UCSF

Violence epidemiology emerged as a federal public health science in the United States not from a laboratory or a policy agenda, but from the deaths of Black children in Atlanta, Georgia, between 1979 and 1981. Southern Roots: The Atlanta Child Murders and the Origin of Violence Epidemiology reconstructs how the federal response to the Atlanta missing and murdered children crisis produced the founding methods, categories, and institutional infrastructure of a new scientific field, and at what cost to the communities whose suffering generated its data.Drawing on previously unexamined archival collections at the Atlanta University Center’s Robert W. Woodruff Library Archives Research Center; Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) investigative records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Epidemiologic Assistance (Epi-Aid) Report EPI-81-16-2 and its unpublished tables; and original oral history interviews conducted by the author in Atlanta in February 2025 with the physicians who designed the public health investigation, this dissertation advances a single, sustained argument: the institutions commissioned with the role to protect children allowed their deaths were transformed into the data on which a new science was built. The dissertation proceeds in four chapters. Chapter One recovers and centers the community knowledge produced by Black Atlanta before federal authorities arrived, demonstrating that the structural analysis later claimed by public health was first articulated by bereaved parents and community members. Chapter 2 examines the ATKID case files (the bureau’s designation for the Atlanta Child Murders Investigation) as a living archive, showing how the FBI's thorough and successful federal investigation produced the data infrastructure that the CDC drew on directly when constructing its own epidemiological database. Chapter 3 explores the transformation of the murders into an epidemiological problem through the case-control study, showing how its methodological choices encoded structural conditions as behavioral risk factors. Chapter 4 follows the peer-reviewed literature that formalized those choices into the settled knowledge of a new subfield.The analysis is informed by Dorothy Porter's concept of health citizenship, Michel Foucault's theory of biopower, and Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics, while building on Samuel K. Roberts Jr.'s critical history of public health in Black communities in the US. Together these interpretive frameworks reveal how violence epidemiology emerged through the transformation of Black children’s deaths into epidemiological evidence and how a field dedicated to preventing violence was founded upon the structures of anti-Black racial inequality it failed to confront.