![]() (In 1981, President Ronald Reagan repealed the act.) Mildred Mitchell-Bateman Hospital in Huntington, West Virginia is named in her honor. In 1980, as one of four psychiatrists on President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on Mental Health, she was crucial to passing the Mental Health Systems Act, landmark federal legislation that poured money into local mental health agencies. In 1973, she became the first Black woman Vice President of the American Psychiatric Association. ![]() “No one has a right to decide that patients aren’t going to get any better,” she once said. Her most famous program was likely “Breaking the Disability Cycle,” which assured patients previously declared “untreatable” that there was hope, and they should not be abandoned. She spent her career advocating for the mentally ill, arguing that patients should be placed at facilities close to their families and that communities needed more mental health resources. ![]() In 1962, she was named the states’ mental health commissioner. Born in Illinois, Mitchell-Bateman was hired as a staff physician in 1946 at Lakin State Hospital, West Virginia’s Black hospital for the mentally ill. The first Black woman to hold high-ranking office in West Virginia, Mildred Mitchell-Bateman was a longtime mental health advocate. Photo: Associated Press, The Charleston Daily Mail, Illustration: USA TODAY Network Stateside, Buck became a vocal advocate for the rights of women and minority groups and wrote extensively about Chinese and Asian cultures. She wrote the novel "Satan Never Sleeps" to describe Communist tyranny in China in 1962. Her repeated attempts to return to China were denied. long-term in 1935.īuck’s rich descriptions of peasant life in China earned her a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938, the first-ever awarded to an American woman.ĭuring the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Buck was labeled a cultural imperialist for her writing on Chinese village life. She lived in China for decades, breaking to earn an undergraduate degree in Virginia and returning to the U.S. The daughter of missionaries, Buck was raised in Zhenjiang, China, from the age of 5 months. Her book "The Good Earth" was America’s bestselling fiction title in 19 and won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize. Pearl Sydenstricker Buck is a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who hails from Hillsboro. Photo: Associated Press, Illustration: USA TODAY Network
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