June Jackson Christmas, pioneering psychiatrist, dies at age 99
June Jackson Christmas, a psychiatrist who broke barriers as a black woman by leading New York City’s Department of Mental Health and Retardation Services under three mayors, died Sunday in the Bronx. She was 99.
Her daughter, Rachel Christmas Derrick, said she died at a hospital of heart failure.
As a city commissioner, as director of rehabilitation services at Harlem Hospital Center, and in her role overseeing the transition of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to a Democratic administration for President-elect Jimmy Carter, Dr. agenda.
Her priorities included improving mental health care for the elderly, helping people cope with alcoholism and helping children caught in the bureaucracies of foster care and the legal system. She also tried to ease the transition of patients from a psychiatric institution to independent living.
Dr. Christmas publicly defended civil rights from an early age. She organized a sit-down strike at a segregated roller skating rink in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she was 14, and later broke new ground as a black woman in education, employment and housing.
June Antoinette Jackson was born on June 7, 1924 in Boston. Her mother, Lillian Annie (Riley) Jackson, was a homemaker who had worked at Boston’s Charlestown Navy Yard and as a state tax assessor during World War II. Her father, Mortimer Jackson, was a postal worker who fought for the advancement of black workers in the union and civil service hierarchy.
At school, June and other black students were never asked to identify their heritage on “I Am an American Day” — a slight she never questioned, she said in a 2016 interview for StoryCorps by her son Vincent, because “I think that was the reality of how we just accepted racism.”
Her father, she recalled in the same interview, “always got the highest score, often perfect, and was never offered the job.”
One year, she said, she and a classmate who was also Black sold more Girl Scout cookies than anyone in their troop, but the minister’s wife, who led the troop, told her she couldn’t put her prize in a another city could claim it because ‘Those camps never actually took any niggers.’
Her father’s advice? “Be twice as good as everyone else,” she recalled.
But, she added, “it seems to me that I’ve often been in places where if you wanted to make life better for yourself, you had to work to make life better for everyone.”
She received a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY in 1945, where she was one of the first three women to identify as black and graduate. She then received a medical degree in psychiatry from Boston University School of Medicine in 1949.
She completed her internship at Queens General Hospital and her residency at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. She received a certificate in psychoanalysis from the William Alanson White Institute, also in Manhattan.
In 1953, she married Walter Christmas, a founder of the Harlem Writers Guild, who handled publicity for a number of companies and organizations and at one point was public relations director for the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New York. He died in 2002.
In addition to their daughter, a travel writer, she is survived by their son Gordon, a photographer, and four grandchildren. Their son Vincent, who worked for the municipal mental health facility his mother once headed, died in 2021.
Dr. Christmas initially practiced privately, but then worked as a psychiatrist for the Riverdale Children’s Association in New York from 1953 to 1965.
In 1964, she founded the Harlem Rehabilitation Center, a Harlem Hospital program, which gained a national reputation for providing vocational training and psychiatric assistance to psychiatric hospital patients who had returned to their communities after discharge. From 1964 to 1972, she was also the principal investigator of research projects for the National Institute of Mental Health.
In 1972, after serving a brief period as Deputy Commissioner, Dr. Christmas appointed commissioner of the Department of Mental Health and Retardation Services by Mayor John V. Lindsay. She was reappointed in 1973 by Mayor Abraham D. Beame (she took a two-month leave of absence to lead Jimmy Carter’s 12-member transition team) and again in 1978 by Mayor Edward I. Koch.
She was a clinical professor of psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, a professor of behavioral sciences at the City University of New York School of Medicine, and a professor of mental health policy at the Heller Graduate School of Social Welfare at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.
In 1980, Dr. Christmas the first black female president of the American Public Health Association. She also founded the Urban Issues Group, a research institute, and served as executive director from 1993 to 2000.
Looking back on her career in 2020, Dr. Christmas that “the barrier of racism is greater than being a woman.”
“I applied for a residency, and the man who interviewed me said he was concerned that, as an African-American woman, I would be too sexually stimulating for male patients,” she said. The Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation.
“When I was looking for an office in Manhattan in the 1960s, at least a third of the agents I spoke to on the phone said they could guarantee me there were no blacks or Puerto Ricans in the building,” she added to it. “It was so difficult to find a place to live that my husband and I eventually went to court, where we prevailed.”
Having been exposed to racial discrimination since childhood, Dr. Christmas, she was imbued with a commitment to minimizing prejudice. She became a psychiatrist, she recalled, because she believed that “if I went into psychiatric medicine, maybe I could teach people not to be racist.”
Her strategy was individualistic, she said, invoking a proverb — “Each one, teach one” — that was rooted in American slavery when black people were denied an education and literacy was passed from one person to another.