June Jackson Christmas, a psychiatrist who broke barriers as a black woman as head of New York City’s Department of Mental Health and Delay Services under three mayors, died Sunday in the Bronx. It was 99.
Her daughter, Rachel Christmas Derrick, said she died at a hospital of heart failure.
As a city commissioner, as head 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, Dr. agenda.
Her priorities included improving mental health services for the elderly, helping people cope with alcoholism, and helping children caught up in the bureaucracy of foster care and the legal system. He also tried to ease the transition of patients from warehouse in state mental hospitals to independent living.
Dr. Christmas publicly championed civil rights from a young age. She staged a sit-in at a segregated skating rink in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she was 14, and later broke ground as a black woman in education, employment and housing.
June Antoinette Jackson was born on 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 tax collector. Her father, Mortimer Jackson, was a postal worker who fought for the advancement of black workers in the union hierarchy and public service.
At school, June and other black students were never asked to identify their origins on I Am An American Day — something she never questioned, she said in a 2016 interview with StoryCorps by her son Vincent, because “I think it was the reality of how we just accepted racism.”
Her father, she recalled in the same interview, “always got the highest marks, often perfect, and was never offered the position.”
One year, she said, she and a classmate who was also black sold more Girl Scout cookies than anyone else in their troop, but the wife of the minister who led the troop informed her that she couldn’t claim her award in another city because “These camps have never really taken any Negroes.”
Her father’s advice? “Being twice as good as everyone else,” she recalls.
But, he added, “it seems to me that I’ve often been in places where if you wanted to make life better for yourself, you had to work to make life better for everybody.”
She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology in 1945 from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she was one of the first three women identified as Black to graduate. He received his MD in psychiatry from Boston University School of Medicine in 1949.
She did her internship at Queens General Hospital and her residency at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. He received a certificate in psychoanalysis from the William Alanson White Institute, also in Manhattan.
In 1953, she married Walter Christmas, founder of the Harlem Writers Guild, who managed publicity for a number of companies and organizations and at one time was director of public relations for the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New York. 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’s mental health service, which his mother once headed, died in 2021.
Dr. Christmas first practiced in private, then worked as a psychiatrist for the Riverdale Children’s Association in New York from 1953 to 1965.
In 1964 he founded the Harlem Rehabilitation Center, a program of Harlem Hospital, which gained a national reputation for providing vocational training and psychiatric assistance to psychiatric hospital patients who had returned to their communities after discharge. From 1964 to 1972, she was also the principal investigator on research programs for the National Institute of Mental Health.
In 1972, after serving briefly as deputy commissioner, Dr. Christmas was appointed commissioner of the Department of Mental Health and Retardation Services by Mayor John V. Lindsay. He was reappointed in 1973 by Mayor Abraham D. Beame (he took a two-month leave to lead Jimmy Carter’s 12-member transition team) and again in 1978 by Mayor Edward I. Koch.
She was a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, a professor of behavioral science at New York University School of Medicine, and a professor of mental health policy at the Heller Graduate School of Social Welfare at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.
In 1980, Dr. Christmas became the first black woman president of the American Public Health Association. She also founded the Urban Issues Group, a research institute, and served as its executive director from 1993 to 2000.
Reflecting on her career in 2020, Dr. Christmas concluded that “the barrier of racism is greater than being a woman.”
“I interviewed for a medical residency and the man interviewing me said he was concerned that I, as an African-American woman, would be too sexually stimulating for male patients,” she said. The Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation.
“When I was looking for an office in Manhattan in the 1960s, at least a third of the agents I spoke to on the phone said they could guarantee me there were no blacks or Puerto Ricans in the building,” he added. “It was so difficult to find a place to live that my husband and I ended up going to court, where we won.”
Having been exposed to racial discrimination since childhood, Dr. Christmas, was imbued with a commitment to minimize prejudice. He became a psychiatrist, he recalls, because he thought “maybe if I went into psychiatry I could teach people not to be racist.”
Her strategy was individualistic, she said, invoking a proverb — “Each man, teach one” — that had its roots in American slavery when blacks were denied education and literacy was passed down from one person to another.