A decade later, he was appointed head of the N.C. State Board of Health, the state’s top public health agency and predecessor of the modern Department of Health and Human Services.

He played an instrumental role in 1936 helping form the University of North Carolina’s School of Public Health, which remains one of the nation’s leaders in public health education.

With Reynolds at the helm, the Board of Health expanded health education in schools and communities and broadened access to health care among its poorest and most vulnerable citizens. During his tenure, public health officials focused on decreasing the rate of infant mortality, improving child and maternal health, and battling the spread of venereal disease.

Among Reynolds’s notable reforms was expansion of the number of Black professionals employed by the Board of Health. Acutely aware of the need to improve health education and access to care among the state’s Black population, in 1936, with financial support from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, Reynolds hired Walter J. Hughes, Sr., the first African American physician employed full time by a local or state public health department in the United States. Hughes worked closely with the N.C. School Health Coordinating Service and played an instrumental role in community outreach.
The photo is emblematic of Reynold’s commitment to improving the health of all North Carolinians.

Pictured seated and standing with Reynolds are several employees of the Venereal Disease Education Institute who are joined by unidentified African American doctors, educators, or perhaps insurance executives at a program in Raleigh that may have been planned to coincide with the annual meeting of the North Carolina Public Health Association, November 1, 1944.

Headed by Capus Waynick, standing fourth from right, the institute was a joint effort between the state and the U.S. Public Health Service and received funding from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.

Alarmed by the rapid increase of cases of venereal disease, particularly syphilis, in the decade before the outbreak of World War II, the need to sustain wartime productivity and protect the health of draft eligible males amplified the public health threat.

The institute became a model public health program and was a successful example of collaboration between philanthropists and government. It employed artists, writers, education specialists, and other clerical staff who created posters, pamphlets, graphs, and comic books—over 7.5 million in FY 1944-1945 alone--which it distributed freely across the state, and sold all over the country and across several continents.

You can see a small sample of its work alongside other photographs documenting North Carolina’s public health history at https://www.flickr.com/.../north.../albums/72157716915474656

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Source Photo- N_53_15_5272 Photo from the Albert Barden Collection

For more information about Reynolds and the response to Asheville’s 1918 influenza crisis, see https://mountainx.com/.../asheville-archives-how-local.../ and https://mountainx.com/news/761485/

For a brief history of North Carolina’s public health efforts, see https://www.ncpedia.org/public-health See less