Andre Braugher Had A Wonderful Life. But He Started Dying In High School

By Darryl L. Fortson, MD

Andre Braugher (top row, left ) and the author (2nd row from top, far right) as pictured in the St. Ignatius 1980 yearbook photo of that year's National Achievement Semi-Finalists.

  Andre Braugher was my high school classmate – St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago - Class of 1980.  We were acquaintances, not friends. I did not know a lot about the acclaimed film and television actor, but one of the things I do remember is that Andre smoked.

  A Marlboro cigarette executive was once said to have said of cigarettes, "we don’t smoke that crap, we sell it.  Cigarettes are for the young, the poor, the Black, and the stupid.”

  In that regard, Andre Braugher was certainly two out of four.  He was Black and he was young when he started smoking. I never got the impression he was “poor,” but he certainly lived among them. Our 1977 school phonebook lists Andre’s address in high school as being in the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side, near Cicero and Madison.  According to 2021 Chicago Department of Health report, entitled “The State Of Health For Blacks In Chicago,”  Austin is designated as a "high hardship" economic area, as are nearly all the predominantly black communities in Chicago that have a lower-than-average income (less than $20,901 per year). In these areas, Black people live as much as 9.2 years shorter than their White neighborhood counterparts in that same city.

  But Andre was not "stupid."  He was a Stanford grad who was among the best students in our class. Prior to his passing, he was arguably the most recognizable living St. Ignatius graduate on Earth. He no doubt experienced wealth, having starred in multiple television and film productions with multiple Emmy awards and nominations.  And yet the lung cancer that felled him at 61 years of age started killing him in his youth - a situation that even his cessation of smoking and his fame could not reverse.  A man like Andre Braugher could and did escape a largely impoverished community, but not the consequences of toxins being marketed in it for his consumption.

  Of course, all Black folk ain’t poor, all White folks ain’t rich, and we all are going to die eventually. According to our class reunion tally, of the 217 men and women that graduated in Andre’s and my class, there have been 26 deaths. Of these 26 students, fifteen were among White and non-Black men. Eleven were Black men. The 1980 yearbook unofficially has pictures of 213 people in our class - 144 white students, 52 Black ones (two are women), and 17 Hispanics. This means that around 10.42% of my White classmates have passed, largely growing up in the same city and attending the same high school as a Black cohort of classmates whose mortality rate of 21.15% is over 2.3 times higher in the same period of time. In other words, a fifth of our black classmates have died three years short of the potential retirement age of 65, with not a dime of the Social Security they paid into collected.

  My Black classmates, in the main, were not impoverished Black men and women, nor were they lacking in achievement academically. The valedictorian and salutatorian of our class are both Black men. The above picture is one of future physicians, software engineers, state officials, physician executives, attorneys, real estate executives, businessmen, and one hell of an actor. Our parents taught school, owned businesses, and worked at IBM. They were nurses, salesmen, and postal and civilian police department employees – solidly middle-class folk. Yet still, their children are dying, and dying faster.

  It makes no sense. But then again, it does. Cigarettes are for the young, the poor, the Black – and Andre Braugher. I didn’t smoke, but my mother did, and she was dead from heart disease at age 47, a little more than two years after Andre and I were in the above photo together. According to the Office of Minority Health of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Black Americans have the highest mortality rate of any racial and ethnic group for all cancers combined and for most major cancers and higher death rates for all major causes of death. Racist marketing, like racism writ large, is killing Black people – and in a bit of a hurry.

  This manifestation of racism helped rob Andre of his life, but we were all robbed of something special – a “Black Sir Laurence Olivier” of sorts - in part, by a system of injustice that was indifferent to leading citizens worldwide, but especially those of color, to a premature demise.  Remember this as you observe toxic substances such as tobacco and unhealthy food being marketed and sold around you - killing us all, but killing Black folks ever so much faster.