For much of the 20th century, as reflected by publications in the two leading journals in American sociology, the health of the black population has not been a central focus of the discipline. To illustrate, we searched the terms “race and health,” “health inequality and race,” “health inequality and ethnicity” and “health disparity” in the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) and the American Sociological Review (ASR) from the earliest dates available electronically (1895, AJS and 1934, ASR) to identify articles addressing racial/ethnic disparities in health. By the year 1989, only 18 relevant articles were identified (10 in AJS and 8 in ASR). However, there was considerably more recent interest in the topic. There were 14 articles published from 1990-2008 (six in AJS and eight in ASR). Although we argue that racial disparities in health were not a central focus of the top journals of the discipline, sociologists have made and continue to make seminal contributions to our understanding of racial disparities in health. Examples include Williams and Collins (1995) in the Annual Review of Sociology, Link and Phelan (1995) in
