June Jackson Christmas, 99, who fought racism as a psychiatrist
June Jackson Christmas, a psychiatrist who broke barriers as a Black woman by heading 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 in a hospital of heart failure.
As a city commissioner, as chief of rehabilitation services at Harlem Hospital Center, and in her role overseeing the transition of the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare to a Democratic administration for President-elect Jimmy Carter, Ms. Christmas ardently advanced her professional agenda.
Her priorities included improving mental health services for older people, helping people cope with alcoholism, and assisting children ensnared in the bureaucracies of foster care and the legal system.
Ms. Christmas championed civil rights from an early age. She staged a sit-down strike at a segregated roller skating rink in Cambridge when she was 14, and she later broke ground as a Black woman in education, employment, and housing.
June Antoinette Jackson was born June 7, 1924, in Boston. Her mother, Lillian Annie (Riley) Jackson, was a homemaker who had worked at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston during World War II and as a state tax assessor. Her father, Mortimer Jackson, was a postal worker who fought for the advancement of Black workers in the union and civil service hierarchy.
She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology in 1945 from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where she was one of the first three women who identified as Black to graduate. She went on to receive a medical degree in psychiatry from the Boston University School of Medicine in 1949.
In 1953, she married Walter Christmas, a founder of the Harlem Writers Guild. 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 city mental health agency his mother once headed, died in 2021.
Ms. Christmas initially practiced privately, then worked as a psychiatrist for the Riverdale Children’s Association in New York from 1953 to 1965.
In 1964, she founded Harlem Rehabilitation Center, a Harlem Hospital program, which gained a national reputation for providing vocational training and psychiatric help to psychiatric hospital patients who had returned to their communities after being discharged.
In 1972, Ms. Christmas was appointed commissioner of the Department of Mental Health and Retardation Services by Mayor John Lindsay. She was reappointed in 1973 by Mayor Abraham Beame and again in 1978 by Mayor Edward Koch.
She was a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, a professor of behavioral science at the City University of New York School of Medicine, and resident professor of mental health policy at the Heller Graduate School of Social Welfare of Brandeis University.
In 1980, Ms. Christmas became the first Black female president of the American Public Health Association.
Reflecting on her career in 2020, Ms. Christmas concluded that “the barrier of racism is greater than being a woman.”
“When I was looking for an office in Manhattan in the 1960s, at least a third of the agents I spoke with on the telephone said they could guarantee me that there were no Blacks or Puerto Ricans in the building,” she added. “It was so hard to find a place to live that my husband and I wound up going to court, where we prevailed.”
Having been exposed to racial discrimination since childhood, Ms. Christmas said, she was imbued with a commitment to minimize prejudice. She became a psychiatrist, she recalled, because she believed that “maybe if I went into psychiatric medicine I could teach people not to be racist.”