Dr. Count D. Gibson, a leader in the movement to provide medical care and social services to low-income people and a founder of the country's first community health centers, died on July 23 in Hartford. He was 81.
The cause was a stroke, said his son George.
In 1965, Dr. Gibson helped found the Columbia Point Health Center in Boston, the country's first community health center for low-income families.
He directed the center for four years, and it continues to provide primary medical care and social services at low costs. He left to help found and direct other community health centers in rural areas like the Mississippi Delta and the San Joaquin Valley in California.
''He was critical in launching what is now a network of nearly 900 community health centers across the country that provide health care to roughly 10 million people,'' said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, co-founder of the Columbia Point center, which was renamed the Geiger-Gibson Health Center in the early 1990's.
Earlier in his career, Dr. Gibson was the director of preventive medicine at Tufts University, but in 1964 he left briefly to travel to Mississippi, where he and other physicians and social workers with the Medical Committee for Human Rights helped treat and protect civil rights advocates trying to organize a voter registration drive.
Dr. Gibson was one of the 3,200 people who walked with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery. He was also a delegate to the White House conferences on health and civil rights, before leaving Boston in the late 60's to head Stanford University's department of family, community and preventive medicine.
He continued his involvement in civil rights issues in California by supporting the farm workers' rights movement led by Cesar Chavez. When a group of American Indian college students took over Alcatraz Island for several months in 1969 to attract national attention to Indian issues, Dr. Gibson, one of the few non-Indians welcomed to the island, helped administer medical treatment to the students.
Born in Covington, Ga., in 1921, Count Dillon Gibson earned his undergraduate and medical degrees from Emory University in Atlanta.
In 1999, he moved to West Hartford, where he lived in a retirement community.
Dr. Gibson's wife, Katherine Vislocky, died in March.
In addition to his son George of Willington, Conn., Dr. Gibson is survived by two sons, Aleksey of Washington and Thomas, of Rochester; a daughter, Gabriella Gibson-Colvin of Gillingham, England; and six grandchildren.