“We are right at the point in our history where we are going to determine whether we are an integrated society, where we recognize that there is one race called the human race."
Hubert Humphrey had a lifelong passion for civil rights as he said in this speech at UCLA in 1969.
Four years earlier that passion culminated in the signing of the Civil Rights Act that Humphrey helped craft.
It excluded federal funding to any institution segregated by race.
Roger Feldman is a professor at the University of Minnesota’s division of Health Policy and Management. He says that wording became important a year later, when Medicare was signed into law providing federal money for health care to elderly residents. Together, the two ended segregation in hospitals giving blacks the right to the same health care as whites for the first time.
“(It was) a huge advance in desegregation in the United States," Feldman said.
Before then, hospitals reserved for whites often didn’t admit blacks–even for emergencies. Giving blacks federally-backed economic power over their health care, improved the lives of people of color.