Dr. Jenkins had been an advocate for racial equality and social justice since high school, when he helped register people to vote in segregated South Carolina. He went on to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee while studying at historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta, and was once arrested for protesting the whites-only policy of an Atlanta restaurant owned by Lester Maddox, later the governor of Georgia.

In 1967, he became one of the first African Americans recruited to the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. Dr. Jenkins said he wanted to be part of a new era at the uniformed service, at a time when many African Americans understood “public health” to mean keeping “black diseases” from infecting whites.

He soon launched an anti-discrimination newsletter titled the Drum, covering what was then the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and was working as a statistician when a physician told him about the Tuskegee experiment.