Family Tragedy Leads Marion Woman to Raise Health Awareness Among Blacks

If your trying to leave Betty Johnson’s ranch home on Marion’s north side, don’t be alarmed if you can’t unlock the door.

She’s not trying to trap you.

The lock was fudged to trick her late mother, stricken with Alzheimer's, from leaving in the middle of the night.

It was the most heart-breaking period of her life. She lost her baby sister to lung cancer, a best friend to breast cancer and her mother. Rather than give in to her profound sadness, this dark period of her life dovetailed with heightened efforts to bring down the alarming numbers of blacks in the area that struggle, disproportionally, with the same illnesses that devastated her family.

"After my baby sister died I went in the bed and covered my head under my pillows," she said. "I wanted to escape."

Johnson founded the first Iowa chapter of Body and Soul, a program designed to help educate Linn County’s African-American community on nutrition, health-care and provide free screenings for ailments like HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, heart disease and prostate cancer, through a network of volunteers in predominantly black churches.

Sara Comstock, the executive director of the Iowa Cancer Consortium, who brought the idea of the program to Johnson around five years ago, said the rate of these afflictions among African-Americans is striking.

According to HealthReform.gov, blacks are seven times more likely to contract HIV than whites, 15 percent more likely to be obese and 19 percent more likely to have a chronic illness when compared to the U.S. population.

But the disproportion is not due to cultural, racial or genetic factors. Comstock said the biggest factor effecting disease rates was education. She explained that when studies controlled for education, the rates of infection and mortality in these afflictions were nearly equal for blacks and whites.

So how did Johnson make a difference in her community, given these stark challenges?

She used her network of like-minded friends and colleagues to hit the streets of the Cedar Rapids Metropolitan area.

"I could be in Des Moines in a meeting and everybody will know her," Comstock said, referring to Johnson’s extensive work in African-American health issues before Body and Soul. "She is so well thought of. To be known across the state for your activity, that is pretty phenomenal."

In order to spread awareness in the Body and Soul program, she and a group of volunteers would approach African-Americans on the street, offering them free meals, groceries and chronic health disease screening to entice them to improve their health.

She also spread educational programs on nutrition to black churches all across the area and invited those struggling with disease and poverty into her home, in deeply personal, tear jerking conversations that could last deep into the night.

"That was my way of fighting back," she said. 

As to what motivates Johnson to work so tirelessly on these issues, friend and colleague Paulette Clark said her tragic past, religious background and extreme compassion have driven her to succeed.

"She’s a loving, caring person," she said. "She wants to know who has a problem and how to help them."

While there is no way yet to measure the impact she has had on the health of Linn County African-Americans, the reverence that the community feels for her is evidence that she’s doing something right.

Recently, Johnson's was awarded the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award, for her working the Body and Soul program.

But her work is not over. She’s said she’s almost lost her husband to cardiovascular disease eight times and that her work with the Body and Soul program is nowhere near over.

"My role is to initiate," she said. "If someone brings something like (Body and Soul) to me, I want to empower other people to do that and just continue to wave the baton."