically talk about our particular experiences with chronic disease and illness and its overall theme of how do we build a healthy well lifestyle and legacy in these spaces where you can look at all of the data and all of the reports and see that the narrative is Black mortality, death, and disparities. Those are all the words that were attached to Black women and Black families and Black community when I arrived back here in 2011. It was my desire to create empowering spaces where we could get vital information to help us deal with our immediate health concerns and needs, but also think broadly about what the long-term vision about completely re envisioning Black women’s health in what I call the Cradle of Disparities of Dane County and Wisconsin.”
Later that spring, Peyton applied for state recognition with WI Department of Financial Institutions of the Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness. And the first Black Women’s Wellness Day held in Madison was in May 2012.
“We hosted the first Black Women’s Wellness Day. I had hosted it for three years in Maryland already,” Peyton said. “So we held the Fourth Annual Black Women’s Wellness Day — the first in Madison — at the Urban League as well. It was held May 22nd and I remember because Milele was there and she danced her way into the room. I had done enough work from moving here in November and really had been talking to women before I even came here. We had about 100 Black women crammed into the Evjue Room at the Urban League.”
There had been efforts in the Black community to improve the health of Black people for decades, events held by Black sororities and the Madison Area Health Network. But there was no continuous effort to improve the wellness specifically of Black women.
“Before it was a periodic focus,” Peyton said. “There were always pockets of Black women who were doing what I was doing. We would take it upon ourselves to create these avenues, these venues where we would focus on ourselves and our health. That was happening. Was there any strong institutional support or commitment to those efforts? No. And of course we always nod to our sororities who were doing their part at that time. I saw an opportunity to really bring all of those efforts together, to pull Black women and those who support us into one conversation to say, ‘How do we, as Black women in this city, envision ourselves? What vision do we want for ourselves? How do we power that vision ourselves and not waiting for systems to create those pathways, not waiting for institutions to do that? How do we create this movement, this groundswell of focus?”
Peyton emphasized that it wasn’t just about Black women’s health. It was about a broader sense of their wellness.
“Adapting a more holistic approach was on purpose,” Peyton said. “It was always about getting women to take primary responsibility and accountability for their well-being. It wasn’t a clinical stance of, ‘Okay, we want to measure blood pressures. It wasn’t a clinical, medical perspective. It was a well-being perspective. That’s why I named the organization the Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness, not Black Women’s Health. There is a distinction. To me, wellness is a continuum of holistic well-being across the life span. And that is mind, body, spirit, financial and relational. It is healthy money, healthy relationships, healthy body, healthy mind, healthy spirit. That was always my desire, our whole person, our whole life is what we are trying to align with our highest good, not just our physical health. And we absolutely cannot get to well-being by just seeing that through a clinical lens. There’s a lot that you are going to miss. It’s really about transformation.”
On some level, Wear Red Day and Black Women’s Wellness Day were the anchors for a larger and more sustained movement.
“There is unmet need and not enough funding to go around to meet what are really crucial needs of our community,” Peyton emphasized. “Yet and still, when you are committed and passionate about a thing, you keep building. So I kept building and bringing women into the work, knowing that what started off as events and experiences would help them understand the mission, the vision, the purpose, and the why.”
Next Issue: The Interrelated Programming of the Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness