The barriers to healthcare I think African Americans faced in the 1940s/1950s are

American medicine is plagued by deep-rooted racism, which manifests in the unethical and biased treatment of Black people within the medical system. Large-scale events such as the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which doctors took advantage of uneducated Black Southerners and used their bodies to study the progression of syphilis, have shaped distrust of medicine among members of Black communities. The Tuskegee study is not an isolated incident: another example of racism within medicine are the Mississippi Appendectomies, hysterectomies performed on Black women without their knowledge or consent to stop them from reproducing. As public knowledge of these atrocities and others swept across America, particularly within the Black community, many Black people grew distrustful of doctors and medicine. Stories like Henrietta’s, where her cells were taken without her knowledge or that of her family’s, were widespread and compounded the issue. The result is people like Henrietta’s husband Day refusing medical treatment.