Howard Pinderhughes Inspires Community Healing in Last Lecture

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In Martin Luther King Jr.’s last book published before his assassination, he reflected on the civil rights movement and asked, “Where do we go from here? Chaos or community?”

That same question resonates today, said Howard Pinderhughes, PhD, during the 2017 UCSF Last Lecture, in which he highlighted the importance of community and social justice in tackling health care challenges.

Now in its sixth year, the UCSF Last Lecture has become an annual tradition in which a UCSF faculty member is nominated and selected by students to answer the question: “If you had but one lecture to give, what would you say?”

Like many who have delivered Last Lectures at UCSF, Pinderhughes outlined the trajectory of his own life and career – he is associate professor and chair of social and behavioral sciences in the School of Nursing – but traced the lines of influence back in time, to his slave ancestors, and outwards, to the communities around the world that have shaped him, from the middle-class Boston neighborhood in which he grew up, to Denmark, Cuba and the East Bay.

His talk covered the experiences that have led to his work studying the effects of violence on youth and their communities. And he urged the students in attendance to dream big and to think beyond healing individuals to transforming institutions in order to heal communities.

Informed by History

For Pinderhughes, seeing the historical records that listed his great-grandmother, who was a slave, along with cattle as property, made slavery less of an abstraction. “When you find your ancestors, the intergenerational trauma becomes real,” he said.

He also recalled how his grandfather Joe, who had dementia in his later years, seemed to say, repeatedly, “It’s a shame to leave a man without a coat.” It wasn’t until later that he understood his grandpa was saying, “It’s a shame to ...

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