William Montague Cobb, A.B., M.D., Ph.D. was the first African American Ph.D. in anatomy and physical anthropology. He produced 1,100 publications while a professor at Howard University. Cobb had a profound influence on the civil rights struggle from the 1930s-1970s, making a special contribution to our understanding of health inequalities due to racial and class inequity. He was the principal biographer of Blacks in Medicine. This paper describes his participation in the legacy of activist and interdisciplinary scholarship of African diasporic intellectuals. He posed this epistemic against the reductionist biodeterminism of his time. Cobb promoted a political economy of health and its appropriate amelioration through public policy.
