The director of the NAACP Center for Health Equity will give the address at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Black History Month Celebration on Feb. 5.
The Elm is featuring stories on the keynote speaker and 2026 MLK Leadership Award winners leading up to UMB’s Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Black History Month celebration on Feb. 5.
Chris T. Pernell, MD, MPH, FACPM, knows firsthand the harrowing experience of having a chronic health condition and being uninsured.
After Pernell, a public health physician who is known as “Dr. Chris,” had completed her medical degree, she began to experience serious symptoms that prevented her from working. In 2004, she was forced to leave her surgery internship at UCLA, becoming unemployed and uninsured, and moved in with her parents. She was diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which can cause rapid heart rate, dizziness, fatigue, and fainting — a pre-existing condition that before the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed in 2010 made it difficult for her to obtain insurance.
“When you are uninsured, it wreaks a terror in your life, and you are faced with constant financial trade-offs,” she said. “I had the blessing of my family. I had access to food, I had access to shelter, I felt safe. But I did not have access to funds to take care of myself, and I delayed care.”
During this time, she fainted frequently and on one occasion, she fell off a stage. Though she was injured, she pleaded not to be taken to a hospital until a friend pointed out that she most likely had a concussion.
“I ultimately relented,” she said. “But it was painful. It was agony, the thought of having thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of medical bills that I would not have a way to pay for.”
Dr. Chris carries this experience with her in her role as the director of the NAACP Center for Health Equity, where she provides strategic leadership on public health and community health initiatives with a focus on health equity and racial justice.
The physician leader and social change agent will be the keynote speaker at the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s (UMB) Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Black History Month Celebration on Feb. 5, giving an address titled “The Clarion Call for Health Justice: No Retreat, No Surrender” in which she will connect the current state of the U.S. health care landscape with Dr. King’s legacy.
“We find ourselves in precarious times in this country as it relates to public health, health care, and health equity,” Dr. Chris said. “There is an onslaught of misinformation and disinformation that’s undermining public health systems. There is a willful ignorance and oftentimes systemic neglect around the need for health equity and elevating the human experience for all persons, and that imperils the health of the nation as a whole.”
She said Dr. King frequently spoke to the whole person and made connections between economic justice and health equity.
“It is fitting to reach back and pick up some of the intensity of what he spoke of and hurl us back to the present day,” she said. “We’re definitely faced with a harsh pendulum swing where access is threatened, where social and cultural fluency around issues of public health is being disregarded, and where public health science is being ridiculed.”
She referred to vaccine hesitancy, the ACA subsidies that expired at the end of 2025 that will make health care unattainable for many Americans, and the overall undermining of the public health structure during the first year of the Trump administration.
“When I hear people in government or political positions question routine public health science, I’m angered, I’m frustrated, I’m vigilant, and it invokes within me the need to continue to demand accountability of power,” she said. “It is an example of policy violence when administrations enact policies that will harm.”
Role with the NAACP
Dr. Chris, who has been with the NAACP for about two years, recently led a large-scale public health initiative with the United States’ oldest civil rights organization.
Through a national survey, face-to-face engagement, and focus groups, the ACE Your Health Project has collected nearly 23,000 responses from community members nationwide about their health priorities, needs, and assets, with a focus on 15 areas across the United States. It examined, for example, the resources respondents have access to that contribute to their well-being as well as the lack of resources that are impeding their health.
“We will be able to use this information to offer insights around how to solve health disparities and to offer insights on the understanding of governance systems,” she said, adding that the information will help to determine where and how to advocate for change.
The work has also looked at emerging technologies, which led to a partnership between the NAACP and global biopharma company Sanofi to publish a health artificial intelligence (AI) white paper.
The news release about the paper points out that while AI holds promise for improving patient outcomes, predicting disease, and personalizing treatment, “these technologies could automate and exacerbate longstanding socioeconomic and racial disparities” if used without intentional design and governance.
“It looks at how AI should be designed, developed, and deployed in a way that is ethically centered and focused on equity,” Dr. Chris said. “We’re very hopeful that this white paper will be a primer to jumpstart an AI revolution in a different way that’s focused on equity and ethics.”
COVID-19 Pandemic
Dr. Chris, who also is the founder of The Esther Group, a public health consulting and health equity strategy firm; a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School; and a fellow and regent-at-large for the American College of Preventive Medicine, served as the first chief strategic integration and health equity officer at University Hospital in Newark, N.J., before assuming her role at the NAACP. She was working there, overseeing a portfolio that included population health, strategic planning, community affairs, and the human experience, when the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020 with devastating effects to her personally: Her father died of COVID at a New Jersey hospital in April 2020.
“It was a traumatic experience for those of us who were directly impacted, as well as for those of us who were providing care,” said Dr. Chris, who volunteered for the COVID vaccine trial.
She said one of her greatest achievements has been the ability to serve her community and the nation during the pandemic as a clear and consistent voice for public health, health equity, and racial justice.
“People would reach out to me from everywhere and say, ‘Please keep speaking. Please keep telling the stories that you’re telling. Keep speaking for us.’ ”
Dr. King’s Influence
Dr. Chris’ parents had lived in the Jim Crow South before moving to New Jersey, where she was raised. Her father marched on Washington with Dr. King and met Malcolm X.
Her parents knew “how Jim Crow separated them from the fullness of opportunity, and how a leader like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was not just a catalyst; he was a call to arms for a better way forward,” she said. “They reared me in that.”
“As I developed into a whole person, I totally understood my purpose, my family’s history, my lived experiences, and the broader history of Black and African American communities,” she said. “Travailing for justice has been implicated in my practice.”
Dr. Chris, who is also a faith leader in the assembly BET HaSHEM YHWH Worldwide Ministries, said several of King’s speeches and writings have influenced her including “I Have Been to the Mountaintop,” his last speech before his assassination in 1968.
“The ability of a preacher to be both a prophet of what is to come and an advocate to speak for how we ought to live has always resonated with me,” she said.
She said she admires UMB’s actions to honor Dr. King’s legacy and advocate for health equity as diversity, equity, and inclusion has been criticized over the past year.
“I have a firm appreciation for the fact that there still is a sacred space to have a conversation in observance of a great soul like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and to continue to talk about issues of health equity, racial justice, equity, and inclusion at a time where it is being outlawed or censured or frowned upon,” she said.