Kejuane Bates and his daughter, Madison.īates, the only child of a single mother who supported him as a teacher’s aide, made it to Alcorn State University on football and choir scholarships. Time and again, it was their fight that was remarkable. They were the very people communities would have turned to first to help recover from the pandemic: entrepreneurs who were also employers confidants like coaches, pastors and barbers family men forced into a sandwich generation younger than their white counterparts, because their parents got sick earlier and they had to care for them while raising kids of their own.

In interviews about the young men who died from the virus, a portrait emerged of a modern John Henry: hard-working, ambitious, optimistic and persistent, trying to lift others along with themselves. COVID-19 is a new gear in an old machine. The effort of confronting that machine, day in and day out, compounded over a lifetime, leads to stress so corrosive that it physically changes bodies, causing Black men to age quicker, become sicker and die younger than nearly any other U.S. The John Henry of contemporary social theory is a man striving to get ahead in an unequal society.

But it holds another, harsher truth: His determination and strength are also what killed him. The folktale celebrates one man’s victory against seemingly insurmountable odds. Our efforts led us to a little-known body of research that takes its name from one of the most enduring symbols of Black American resilience.Īs the legend goes, John Henry was a steel-driving man who defeated a steam-powered drill and died with a hammer in his hand. To help illuminate this gap in knowledge and gain a deeper understanding of why America has lost so many young Black men to COVID-19, ProPublica spent months gathering their stories, starting with hundreds of news articles, obituaries and medical examiners’ reports, then interviewing the relatives and friends of nearly two dozen men, along with researchers who specialize in Black men’s health. We absolutely need to be asking what is going on here?” “I wasn’t seeing 60- and 70-year-old men. “I’ll be 45 this year,” said the University of Michigan professor, who studies racism and health. noticed when he kept seeing online memorials for men his age. And in an analysis for ProPublica this summer using the only reliable data at the time accounting for age, race and gender, from Michigan and Georgia, Harvard researcher Tamara Rushovich found that the disparity was greatest in Black men. One study using data through July found that Black people ages 35 to 44 were dying at nine times the rate of white people the same age, though the gap slightly narrowed later in the year. While COVID-19 has killed 1 out of every 800 African Americans, a toll that overwhelms the imagination, even more stunning is the deadly efficiency with which it has targeted young Black men like Bates. Get Our Top InvestigationsĮmail address This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Five days later he was on a ventilator five days after that, he died. As he preached about Daniel in the lion’s den - we will be tested, but if we continue to have faith, we will come through - he grimaced from the effort. Online church was a new concept to his parishioners, and during the next morning’s service, he had to keep reminding them to mute their phones. He attributed his malaise to allergies and pushed forward with his second full-time job, as head pastor of Forest Aid Baptist Church, working on his Sunday sermon between naps. The next day, he couldn’t get out of bed.īates was only 36, too young to be at risk for COVID-19, or so the conventional wisdom went. On Friday, March 20, he was coughing and his nose was bleeding. But with classrooms indefinitely closed, he was back on patrol duty and, like most people in those early days of the pandemic, unprotected by a mask. Bates was in his 10th year with the Vidalia Police Department, assigned as a resource officer to the upper elementary school. The arrival of the novel coronavirus in Vidalia, Louisiana, was another burden on a body already breaking under the load. Kejuane Artez Bates was a big man with big responsibilities. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.

Tor project hopes complex fragile