“It is difficult to see a pillar of the family struck down and to watch that person become angry, frustrated, and resentful of his caretakers,” Kong says. One uncle would die within a year. The other would live 21 years, partially paralyzed and unable to support his seven children. Kong saw the family economics unravel.

“Every family member is affected by a stroke,” Kong says.

This stayed with Kong as he channeled his losses into a lifelong passion: educating African Americans about the dangers of cardiovascular disease and empowering them to take steps to improve their health.

Now celebrating his 20th year as CEO of the Association of Black Cardiologists (ABC), Kong has remained true to that calling. Under his leadership, the ABC, a nonprofit organization with an international membership of more than 600 health care professionals, has brought unprecedented attention to the disparities related to cardiovascular disease.

Beating the Odds

Kong grew up in the tiny community of Woodlands in southern Jamaica. He was raised primarily by his grandmother there after his father, a Chinese refugee, abandoned the family, and Kong’s Jamaican-born mother traveled to the United States to find work to support her two small children.

Still, Kong says, “I could not have had a better childhood. We lived in a small community where there were very few worries.” Life revolved around church, school, cricket, soccer, bird hunting, and town festivals. “I learned through rote memory, mostly poems and Bible passages. Thinking was not associated with learning,” says Kong.

One priceless lesson he learned was the value of building and maintaining relationships. “My grandmother would sit on the veranda every morning with a huge coffeepot, and everyone would stop by, bring her something from their gardens, exchange gossip, and have a cup of coffee,” Kong remembers. “She was also the person they came to see if they had a medical problem. At her knees, I learned that relationships are key.”

One of Kong’s uncles, a veterinarian in Kingston, saw potential in the teenager and urged Kong’s mother to bring the boy to the United States. She agreed and, at age 15, Kong began a new life in Morristown, N.J.

Adapting to a New Culture

“I was in absolute shock,” Kong remembers. “I could not speak or understand the language.” His saving grace was sports. “In Bob Marley’s words, my feet were my only carriage in Jamaica, so I was a fast runner,” says Kong, who earned seven varsity letters in high school. Another point in Kong’s favor—“I was two years older than my peers and the only one who could drive in my sophomore year, so I was very popular.”

His upbringing in a culture where effort and willingness to try new things were encouraged led him to approach everything in his new country with a passion. Despite all of his efforts, his academic future looked bleak. In fact, his high school guidance counselor was arranging for him to work as a carpenter’s helper when a recruiter from Simpson College, in Iowa, visited the high school, scouting for the wrestling team. Kong was offered a four-year scholarship.

“From that point on, my whole orientation was to become a college graduate,” Kong says. “I knew it would open doors for me.”

Heeding the Call

Kong earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology and psychology in 1967, and a master’s in 1970, and began his search for an explanation for his uncles’ strokes, for a connection between psychology and medicine. He became an assistant professor of human development at the University of the District of Columbia and continued his research on hypertension, particularly the links between personality traits and high blood pressure.

At the University of Maryland, he earned the equivalent of “all but dissertation.” After finding that the expertise was not available to supervise his dissertation on hypertension, he transferred to Walden University on the recommendation of a professor.

“What made the transfer most attractive was the promise that I could choose the best experts in the field anywhere in the country to serve on my dissertation committee,” Kong says. The professor (Dr. Glenwood Brooks) who recommended Kong to Walden chaired his dissertation committee. Kong added Elijah Saunders, M.D., a professor and cardiologist who currently heads the division of hypertension at the University of Maryland School of Medicine; Dr. Edward Hawthorne, a former dean at Howard University who had devised innovative measurements of the heart; and Dr. John Chessell, an advocate of preventive health.

When Kong completed his Ph.D. in 1977, Saunders offered him the opportunity to head a research center he was developing. “It was the strangest job offer, because he had no money to pay me,” Kong says. As director of research and grants at Provident Hospital in Baltimore and director of the Urban Cardiology Research Center based at Provident, Kong worked closely with Saunders on a number of projects, and his proposals began generating a good deal of interest and income.

He quickly recognized the needs of the African-American community served by the hospital, and the information that could be gained to help even more people. “The clinical drug trials we performed were the first to be conducted in an African-American private hospital in this country,” Kong says. Their first clinical trial involved clonidine, a popular drug for treating high blood pressure. Their study demonstrated that while the drug caused sexual dysfunction for the first two weeks of use, the side effects diminished over the long term. “We demonstrated the need to educate patients in African-American communities that the side effect was short term so that they would continue to take the drug,” Kong says.

The pharmaceutical company that sponsored the research used the findings in its marketing, but Kong and Saunders did not realize the full impact of their study until an entrepreneurial colleague built on their idea and opened centers around the country to make clinical trials available to African Americans.

Taking Public Health to the Public

From there, Kong and Saunders took their medical messages to the communities in which African Americans live, work, and pray. In 1978, when blood pressure measurement was considered a procedure only trained medical professionals could do, they proposed to teach lay people how to take and monitor blood pressure. “Even the American Heart Association did not support us. But to get us over the bureaucratic hurdle, they agreed to allow us to train ‘church nurses,’ who they did not realize were not registered nurses, but members of congregations,” Kong explains.

After church services in African-American neighborhoods throughout Baltimore, preachers urged congregation members to let the church nurses, many of whom were friends and neighbors, check their blood pressure. They made referrals to physicians as needed. Within a few years, clinics in more than 100 Maryland churches were staffed by more than 500 lay volunteers, and the American Heart Association eventually offered its support.

“Dr. Kong has been an important force in working with physicians to take our messages to the street,” Saunders says. “He is smart and sensitive to the needs of the community, and people trust him. Because of that, he has achieved things that would have been impossible for physicians.”

Jeanne Charleston, project director of Baltimore’s Community Health Awareness and Monitoring Program (CHAMP), remembers the inception of the Church High Blood Pressure Program more than 25 years ago. “The program changed people’s lives and it saved lives,” she says. “Women throughout the state seemed to stand up and take notice,” says Charleston, citing survey results that demonstrated a sharp increase in women’s awareness of heart disease risks just three years after the program’s inception.

In an attempt to reach more men, in 1981 the program expanded from churches to barber shops, a favorite gathering place in many African-American neighborhoods. “The day we started the barber shop program at Willy’s Afro Hut in Baltimore, we were on eight different radio and television shows, including National Public Radio and CBS,” Kong says.

Kong has since extended the program throughout the United States, including to Claiborne County, Miss., which has one of the country’s highest rates of cardiovascular disease. The concept has been adopted in other countries. And just last year, a Hair, Heart and Health program—a joint venture between a major health insurance company, the University of Maryland, and CHAMP—was launched in Baltimore. Introduced in Baltimore-area barber shops and hair salons, the program provides an educational program to improve the health of the African-American community.

Leading a Nonprofit

Kong’s successful programs attracted the attention of the Association of Black Cardiologists, and he joined the association in 1986 as CEO. His groundbreaking initiatives have led to increased visibility for the ABC, and his leadership inspired the funding and construction of a new 40,000-square-foot facility for the association.

The significance of the new $10 million building cannot be overstated. “I learned a long time ago that if you are not at the table, you are on the menu. I do not like being marginalized just because we are small or a minority organization,” Kong says. “The new building will win us respect, and with the new building comes longevity.” 

Kong attributes his own longevity as CEO to his enduring faith. “To God be the glory. The average tenure of a CEO of an association or institution is three years,” Kong says. “I have persevered for 20 years—from one employee 15 years ago, to 25 today, with an expectation to grow to 50.” During his tenure, Kong achieved yet another dream: He earned his law degree from Penn State Dickinson School of Law in 1993 and became a member of the State Bar of Georgia in 1994.

Spirituality remains an important component in Kong’s community crusade. He has even encouraged physicians to write prescriptions for patients to attend church. “It is not out of religious fervor, but there are health benefits. African Americans who attend church regularly live up to 14 years longer than those who do not,” Kong says. “Whether it is singing or eating together, listening to inspirational sermons or attending prayer chains, there are tremendous health benefits.”

A deacon at Providence Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta, Kong helped to analyze the Bible and extract passages related to health and nutrition. The ABC then used the passages in a nine-week course.

Educating the Next Generation of Cardiologists

In one of his most recent projects, Kong and the ABC have taken an advocacy role in promoting a new drug for African-American heart patients. That work has led him to suggest that the Federal Drug Administration establish an Office of Minority Affairs to address issues such as minority participation in clinical trials.

“We remain concerned about the lack of African Americans in clinical trials,” Kong says. “Our strategy is to train more African-American investigators among our membership to take active roles in clinical trials.”

Just as he has empowered community members, Kong sees the future as an era of empowering physicians. “We are still troubled that only 2 percent of cardiologists nationwide are African American. The other sad part is that cardiology is the medical field in which African Americans are best represented.”

For those who demonstrate an interest, the road to becoming a licensed cardiologist remains a rocky one. “There are 183 medical training programs nationwide and, to this day, 20 of them have never accepted an African American or a woman. Politicians must start asking why many of these programs that receive federal funding are not training African Americans or women,” says Kong, who plans to lobby legislators on the topic.

To further address this issue, the ABC is working to ensure that there are a sufficient number of students in the education pipeline. Kong advises students that they “need perseverance, an ability to defer gratification, and a willingness to make personal sacrifices.”

To introduce medicine to youngsters, members of the ABC sponsor medical terminology spelling bees in schools and churches. “When I was 6, everywhere my grandmother took me she would have me spell ‘Mississippi.’ It gave me confidence,” Kong says. “If children learn to spell the word ‘arrhythmia,’ it could give them newfound confidence. It could be a badge of courage to propel them into new areas of interest.”

Children Should Know Their Grandparents

Despite all his professional accomplishments, Kong boasts, “My greatest successes are my four successful children and four happy grandchildren.” He takes his role as grandfather very seriously, remembering his own nurturing and loving relationship with his grandmother that gave him confidence and the interpersonal skills to last a lifetime.

Unfortunately, in the African-American community, many children never know the love of their grandparents. “Fifty percent of our grandparents die of heart disease. This is sad because it is a preventable disease,” Kong says.

With the untimely deaths of so many elders, Kong believes the African-American community is losing the shared knowledge and wisdom that comes with lived experiences. “Our children are losing the connection to valuable pieces of their past, their heritage,” Kong says.

His desire to see other children benefit from the love of their grandparents led to another ABC initiative, “Children Should Know Their Grandparents so They Will Become Great Grandparents.”

It’s another example of Kong giving community members the tools and information they need for healthier lives. “My biggest contribution to medicine was giving lay people the tools and training to take blood pressures and to serve as health promotion specialists,” Kong says. “It empowered people to take responsibility for their own health, and that is what I am all about.”

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