“Mom and Tots”: Nursing and the Politics of Community Health in 1960s’ Detroit

abstract: In 1965, a public health nurse established a community-based maternal and child health center in a predominantly low-income Black neighborhood in Detroit. Funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity and administered by the Visiting Nurses Association, the Mom and Tots Neighborhood Center was staffed by community members and established to serve the needs of the community as identified by the community. This article analyzes the different meanings the center held for the women who staffed the center, the clinicians who provided care, and the community members it served during the turbulent years of the late 1960s. It highlights the entangled politics of community health provision, whereby efforts to increase health services to low-income Black women confronted the race, gender, and class biases of clinicians, administrators, and politicians. These politics reflect the contested status of community health centers and the value placed on the health of the patients they served.