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Kim Sudderth is a community leader and advocate for racial justice with the Norfolk branch of the NAACP, and the first Black woman to serve as Vice Chair of the Norfolk Planning Commission, beginning in 2022. She was the Repair Lab’s inaugural Practitioner-in-Residence in 2021. Born in 1971, Sudderth grew up in Norfolk and spent some of her adult years in Virginia Beach before returning home to Norfolk.
Track 1: In this oral history, Sudderth discusses her childhood years growing up on the naval base near Ocean View in Norfolk, and her memories of her mother’s softball league. In her later adult years, Sudderth began advocating for environmental justice cases with Mothers Out Front. Sudderth shares her perspectives on power and change-making, and discusses the connected and widespread issues of housing and the environment, as well as the lessons she has learned through organizing.
Track 2: In this interview Sudderth discusses her experience with a representative of the city in conversation about the proposed downtown Norfolk seawall and the absence of structural mitigations for flooding for the predominantly Black Southside neighborhood, where she resides. Sudderth also addresses Norfolks’ Vision2100 document, a neighborhood planning guide created in response to forecasted sea-level rise and the resulting changes in the city’s geography.
In summer 2013, UVA landscape architecture graduate students Harriett Jameson and Asa Eslocker travelled to Sardinia, Okinawa, and Loma Linda, California, three landscapes with the highest life expectancy in the world, to explore these places' physical, spatial, and material qualities-topography, plant communitites,urban form-and also the personal attachments that seniors in these sites have to their cultural landscapes. The people in these locales have long been studied for their genetics, diets, and recreation habits. But until Ms. Jameson and Mr. Eslocker arrived, no one had inquired into or demonstrated in these settings the critical role of place in healthy longevity. Through study of these distinctive landscapes and the personal stories of elderly residents, the pair arrived at insights that may help communities rethink and redesign public landscapes to cultivate a culture of health and well being that spans infancy through old age.
In this Medical center hour, Ms. Jameson and Mr. Eslocker focus on how place contributes to healthy aging and preview parts of their full-length documentary film, Landscapes of longevity, which will premiere in Charlottesville in November.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the Center for Design + Health, School of Architecture, UVA
Lathaniel Kirts was born in 1988 and grew up in the Norview community of Norfolk, Virginia. In this oral history interview, he describes his experiences as an honor roll student in Norfolk public schools while he and his family were navigating homelessness. Kirts was granted a scholarship to Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he studied political science and worked in public service. While serving as a Deputy Clerk in courtrooms in Richmond and in Norfolk, he witnessed the school-to-prison pipeline. This interview includes Kirts’s reflections on his work for Communities and Schools, an organization dedicated to providing social services and mentorship for students in K-12 settings, around housing and food insecurity, and his decision to attend seminary school at Virginia Union, where he graduated in 2015. Kirts is an active community advocate for protecting residents living next to CSX rail yards against coal dust pollution. He served as the Repair Lab Practitioner-in-Residence (2023-2024). This oral history was conducted at Pay First Church, the church that Kirts and his wife lead in Newport News.
Lawrence Turner was born and raised in the southeast community of Newport News. In this interview, Turner describes how his life has been shaped by mentorship he has received within his community, and also the impact environmental racism in Newport News has had on his life. Turner recalls that for at least once a year between 2002 and 2018, sea level rising would impact residents' daily lives, including water lines coming up the third stair of his home during high tides when he lived in the Salters Creek area of Newport News. Turner’s interview contains descriptions of his mentors, teachers, and athletic coaches throughout his secondary education and college experience. Turner graduated from the Call Me MISTER (Men Instructing Students Toward Effective Role Models) program at Longwood University, in Farmville, Virginia. His work as a high school counselor at schools in Newport News and Mansassas empowered students both in athletics and in post-high school work and education. Within his numerous community advocacy roles, Turner has helped develop a Toxic Tour, highlighting sites in the southeast community of Newport News contributing to air pollution. This oral history also includes Turner’s reflections on Newport News interstate traffic, gun violence, and how it impacted his family and mental health.
Fifty years ago President Lyndon B. Johnson envisioned a Great Society, an America free from poverty and racial injustice and full of equality of opportunity and social mobility for all. Many legislative planks of his Great society platform--civil and voting rights, educational opportunity, fair housing practices, urban planning, mass transit, and health care --represent what we today consider "social determinants of health." This Medical center hour with bioethicist Erika Blacksher reviews how Americans are faring today in relation to key aspirations of LBJ's Great Society, especially those that bear on health. Americans generally live shorter, less healthy lives than their counterparts in peer nations, and within the U.S. health varies dramatically among social and economic groups and from region to region. What ethical concerns are raised by significant health disparities? Are such disparities unjust, as many in public health assume? If so, what are our responsibilites, and what ethical limits might constrain our pursuit of a more equitable distribution of health?
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series and the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life
Even as the University of Virginia and other medical schools across the U.S. prepare to graduate a new wave of physicians, what will be these doctors' roles and responsibilities in a health care system increasingly stressed by social and political pressures, cultural challenges, and financial shortfalls? And what will be—what should be—expected of physicians and the medical profession in years to come, in their practice, in communities, in policy circles, in the public square? In this Medical Center Hour, Dr. Christine Cassel, a longtime leader in medicine and medical education, offers her perspectives on what should be expected of physicians and other health professionals in coming years--in their practice, in their communities, in government and policy circles, and in the public square.
Twenty-first century physicians and other clinicians who are caring for patients in an era of unlimited knowledge, rapid knowledge turnover, and ever-more-sophisticated artificial intelligence (Watson!) increasingly need new skills and strategies. Such practitioners need too a renewed capacity for compassion. In this Medical Center Hour, eminent physician leader Dr. Steven Wartman, 2019 recipient of UVA's Brodie Medical Education Award, maps this critical juncture and challenges educators and other health professional leaders to reimagine and reengineer how we prepare doctors and other health care practitioners.
The Brodie Medical Education Award Lecture
These are two recordings from 2022-09-07 made at the Bremo Enslaved Cemetery, Upper Bremo Farm, Fluvanna County, Virginia. The video includes two letters, one from Liberia to the former Bremo plantation written by Peyton Skipwith (1834) and the other coming from Lower Bremo former plantation to Liberia by Jack Creasy (1840). Both men were enslaved at the former Bremo plantations in the early 19th century. The Creasy letter is read by Horace Scruggs of the Fluvanna Historical Society and descendant of the Bremo enslaved. The Skipwith letter is read by Thomas Nynweph Gmawlue Jr, visiting student from Liberia participating in UVA Landscape Architecture class ALAR 8993 : Cultural Landscape Networks Across the Black Atlantic, lead by Professor Allison James. The readings were done as part of a collaborative field trip between ALAR 8993, ARH 5600 : 3D Cultural Heritage Informatics, lead Professor Will Rourk of the UVA Library and the Fluvanna Historical Society. Sources for the letter were provided by Tricia Johnson, executive director of the Fluvanna Historical Society. The source of the Creasy letter is from the Fluvanna Historical Society Bremo papers and the Skipwith letter is from UVA Library Special Collections.
