Dr. Michael A. Lindsey, PhD, MSW, MPH has lived the American Black experience in every way, shape and form. Family members going to the military for discipline.
Some falling victim to the streets; the glue that holds the family together passing away. The other missing piece of the Black experience: being the first in his family to go to college.
Dr. Lindsey was recently named dean of the NYU Silver School of Social Work, the first Black person to hold the position. He currently serves as the executive director of the NYU Silver School’s McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research. “As I learned more about luminaries like King and other great men of Morehouse who graduated and had gone out into the world to make a difference, I think it was somewhat of a requirement of us as students at Morehouse—more apt to go out into the world to change it to do something. If you see an issue, do something about it.”
Lindsey wasn’t done academically. He became a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.“I remember sitting in a substance abuse group with one of my clinical supervisors, and then came one of my childhood best friend’s moms. She was in the group,” he said. “And she had been addicted to crack and I just almost wanted to cry because she was a neighbor. I hadn’t seen her in about maybe 10 years or so, maybe longer than that.