Fueled by family, he grew up to become a force for Black health

Dr. Herman Taylor Jr.'s resume has many of the things you'd expect from a career spent in the loftiest reaches of the medical field: Ivy League degrees. Awards from his peers. His name on hundreds of studies in prestigious medical journals.

Taylor has touched lives around the world as a cardiologist and through projects such as the Jackson Heart Study, the largest single-site study of Black people's heart health ever undertaken. He spent Super Bowl weekend in New Orleans meeting with former NFL players and their families as part of his work with the Football Players Health Study at Harvard University.

And as an endowed professor and the director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Taylor also is leading efforts to rethink views on Black Americans' health by understanding not just the adversities they've faced but how they managed to overcome.

He embodies such strength himself. He credits his upbringing for getting him through an era of turmoil and for instilling a drive to help others. To understand how Taylor has accomplished so much, you have to understand where he came from.

Rooted in steel

Taylor grew up around Birmingham, Alabama, near the town of Bessemer. It was steelworking, coal- and iron ore-mining country. "All the men in my family were affiliated with that industry in one way or another," he said.

It also was strictly segregated. "In the earliest part of my life, there were still 'colored' and 'white' designated water fountains," Taylor said. "I remember seeing that in the supermarket."

By 1963, Birmingham was the epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King Jr. was locked up in the city jail. Children were attacked by police dogs, blasted with fire hoses and jailed during anti-segregation protests. Taylor was in fourth grade when four girls were killed in a blast at Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church.

"We had, essentially, terrorist bombings of Black homes," Taylor said. His family knew some of those who were attacked. "And as a child a few years younger than some of the kids who were actually jailed, it was disturbing to think that could happen – that a whole bunch of kids could be marched off to jail because they were protesting some of the conditions that were easy for anybody to see."

Things got personal. A rock was thrown through a picture window of his family's home. Taylor was detained by law enforcement as he and some friends left church in their Boy Scout uniforms.

He calls such experiences "a crucible" that helped forge him into "a little bit of a crusader."

"It was easy to see that there was a big need out there – that people had strong antipathies towards us and weird prejudices against us," he said.

Taylor acknowledges feeling "fully aware and frightened" about what was going on. But thanks to his family, he also felt safe.

The power of family

An only child, Taylor had "a very, very good family life. The extended family was incredible. I had six aunts and uncles on one side. I had eight on the other. And all those cousins, right? And that was your cushion, your buffer against a lot of the turbulence."

His mother, Earnestine, was a teacher, and his father, Herman Sr., a union leader. Taylor said they instilled in him the idea that "we're every bit as good as anybody you've ever known, and this is an important message for you to carry forth."

Taylor embraced that idea, and it manifested in success at school. He was one of about 20 Black students in an integrated Catholic high school of 300. That success helped Taylor and his Black classmates show their white classmates that they were academic equals. "We were just separated for some crazy reasons."

His work paid off when it was time to choose a college.

Taylor's father had wanted him to attend the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. "My dad had been insisting for a while that since, as he put it, we had to pry (Alabama Gov.) George Wallace out of the schoolhouse door to allow Black admission, that that was clearly where I needed to go."

But when the future doctor watched a broadcast where journalist Barbara Walters interviewed a young Black man who attended Princeton University and how impressed she was, Taylor decided that was where he wanted to be.

His grandmother had helped nudge him toward studying medicine. A summer research experience at Cornell Medical School later led him to focus not only on cardiology but also disparities.

Two important lessons from the Cornell experience stuck with Taylor. First, "one-on-one care was critically absent for vast numbers of African Americans and other poor people in the United States," he said. But to him, "it was also very, very clear that one-on-one interactions were not going to solve the problem. Ultimately, he realized, "we had to take action at a higher level."

It's another decision that had roots in his family life.

Seeing the bigger community

Taylor saw his mother as "utterly devoted to the students and in their progress," he said. Many of his father's colleagues dealt with health issues related to work. His father testified about work conditions the men had endured, and the Taylor home became a place where workers, many of them illiterate, could get help filling out forms to receive money from legal settlements. "Sometimes, the front room of the house would be crowded with men waiting to see him."

The lesson Taylor took from his parents' examples was "this idea that part of the rent you pay for living here is service," he said. "And looking at health disparities, when I became aware of the magnitude and the tragedy of them," became his focus.

He was able to take action after graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1980. As part of the National Health Service Corps, he was assigned to Miami's Liberty City neighborhood, a historically Black area that was also home to people from the Caribbean. Taylor worked not only on providing medical care but also on promoting voter registration.

"It is a part of securing your health to have a voice," he said, because voting affects health in many ways, including "how good your sanitation is, or where they're burning trash, or where the highways go."

Years later, he'd bring a similarly broad perspective to the project he's best known for: the Jackson Heart Study, for which he became founding director in 1998.

The path to Jackson

Before he was named to that position, Taylor was working as a cardiologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which is where he met the "love of his life," Dr. Jasmine Taylor, who is now an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Morehouse School of Medicine.

She recalls the discussions about whether he should take the Jackson position. In Birmingham, she said, he could have helped people while maintaining a potentially lucrative private cardiology practice. In reasoning out his decision, she said he told her, "'Yes, that would make a difference – one patient at a time.'" But he also told her, "'I really want to look at this idea of creating the science that helps a lot of people all at once.'"

He's a man of science who's also driven by faith, Jasmine said. "He believes, and I agree with him, that we are here to do good things for others."

Under Taylor's leadership, the Jackson Heart Study grew to include more than 5,300 participants who live in and around Jackson, Mississippi. It has led to important findings related to the genetics of heart disease, links between discrimination and high blood pressure, the significance of social factors in heart health and more.

From a research standpoint, by focusing on a Black population, the study provides valuable data on a group of people ignored in earlier cardiovascular research, such as the famous Framingham Heart Study, where more than 98% of the participants were white. "I'm very proud of what we created in terms of the repository of critical information on Black health," Taylor said.

And in the same way the Framingham study benefited more than just the people it studied, he said, the Jackson data has the potential to help all people.

But the study wasn't just an observation, Taylor said. It was a "transgenerational intervention" to build community and promote health. The study ended up connecting not only researchers and participants but also churches, government entities, nonprofit groups and multiple educational institutions.

And it has done more than just record participants' health data. It has worked to support Black health care professionals, because diversity among physicians and researchers can directly benefit Black people's health. To make it work, Taylor and others had to find a way to build trust among people taking part, some of whom had been maltreated by a racist medical system in the past.

Taylor said he's also proud of how the study "helped stimulate a higher level of health activism in the community. The real secret sauce of the Jackson success is the community," the people who enrolled as well as their children, who see the study as "a positive element in the community life, and sometimes an inspiration to do better."

Near the end of his 15 years in Jackson, Taylor said, the Football Players Health Study at Harvard called on him because they, too, needed to build "the same spirit of community involvement" into their effort. Football players, he said, had a lot of the same concerns of privacy and trust that people around Jackson had. Since its launch in 2014, the Harvard study has had several significant findings about former players' risks for heart and brain health.

How he does it

Taylor builds trust and a spirit of community, in part, by listening for "unexpected sources of genius," he said.

"By unexpected, I mean it doesn't necessarily come from the individuals with all the initials behind their names, or the most senior, or the ones with perfect grammar and elocution," he said. "I have been humbled by insights coming from students, elderly patients in hospital beds, people who just showed up at my office door with a complaint, and others.

"There's so much power in the collective," Taylor said. If he's the smartest guy in the room, "then I am clearly in the wrong room – it's not big enough."

It's another skill he learned from his parents, who taught him to lead with trust and honesty while also being "wise in the ways of the world," he said.

"My father would give you his last dime if he thought you needed it more than he did, but he was also stern in the face of unfairness," Taylor said. "Mom could be as sweet as Southern tea but was savvy and knew how to get things done."

His wife has seen him put those skills to work. They've been married since 1991, raised three children together and have collaborated professionally.

Jasmine Taylor has watched him in meetings. "He doesn't speak first," she said. "He'll let everyone say what they need to say. He listens, he takes it in, and then he speaks." He doesn't act as if he has all the answers. "He doesn't operate in a hierarchy, and I think that's how he's able to get so much done, because I think people feel safe that they can really put their ideas out there, and then they do great things together."

Dr. Ernest Carter, director of health research and innovation at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, also has spent years seeing Taylor's gifts in action.

Carter, who also is an assistant professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, has been friends with Taylor since they were roommates at Harvard Medical School in 1976. Taylor, he said, has not only the intellect necessary to run a huge study like the one in Jackson but the charisma as well.

"Herman has a presence when he talks," Carter said. He's full of humor. He knows how to navigate political situations and how to relate to different people.

Carter said those abilities are rooted in Taylor's experiences growing up.

"It was this incredible sense of community," said Carter, who grew up in a similar small-town environment in Tennessee, "as if everybody was your mother and father." People would come over to your house, visit with the family, want to know how you were doing and be interested in what you wanted to do in life.

"And that starts to drive you into whatever you're going to do," Carter said. And when you step out into the broader world, "you translate your sense of community to everybody. And then you try to figure out, 'How do we help the entire world?'"

It's a form of resilience, Carter said.

Resilience is not exclusive to Black people, he emphasized, and not every Black person finds a way to overcome. But resilience explains how people can rise above oppressive situations such as those he and Herman grew up in.

"That's what Herman and I both know," Carter said. "We both know that if we want to improve health outcomes, we've got to get people to become resilient. And becoming resilient means that they need to understand more about how to keep themselves healthy."

Carter said that resilience is a key part of his friend's personal success story. It's founded, he said, in family and community of the past, but also in what Herman has built now – what Carter calls a "circle of love" of family and friends. "I mean, that's what keeps everybody resilient – not just Black people."

Resilience is also a main focus of Taylor's current work.

Understanding resilience

Taylor has been at Morehouse since 2014. "One of the first things I wanted to do had to do with looking at the notion of Black resilience," he said.

Ask an audience about the general state of Black health, he said, and "the honest answer that you get back is, 'It's bad.'"

But there is another side to that story, he said, "the side of Black health, Black longevity, Black thriving happening despite the tremendous adversities that African Americans as a people have faced for a very long time."

It is, he said, "a truly amazing story, and perhaps if we look at it a slightly different way, the most scientifically intriguing side of Black health is the uplifting message for Black people that, despite it all, people have overcome."

That's "a very heroic story in many instances," he said. Understanding its biological and other underpinnings "could lead not only to a better, clearer and balanced understanding of the Black experience," but to new approaches to treatment for everybody.

Jasmine, who has worked with her husband on understanding resilience, said that part of his own resilience is how he's developed ways to make a difference. "The whole idea of studying resilience is because he also wants to foster agency in a people that is constantly told that something's wrong."

Resilience is something Taylor said he aspires to. To him, it involves trying to balance professional success while sustaining "health, happiness and your humanity."

"There is a form of 'resilience' that can look good on the outside, but all the while you're paying a price inside – like the legendary John Henry, who overcame the tremendous challenge of outracing a steam-powered steel-driving machine but died on the spot after overcoming the obstacle. Black people, and others, too often overcome adversity but are casualties of the struggle in terms of health, happiness and joy."

But he sees the study of resilience as a way to help everybody.

"Black resilience is human resilience," Taylor said, and understanding their methods of success, "despite all of that adversity, could very well lead to some new universal truths."