by Dr. Ben Danielson

Odessa Brown, the namesake of a pediatric clinic in Seattle, would have had her birthday on April 30. She was born in 1920 and died in 1969, too young by any measure. She had leukemia, and I think it’s fair to add that racism accelerated her passing. It is just as true today as it was in the 1960s: Black women and men are more likely to have more advanced cancers at diagnosis and are more likely to die from them than white Americans with similar cancers.