CDPH Honors Carol McGruder

The California Department of Public Health honors one individual each year with the Beverlee A. Myers Award for Excellence in Public Health, the highest, most prestigious award presented by the department to public health professionals. The recipient this year is Carol McGruder, project director for AMPLIFY! (African American Statewide Coordinating Center) and founding member and Co-Chairperson of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council (AATCLC).

She is so deserving of this award, which in many respects is a lifetime achievement award for her tireless activism locally in San Francisco, throughout California, and the nation. Carol is a seasoned veteran of California’s tobacco control movement, beginning her tobacco control career in 1994. Her work with AATCLC works at the intersection of public health policy and social injustice. Carol McGruder and the members of the AATCLC continue to fight resolutely against the decades of racialized tobacco industry targeting of the Black community and the resulting 45,000 Black lives lost each year from tobacco related diseases.

Carol has been honored over the years for her public health activism, including in 2010 when she was honored with the Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Engagement Award for her tobacco control work in San Francisco; in 2007 when she was named the American Legacy Foundation national honoree for Community Activist of the Year, and her other awards include the prestigious Jefferson Award for community activism in tobacco control and recognition by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Berkeley City Council, and American Lung Association for her leadership in tobacco control and community activism. She has also served two terms as NAACP Branch President for Berkeley, California.

Carol’s work centered recently on SB 793, the groundbreaking legislation to ban most flavored tobacco products, including menthol. Prior to the law’s passage, and during the period of uncertainty when the tobacco industry moved the law to a referendum, Carol was prolific and dogmatic in educating the public and policy makers about the harms caused by flavored tobacco products, the insidious marketing strategies by the tobacco industry to addict each generation, and about the catastrophic story of menthol tobacco products. A sampling of her champion efforts recently includes multiple media interviews, podcasts, and even testifying before the Congress House Oversight Committee: Examining JUUL’s Role in the Youth Nicotine Epidemic.

In the history of tobacco control in California, critical mass has always been the way to stimulate significant and lasting change in benefit of population health. With respect to menthol products, the path to social justice is much longer and is impeded by the long, ugly history of racism. While it was critical mass that finally ended the use of menthol products in California to target, addict, and kill African Americans, Carol McGruder was, and is, front and center leading the way. Please join me in congratulating Carol on this well-deserved award.

Congratulations Carol!