NOTES
Preface
1. This statement is inspired by Bruno Latour’s now-famous assertion, “Science . . . is politics by other means.” See Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 229.
2. “White House Remarks on Decoding of Genome,” New York Times, June 27, 2000.
3. David Hinckley, “Health Care Bill Triggers Eruption from Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and John Gambling,” New York Daily News, March 22, 2010, http://articles.nydailynews.com/2010-03-22/news/27059757_1_health-care-bill-glenn-beck-stupak.
4. Ezra Klein, “Rush Limbaugh: Health-Care Reform Is ‘Reparations,’ a ‘Civil Rights Act,’” Washington Post, February 22, 2010, http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/rush_limbaugh_health-care_refo.html.
5. Steven Smith, “Wellesley Professor Unearths a Horror: Syphilis Experiments in Guatemala,” Boston Globe, October 2, 2010, http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2010/10/02/wellesley_professor_unearths_a_horror_ syphilis_experiments_in_guatemala/.
6. Susan M. Reverby, “‘Normal Exposure’ and Inoculation Syphilis: A PHS ‘Tuskegee’ Doctor in Guatemala, 1946–48,” Journal of Policy History 23, no. 1 (2011): 6–28.
7. Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Random House, 2007).
8. Brian D. Smedley, Adrienne Y. Stith, and Alan R. Nelson, eds., Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2003).
9. On the effect of historical abuse on the health-seeking behavior of African Americans, both before and after the revelation of the Tuskegee study, see Vanessa Northington Gamble, “Under the Shadow of Tuskegee: African Americans and Health Care,” American Journal of Public Health 87, no. 11 (1997): 1773–78. On how past medical mistreatment influences blacks’ willingness to participate in clinical research studies, see Giselle Corbie-Smith, Stephen B. Thomas, and Diane Marie M. St. George, “Distrust, Race, and Research,” Archives of Internal Medicine, November 25, 2002, 2458–63.
10. Washington, Medical Apartheid, 15.
11. For example, as recently as February 2010, the campaign of Los Angeles County public health officials to have African Americans vaccinated for the H1N1 flu was unsuccessful. Blacks make up 32.4 percent of the residents of the South Central community, but received only 7.73 percent of the flu vaccinations at county clinics. Some in the media attributed this low participation rate to the dissemination via social media of warnings that invoked past medical abuse (Molly Hennessy-Fiske, “Few African Americans Vaccinated at L.A. County H1N1 Flu Clinics,” Los Angeles Times, February 9, 2010, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/02/few-africanamericans-vaccinated-at-la-county-h1n1-flu-clinics.html; and Linda Villarosa, “The Guatemala Syphilis Experiment’s Tuskegee Roots, theroot.com, October 2, 2010, http://www.theroot.com/views/tuskegee-study-s-guatemalan-roots).
12. Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1990); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1996); Evelynn Hammonds and Rebecca Herzig, eds., The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009); Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998); Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a World View (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1998); William Stan-ton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes towards Race in America, 1815–1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and Keith Wailoo, Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
13. Jane Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (New York: New Press, 2007), 5–6, emphasis added. On media bias as a component of state repression of the Party, see Christian Davenport, Media Bias, Perspective, and State Repression: The Black Panther Party (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
14. Many of the articles in the Black Panther were unsigned, making it difficult to attribute authorship to them. The editors, however, are known: Eldridge Cleaver, the Party’s minister of information, first edited the paper. Elaine Brown took over as editor in 1971; she had been the deputy minister of information for the Party’s Southern California chapter from 1969 to 1971. Ericka Huggins edited the paper in 1971 and 1972, when Brown campaigned for a slot on Oakland’s city council. The paper was also edited by David Du Bois—stepson of W. E. B. Du Bois—from 1972 to 1975, and subsequently by Michael Fultz, a former member of the Boston chapter. JoNina Abron was the paper’s last editor (1978–80). Cleaver, Brown, and Du Bois were the paper’s editors during the period covered in this book. In addition, other Party members and its leadership, including Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, contributed writing to the paper. See also Philip Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak (New York: Lippincott, 1970), 8–14; Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1970), 177–81; David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (New York: Little, Brown, 1993), 338; and Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), 207, 271, 273–75, 343, 410.
15. “The Law: Sterilized: Why?” Time, July 23, 1973, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,878602,00.html. Prior to the deceptive sterilization procedures, the Relf sisters had for months been given injections of Depo-Provera, a then experimental contraceptive with severely unpleasant side effects. Both incidents were documented and politicized in the Party’s newspaper.
16. Charles Tilly, “Retrieving European Lives,” in Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History, ed. Olivier Zunz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985, 15).
Introduction
1. Several other similar events took place in the spring and summer of 1972, including a “Black Survival Conference” on May 13, 1972, and an “Anti-War, African Liberation, Voter Registration, Survival Conference” on June 24, 1972. On the survival conferences, see Bobby Seale, Lonely Rage: The Autobiography of Bobby Seale (New York: Times Books, 1978), 224; Bobby Seale to Eve Kenley, April 5, 1972, series 1, box 4, folder 9, Dr. Huey P. Newton Archives, Special Collections, Green Library, Stanford University; Dick Hallgren, “Black Panthers Draw Big Crowd,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 30, 1972; “Chairman Bobby Seale for Mayor!” Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, May 20, 1972; and “The Black Panther Party’s Anti-War, African Liberation, Voter Registration, Survival Conference,” Black Panther, June 10, 1972.
2. “This Will Tide Us Over to Liberation,” Black Panther, April 8, 1972.
3. Hugh Pearson, Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo, 1995), 247; Black Panther, April 16, 1972; and Seale, Lonely Rage, 224.
4. On May 13, 1972, Seale announced that he would run as a candidate for mayor of Oakland. Moments before doing so, in a dramatic gesture, Seale drew back the curtain on the stage of the Oakland Auditorium to reveal ten thousand bags of free groceries—including the now-iconic “chicken in every bag”—that had been gathered by the Party to distribute to attendees of the event. On this same occasion, Brown announced her candidacy for an Oakland city council seat. See Seale, Lonely Rage, 224–27; Brown, Taste of Power, 276–77, 321–23; Pearson, Shadow of the Panther, 247–48; and “Chairman Bobby Seale for Mayor!” See also “Bobby Seale to Run for Mayor of Oakland,” Los Angeles Times, January 19, 1974; and “Tame Panthers?” Time, December 25, 1972, 13–14. This turn to electoral politics was somewhat of a renewed focus for the Party because Cleaver, Seale, and Newton had run as candidates on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in 1968 for the offices of president of the United States, California State assemblyman, and U.S. congressman, respectively. See Seale, Seize the Time, 237–40; and Gene Marine, The Black Panthers (San Francisco: Ramparts Books, 1969), chap. 10.
5. See, for example, Curtis J. Austin, Up against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006), esp. chap. 7; and Charles William Hopkins, “The Deradicalization of the Black Panther Party” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1978). Newton argued that the service programs were organizing tools toward revolution, not reformist politics. See Art Goldberg, “The Panthers after the Trial,” Ramparts, March 1972, 24–25.
6. Even Seale and Brown’s campaign platform broached the issue of health. The candidates recommended the creation of tax-funded “preventative medical health care programs” that would provide services, as well as training and jobs in the health sector, as one solution to Oakland’s burgeoning unemployment rates (“Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown on Un-Employment in Oakland,” Community Committee to Elect Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown to City Office of Oakland, African Americans in California collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley).
7. Black Panther Party (guest editors), “The Black Panther Party Program, March 29, 1972 Platform,” CoEvolution Quarterly 3 (Fall 1974): 48; Elaine Brown, interview with author, December 6, 2008, Savannah, Georgia.
8. The neoconservative David Horowitz’s writing is the most extreme example of this position on the Party. See his coauthored work with Peter Collier, Deconstructing the Left: From Vietnam to the Clinton Era (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991); and Horowitz’s memoir, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (New York: Free Press, 1998). Similar criticisms are made in Pearson, Shadow of the Panther.
9. See, for example, Huey P. Newton, The War against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (1980; repr. New York: Harlem River, 2000).
10. Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles outside the South, 1940–1980 (New York: Palgrave, 2003).
11. National media coverage of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s contributed to the construction of hard distinctions between northern and southern activism and the “civil rights” and “black power” movements. See Jeanne Theoharis, introduction to Freedom North, 12–13.
12. King argued that nonviolent, civil disobedience was intended partly to “awaken a sense of moral shame” among those who opposed racial equality. See Martin Luther King Jr., “Nonviolence and Racial Justice,” Christian Century Magazine, February 6, 1957, 165–67.
13. I borrow the term “un-civil” from Theoharis, introduction, 12.
14. King, quoted in John Dittmer, The Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), ix.
15. Norma Armour, interview with author, March 19, 2009, Los Angeles; “Winston-Salem Free Ambulance Service Opens, Black Panther, June 26, 1971, 7.
16. Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 388–89.
17. Van Gosse, “A Movement of Movements: The Definition and Periodization of the New Left,” in A Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 277–302. See also Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1233–63; Larry Isaac, “Movement of Movements: Culture Moves in the Long Civil Rights Struggle,” Social Forces 87 (2008): 33–63; and Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
18. Patricia Sullivan’s Days of Hope and Mary Dudziak’s Cold War Civil Rights, for example, show that the civil rights movement began decades prior to the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott that conventionally marks its start; similarly, Timothy Tyson’s examination of the life of Robert F. Williams pushes back the time line of the black power movement into the 1950s. Works by William Chafe, Dittmer, and Yohuru Williams situate civil rights struggles in local politics of specific communities, while recent books by Martha Biondi, Theoharis, and Woodard, among others, remind us that racial terror and social inequality were characteristic qualities of American society on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. The range of experiences and motivations of participants in civil rights struggles are given expression in Doug McAdam’s Freedom Summer. See Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Theoharis and Woodard, Freedom North; Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Yohuru Williams, Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Panthers in New Haven (St. James, N.Y.: Brandywine, 2000).
19. Evelynn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17 (Winter 1992): 251–74.
20. Paula Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), esp. chaps. 1, 6; and Joanne Grant, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1998), chap. 2. A considerable portion of writings by Party members is dedicated to examining the interlocking oppressions of racism and economic inequality. See, for example, Huey P. Newton, “On Pan-Africanism or Communism: December 1, 1972,” in The Huey P. Newton Reader, ed. David Hilliard and Donald Weise (New York: Seven Stories, 2002), 248–55.
21. Stewart Burns, To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King’s Mission to Save America, 1955–1968 (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 404. For an account of the evolution of the SCLC Poor People’s Campaign and the Nixon administration’s resistance to it, see Gerald D. McKnight, The Last Crusade: Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI, and the Poor People’s Campaign (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1998), 21.
22. On Fannie Lou Hamer’s life and her experiences with health inequality and surreptitious medical procedures, see Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Plume, 1993), 20–22; Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 68; and Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 90–91.
23. Also, as Jonathan Metzl demonstrates, references to illness—mental illness in particular—were used against King and others in this period to characterize racism as a form of social disease. See Jonathan Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (New York: Beacon, 2009), 119–25.
24. On black health activism in the Progressive Era, see Vanessa Northington Gamble, Germs Have No Color Line: Blacks and American Medicine, 1900–1940 (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1989); and Northington Gamble, Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement, 1920–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). See also Susan Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women’s Health Activism in America, 1890–1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), esp. chap. 1. On the medical civil rights movement, see Herbert Morais, The History of the Negro in Medicine (New York: Publishers Company, 1967), chap. 9.
25. Northington Gamble, Making a Place for Ourselves.
26. Elaine Brown, interview with author, December 7, 2008, Savannah, Georgia.
27. “Health Care—Pig Style,” Black Panther, February 7, 1970.
28. Alice Kessler-Harris, “In Pursuit of Economic Citizenship,” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State, and Society 10, no. 2 (2003): 157–75; and Margaret R. Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
29. Kessler-Harris, “In Pursuit of Economic Citizenship,” 159; Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship, 25.
30. Kessler-Harris, “In Pursuit of Economic Citizenship,” 164.
31. Ibid., 164–65; Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship.
32. Armour, interview.
33. Constitution of the World Health Organization (1948), http://www.who.int/about/definition/en/print.html (accessed May 2, 2007).
34. Ibid.
35. Black Panther, June 1971.
36. Ibid.
37. I am aware of one other use of the term social health. The health education scholar Robert Russell used the phrase to describe “that dimension of an individual’s well-being that concerns how he gets along with other people, how other people react to him, and how he interacts with social institutions and societal mores” (“Social Health: An Attempt to Clarify This Dimension of Well-Being,” International Journal of Health Education 16 [1973]: 75). He also noted that well-being derives from a person’s orientation in society (74–82).
38. Similar conceptualizations can be found in Rudolph Virchow, Cellular Pathology as Based upon Physiological and Pathological Histology (1860; repr. Birmingham, Ala.: Classics of Medicine Library, 1978); Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and David McBride, From TB to AIDS: Epidemics among Urban Blacks since 1900 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).
39. John Ehrenreich and Barbara Ehrenreich (for Health/PAC), The American Health Empire: Power, Profits, and Politics (New York: Random House, 1970). At the Party-sponsored People’s Revolutionary Constitutional Convention of September 1970, the activists resolved: “We are opposed to the medical industrial complex of medicine. We believe in socialized medicine. Inherent in this concept is prevention and free comprehensive, community-controlled medicine. The only way to socialize medicine is through revolution.” See “Appendices,” in Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party, ed. Kathleen Cleaver and George Kastiaficas (New York: Routledge, 2001), 300.
40. David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization,” International Social Movement Research 1 (1988): 197–217. On framing, see also Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986); and Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959). The concept of framing describes the symbolic strategies employed by activists to convey political positions and persuade others of their legitimacy. As elaborated by the sociologists Snow and Benford, efficacious framing is accomplished through several steps: a social problem is diagnosed; blame for the problem is assigned; and a prescription for social action is offered.
41. Starr, Social Transformation of American Medicine, chap. 4.
42. Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965 (New York: Penguin, 1988), 232–33, 236; McAdam, Freedom Summer.
43. Lillian Rubin, “Maximum Feasible Participation: The Origins, Implications, and Present Status,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 385 (1969): 14–29.
44. “Special Message to Congress Proposing a National Health Strategy,” February 18, 1971, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=3311 (accessed October 12, 2009).
45. Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, American Health Empire, 4–6.
46. Black Panther, October 18, 1969.
47. Black Panther Party (guest editors), “People’s Free Medical Research Health Clinics,” CoEvolution Quarterly: Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog 3 (1974): 21.
48. Allen M. Hornblum, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison (New York: Routledge, 1998). For a synthetic history of medical experimentation with African Americans, see Washington, Medical Apartheid. For a compelling account of one black woman’s questionable interaction with biomedical researchers, see Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (New York: Crown, 2010).
49. Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, American Health Empire, 14.
50. Fitzhugh Mullan, White Coat, Clenched Fist: The Political Education of an American Physician (1976; repr. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), chap. 6.
51. “Bunchy Carter Free Clinic,” Black Panther Community News Service (Southern California chapter), January 19, 1970.
52. For example, the historian Spencie Love has demonstrated that the rumors that the death of noted African American surgeon Charles Drew was caused by the fact that he was denied care in a segregated Southern hospital were inaccurate. Nevertheless, Love concludes that this apocryphal account, while not based in fact, suggested a social truth—blacks’ apprehensions about the healthcare system. See Spencie Love, One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
53. “Medical Genocide,” People’s News Service (Southern California chapter), June 12, 1970.
54. James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (1981; repr. New York: Free Press, 1993); Susan M. Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
55. Gisele Corbie-Smith, “The Continuing Legacy of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Considerations for Clinical Investigation,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences 317 (1999): 5–8; Northington Gamble, “Under the Shadow of Tuskegee.” For examples from the popular media of the time of how the July 1972 revelation of the Tuskegee study stoked mistrust of medicine in black communities, see William Rice, “Why Being Black Can Be Bad for Your Health,” Daily News (New York), January 26, 1973; and “Expose, Punish Heads of Syphilis Study—NAACP,” Los Angeles Sentinel, August 31, 1972.
56. McBride, From TB to AIDS, 126.
57. Ibid.
58. Lily M. Hoffman, The Politics of Knowledge: Activist Movements in Medicine and Planning (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). See also Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
59. Kenneth Reich, “National Pattern Followed in Raid on Panthers Here,” Los Angeles Times, December 9, 2009.
60. Austin, Up against the Wall, 335.
61. HIV/AIDS activists in the 1980s shared similar aims. See Steven Epstein, “The Construction of Lay Expertise: AIDS Activism and the Forging of Credibility in the Reform of Clinical Trials,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 20 (1995): 408–37.
62. JoNina M. Abron, “‘Serving the People,’” in The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered), ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore, Md.: Black Classic, 1998), 178, 184. See also “Rules of the Black Panther Party.” Rule number 21 read: “All branches must implement First Aid and/or Medical Cadres” (in “Political Education Kit for Black Panther Party Members,” Palmer Smith Papers, University of Washington Special Collections). Party Minister of Justice Ray “Masai” Hewitt announced the Party’s plan to extend the PFMC network in November 1969, several weeks prior to the January 1970 directive that Seale sent to all chapters.
63. For a theoretical overview of health social movements, see Phil Brown and Stephen Zavestoski, eds., Social Movements in Health (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005).
64. A fine discussion of the women’s health movement is offered in Sandra Morgen, Into Our Hands: The Women’s Health Movement in the United States, 1969–1990 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002). See also Sheryl Burt Ruzek, The Women’s Health Movement: Feminist Alternatives to Medical Control (New York: Praeger, 1978). On the history and significance of the SHO, see Naomi Rogers, “‘Caution: The AMA May Be Dangerous to Your Health’: The Student Health Organizations (SHO) and American Medicine, 1965–1970,” Radical History Review 80 (2001): 5–34; and William Bronston, interview with author, August 19, 2007, New York. On the MCHR, see Dittmer, Good Doctors. On the “rainbow coalition,” see Lincoln Webster Sheffield, “People’s Medical Care Center,” in Foner, Black Panthers Speak, 175; Miguel “Mickey” Melendez, We Took to the Streets: Fighting for Latino Rights with the Young Lords (New York: Macmillan, 2003), 85.
65. This is the motto of the Berkeley Free Clinic, which was an institutional collaborator with the Party.
66. H. Jack Geiger, “Community Health Centers: Health Care as an Instrument of Social Change,” in Reforming Medicine: Lessons of the Last Quarter Century, ed. Ruth Sidel and Victor Sidel (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 11–32.
67. Washington, Medical Apartheid.
68. Ibid.; Skloot, Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
69. Steven Epstein, Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Biomedical Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 17.
70. David S. Meyer and Nancy Whittier, “Social Movement Spillover,” Social Problems 41 (1994): 277–98.
1. African American Responses to Medical Discrimination before 1966
1. See Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, chap. 9.
2. Lewis E. Weeks, ed., “Montague Cobb,” in In First Person: An Oral History (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Lewis E. Weeks and American Hospital Association and Hospital Research and Educational Trust, 1983); and Lesley M. Rankin-Hill and Michael Blakely, “W. Montague Cobb (1904–1990): Physical Anthropologist, Anatomist, and Activist,” American Anthropologist 96 (1994): 74–96. See also Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, chaps. 8–9; and Smith, Sick and Tired, 76, 169.
3. Edward H. Beardsley, A History of Neglect: Health Care for Blacks and Mill Workers in the Twentieth-Century South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 264–66.
4. Ibid. More specifically, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the Simkins v. Cone case and let the lower court decision stand; see Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, 240–41, app. L. See also W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton, An American Health Dilemma: Race, Medicine, and Health Care in the United States, 1900–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 267.
5. For a few notable exceptions, see Smith, Sick and Tired; McBride, From TB to AIDS; Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander L. Gilman, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism,” in The Racial Economy of Science: Towards a Democratic Future, ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993), 170–93; Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine; and Northington Gamble, Making a Place for Ourselves.
6. Beardsley, History of Neglect, 245–56.
7. Hoffman, Politics of Knowledge. See also Epstein, Impure Science.
8. McBride, From TB to AIDS. See also Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia Himmelsteib King, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora: Diet, Disease, and Racism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Jones, Bad Blood; and Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr., Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
9. Smith, Sick and Tired, 80; Beardsley, History of Neglect, 114–19; and McBride, From TB to AIDS, 75–82. For background information on the activities of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, see Edwin R. Embree and Julia Waxman, Investment in People: The Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund (New York: Harper, 1949).
10. David McBride, Integrating the City of Medicine: Blacks in Philadelphia Health Care, 1910–1965 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); and Northington Gamble, Making a Place for Ourselves.
11. Hoffman, Politics of Knowledge.
12. For example, in his essay “The Conservation of Races,” Du Bois famously deconstructed and reinterpreted data that claimed African Americans had smaller brains (and, by implication, were less intelligent) than whites. See W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” in W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1890–1919, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Pathfinders, 1970), 72–85.
13. McBride, From TB to AIDS, 126. For the gendering of caretaking in the black community, see Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), chaps. 1–2.
14. McBride, From TB to AIDS, 86.
15. Beardsley, History of Neglect, 11.
16. McBride, From TB to AIDS, 2. See also Beardsley, History of Neglect, chap. 1.
17. Smith, Sick and Tired, 1–2, 51–57.
18. Charles Payne, “‘Men Led but Women Organized’: Movement Participation of Women in the Mississippi Delta,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965, ed. Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
19. In early-twentieth-century health social movements, Susan Smith argues, men “held most of the formal leadership positions and [lay and professional] women did most of the grassroots organizing” (Sick and Tired, 1).
20. Hazel V. Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 738–57.
21. Williams is credited with performing the first open-heart surgery in the United States in 1897. See Kelly Miller, “Eminent Negroes,” in Race Adjustment: Essays on the Negro in America (New York: Neale, 1908), 195–96; and Helen Buckler, Daniel Hale Williams: Negro Surgeon (New York: Pitman Publishing, 1954), 77, 85–96.
22. Buckler, Daniel Hale Williams, chap. 6; Lewis H. Fenderson, Daniel Hale Williams: Open Heart Doctor (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 53–54; Smith, Sick and Tired, 23.
23. Buckler, Daniel Hale Williams, 70–75.
24. Louis Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Meier, Negro Thought in America; and Smith, Sick and Tired, chap. 2.
25. Washington, Up from Slavery, 31–32.
26. Ibid., 36–38.
27. Ibid., 54, 126.
28. Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), esp. chaps. 3–4.
29. William Hardin Hughes and Frederick D. Patterson, eds., Robert Russa Moton of Hampton and Tuskegee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956), 60–62.
30. Booker T. Washington, “An Address before the Negro Organization Society of Virginia: What Cooperation Can Accomplish,” November 12, 1914, in The Booker T. Washington Papers, ed. Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock, vol. 13 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 167.
31. Harlan, Booker T. Washington, 187–88; 233; Smith, Sick and Tired, 34.
32. Washington, “Address before the Negro Organization Society of Virginia,” 169.
33. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 68.
34. Harlan and Smock, Booker T. Washington Papers, 167–68, 218.
35. The unfortunate consequence of this argument was that it sacrificed African American women’s honor on the altar of racial politics. It cast black women—cooks, wet nurses, and washerwomen—as bearers of disease and vectors of contagion. For more on the black woman laborer as a source of contagion, see Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom’: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), chap. 5.
36. Anson Phelps Stokes to Booker T. Washington, November 24, 1914, in Harlan and Smock, Booker T. Washington Papers, 13:182–83; Smith, Sick and Tired, 39.
37. “The Principal’s Report to the Board of Trustees of Tuskegee Institute,” May 31, 1915, in Harlan and Smock, Booker T. Washington Papers, 13:303–4.
38. Monroe Work, “The Economic Waste of Sickness.” Paper presented at the Health Conference, Gulfside, Mississippi, June 5, 1929; quoted in Smith, Sick and Tired, 56.
39. Smith, Sick and Tired, 69.
40. Ibid., 33. The National Negro Health Movement and the Office of Negro Health Work were closed in 1950 when prominent blacks and state and federal administrators who supported integration efforts concluded that a separate public health office and health education campaign for African Americans was anathema to such progress.
41. Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1976), 7–8, chap. 2.
42. Ibid., 14.
43. Ibid., chap. 3.
44. Lawrence W. Levine, “Marcus Garvey and the Politics of Revitalization,” in Black Leaders in the Twentieth Century, ed. John Hope Franklin and August Meier (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 105–38; and Robert A. Hill, ed., Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). See also Michelle Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), chap. 8.
45. “Essays by Marcus Garvey,” in Hill, Marcus Garvey, 48, 50.
46. Ibid.
47. “Chronology,” in The Marcus Garvey Papers, ed. Robert A. Hill, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 619.
48. Hill, Marcus Garvey, 402. The BCN was advised by the UNIA’s surgeon general, the Montreal physician D. D. Lewis.
49. A unit of the Black Cross Nurses still exists in Belize (Dr. Julius Garvey, conversation with author, September 25, 2010, Atlanta, Georgia). For the history of this chapter, see Anne Macpherson, “Colonial Matriarchs: Garveyism, Maternalism, and Belize’s Black Cross Nurses, 1920–1952,” Gender and History 15 (2003): 507–27.
50. Hill, Marcus Garvey Papers, 3:383. The BCN was also likely inspired by the Blue Circle Nurses. In response to their exclusion from the Red Cross during World War I, frustrated members of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) established the Blue Circle Nurses in 1917. These nurses served the same function as the Red Cross nurses, but for black soldiers solely. See Hine, Black Women in White, 104.
51. Hine, Black Women in White, 134–36.
52. Martin, Race First, 32.
53. “Report by Bureau Agents A. A. Hopkins and E. J. Kosterlitzky, December 6, 1920,” in Hill, Marcus Garvey Papers, 3:99.
54. Edmund David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 64. Although the U.S. Navy refused the assistance of African American women seeking to be Red Cross nurses, the army employed their services with only a month of the war remaining. When African American nurses were finally permitted to join the Red Cross, the icons of their service, the red cross-shaped pins, were marked with the letter “A” to indicate the wearer’s special racial status.
55. “Rules and Regulations Governing the Universal African Black Cross Nurses,” in Hill, Marcus Garvey Papers, 3:766–67; “Universal Negro Catechism,” in Hill, Marcus Garvey Papers, 3:315; and Hill, Marcus Garvey, 362.
56. Hine, Black Women in White, esp. 89–107.
57. Cronon, Black Moses, 64. Garvey suffered from respiratory problems including pneumonia and bronchitis. In the month-long UNIA convention of August 1920, Surgeon General Lewis implored the auxiliary of BCN to “see that he [Garvey] keeps healthy.” Lewis continued, “There is no subject that interests me more than that of health. It is the keynote to success” (“Report of the Convention,” in Hill, Marcus Garvey Papers, 2:619).
58. Martin, Race First, 32.
59. See, for example, William L. Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 1–19.
60. Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine, 1965), chap. 1.
61. McAdam has shown that the parents of summer project volunteers included prominent intellectuals and politicians. See Freedom Summer, 157–60.
62. Aaron O. Wells (MCHR chairman and physician), quoted in Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, 166.
63. Dittmer, Good Doctors; Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, 116, chap. 9, app. O; and Len Holt, The Summer That Didn’t End (New York: William Morrow, 1965), 78.
64. Holt, Summer That Didn’t End, 81.
65. David French (former MCHR chairman), quoted in Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, 256.
66. Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, 168.
67. Ibid., 261.
68. Holt, Summer That Didn’t End, 81; Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, 168; Ruzek, Women’s Health Movement; and McAdam, Freedom Summer, 105–15.
69. McAdam, Freedom Summer, chaps. 4–5.
70. Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, 167, 256; Dittmer, Good Doctors, chap. 8.
71. McAdam, Freedom Summer, chaps. 4–5, esp. 102–5, 114–15.
72. Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, 168.
73. Smith, Health Care Divided, 116–17; Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, 164–68, 198–99; and Hoffman, Politics of Knowledge, 70–79. The MCHR agenda also included the promotion of universal health coverage and agitating for the full integration of the American Medical Association, which remained off-limits to black medical professionals in the South.
74. Beardsley, History of Neglect, chap. 11; and Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, chaps. 8–9.
75. Dr. Charles V. Roman, quoted in Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, 68.
76. Smith, Sick and Tired, 76.
77. Ibid. Notably, the NAACP spurned National Negro Health week activities in the 1920s and 1930s; however, the NMA was an active participant in them. See Smith, Sick and Tired, 44, 62.
78. Cobb, a Howard University Medical School faculty member and physician, was president of the NMA from 1964 to 1965.
79. W. Montague Cobb, cited in Smith, Sick and Tired, 79.
80. Reprinted as W. Montague Cobb, “The National Health Program of the N.A.A.C.P.,” Journal of the National Medical Association 45 (July 1953): 333–34.
81. Hospital Survey and Construction Act, 79th Congr., 2d sess. (August 13, 1946), CH 958.
82. Cobb, “National Health Program,” Journal of the National Medical Association 45 (July 1953): 335.
83. Imhotep was a physician in ancient Egypt.
84. Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, 144. See also Smith, Health Care Divided, 54.
85. Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, 144–45.
86. Smith, Health Care Divided, 62–63. Morais concurs. He argues that the Imhotep movement inspired other organizations to take the issue of desegregation seriously. For example, in the early 1960s, the American Hospital Association began to investigate remedies to hospital segregation. In addition, in 1964, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare convened “an Imhotep-like” conference on hospital desegregation in Washington, D.C., which was attended by members of the AMA, the NMA, the American Dental Association, and the American Nurses Association, among others. See Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, 181–83.
87. Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, 82; Smith, Health Care Divided, 107.
88. Other earlier and important yet failed legal cases in the medical civil rights movement were Eaton et al. v. James Walker Memorial Hospital, an unsuccessful 1956 challenge to medical discrimination initiated by the African American physician Dr. Hubert Eaton against a Wilmington, North Carolina, hospital that refused staff privileges to black doctors. Hawkins v. North Carolina Dental Society in 1960 was an unsuccessful attempt to use the courts to compel integration in medical societies. Though these early cases were unsuccessful, they were key moments that contributed to eventual litigation success (much like the lower court cases that preceded Brown v. Board). See Smith, Health Care Divided, chap. 3.
89. Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, 52–58, 162–73, 179–80.
90. Hine, Black Women in White, 109, 115, 129–30.
91. Brent Staples, “Rooting Out Racism in Medicine,” New York Times, August 14, 2008, http://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/14/rooting-out-racism-in-medicine/.
92. Hine, Black Women in White, 89.
93. Ibid., 162. Cosponsors of the MCCR/MCHR request included CORE, NAACP, SNCC, and the American Jewish Congress. See also Dittmer, Good Doctors, chap. 5.
94. Ibid.
95. Morais, History of the Negro in Medicine, 204; Staples, “Rooting Out Racism in Medicine”; and Robert B. Baker, Harriet Washington, Ololade Olakanmi et al., “African American Physicians and Organized Medicine, 1846–1968,” JAMA 300 (July 2008): 306–13.
96. Hine, Black Women in White, 92.
97. Ibid., 94.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid., 121.
100. Ibid., 151–53.
101. Ibid., 183–86.
102. Ibid.
103. Ibid., 192.
104. See, for example, McBride, From TB to AIDS; Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
105. According to McBride, these ideas began to wane after World War II. Yet others have argued that sociomedical racialism was but one phase in the longer history of racial formation in biomedicine. For instance, using the example of sickle cell anemia, the anthropologist Melbourne Tapper argues that forms of medical racialism persist. See Melbourne Tapper, In the Blood: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), chap. 1. Duster makes a similar suggestion about the persistence of social stratification amid the most recent developments in genomics. See, for example, Troy Duster, “Race and Reification in Science,” Science, February 18, 2005, 1050–51; and Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics.
106. McBride, From TB to AIDS, 15. See also Jones, Bad Blood, esp. chap. 2; and Beardsley, History of Neglect, 12–14. See also Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom,’ chap. 8.
107. McBride, From TB to AIDS, 10, 12.
108. McBride, From TB to AIDS, 22–23. McBride suggests that in addition to different priorities, many black physicians were ill-equipped to counter the more research-oriented racialist claims because they had received minimal training owing to segregated medical schools and postgraduate and specialist training programs (23).
109. McBride, From TB to AIDS, 65.
110. Ibid.
111. Stepan and Gilman, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science,” 172.
112. Ibid., 183.
113. Frederick L. Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, http://www.archive.org/details/racetraitstenden00hoffrich (accessed December 14, 2008); and Beatrix Hoffman, “Scientific Racism, Insurance, and Opposition to the Welfare State: Frederick L. Hoffman’s Transatlantic Journey,” Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era 2, no. 2 (2003): 151. Hoffman’s claims still reverberate in the U.S. insurance industry and have been cited as the one reason why African Americans historically have been charged higher insurance premiums than whites. See Scot J. Paltrow, “Old Notion of Black Mortality May Have Influenced Insurers,” Wall Street Journal, December 26, 2000.
114. Hoffman, “Scientific Racism, Insurance, and Opposition to the Welfare State,” 152.
115. Stepan and Gilman, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science,” 184–85.
116. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Review of Frederick Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, http://www.webdubois.org/dbReviewOfHoffman.html (accessed October 27, 2008).
117. Montague Cobb called Health and Physique the “first significant scientific approach to the health problems and biological study of the Negro,” quoted in Atlanta University Publications (Nos. 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18), ed. Ernest Kaiser (New York: Arno, 1968), vi. However, Du Bois’s monumental work, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, completed after his training in sociology at the University of Berlin, is credited by many as the first. For discussion of Du Bois’s training in Berlin, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), chap. 4; and David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), chap. 6.
118. W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The Health and Physique of the Negro American: Report of a Social Study Made under the Direction of Atlanta University: Together with the Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems, Held at Atlanta University, on May the 29th, 1906. Atlanta University Publications, Number Eleven (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1906), 5, emphasis added. This remains an important distinction because, to this day, longevity rates are still accepted as the normative and exclusive gauge of African American health.
119. Notably, Du Bois made no criticisms of the method itself; his critique was not of scientific research per se but of racially biased research.
120. Du Bois, Health and Physique, 24. See also Byrd and Clayton, American Health Dilemma, 78–80.
121. Ibid.
122. Ibid., 89.
123. Ibid., 88. See also Roberts, Infectious Fear, 19–40.
124. Ibid., 89.
125. Ibid. See also Stepan and Gilman’s discussion of Du Bois’s intervention in “Appropriating the Idioms of Science,” 184.
2. Origins of Black Panther Party Health Activism
1. Black Panther Party, “Black Panther Party Program,” 48–49.
2. Mark Brody, “Panthers Map a People’s Health Plan,” Daily World, June 25, 1969, 9.
3. Office of Economic Opportunity, Community Action Program Guide (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1965). A comprehensive analysis and critique of CAP is offered in Kenneth B. Clark and Jeanne Hopkins, A Relevant War against Poverty: A Study of Community Action Programs and Observable Social Change (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).
4. Brown, Taste of Power, 276, emphasis added. See also Brown, interview, December 6, 2008.
5. Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 6. See also Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003); Robert Self, “‘To Plan Our Liberation’: Black Power and the Politics of Place in Oakland, California, 1965–1977,” Journal of Urban History 26, no. 6 (2000): 759–92. In interviews with Sol Stern, a writer for Ramparts magazine who wrote an article on the Party for the New York Times Magazine, Newton and Seale define their goals against what they deemed the moderation of the southern-centered civil rights movements and the wasted energies of the urban uprisings of the late 1960s (“The Call of the Black Panthers,” August 6, 1967, 68). Newton expresses a similar sentiment in Wallace Turner, “A Gun Is Power, Black Panther Says,” New York Times, May 21, 1967.
6. Seale, Lonely Rage; Seale, Seize the Time; Foner, introduction, xv; and Marine, Black Panthers, 12–13.
7. See Shirley Ann Moore, “Getting There, Being There: African-American Migration to Richmond, California, 1910–1945,” in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender, ed. Joe William Trotter Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 106–26. On general migration patterns in the San Francisco Bay Area, see Marilynn Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California, 1993). For an exhaustive account of blacks in the West, see Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: Norton, 1998).
8. For general discussion of African American migration patterns up to the immediate post–World War II period, see Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Vintage, 1992); Carole Marks, Farewell—We’re Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Trotter, Great Migration in Historical Perspective; and Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010). For discussion of cultural representations of this historic movement of black Americans, see Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Who Set You Flowin’”? The African-American Migration Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
9. Self, “‘To Plan Our Liberation,’” 765.
10. Donna Murch, “The Campus and the Street: Race, Migration, and the Origins of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA,” Souls 9 (2007): 334.
11. Self, American Babylon, 135–44, 159–76. Also instructive for illuminating the political economy of race and cities is Thomas J. Sugrue’s seminal work Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
12. William Julius Wilson, More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (New York: Norton, 2009), 40.
13. Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
14. See Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
15. Murch, “Campus and the Street,” 334.
16. Ibid., 341.
17. E. Frances White, “Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse, and African-American Nationalism,” Journal of Women’s History 2 (1990): 73–97. In this essay, White directs our attention to how “African-Americans in the late twentieth century construct and reconstruct collective political memories of African culture to build a cohesive group that can shield them from racist ideology and oppression”(74). These collective political memories of cultural nationalism, she argues, “set up standards of social relations that can be both liberating and confining” for women’s freedoms (75).
18. “Huey Newton Talks to the Movement about the Black Panther Party, Cultural Nationalism, SNCC, Liberals and White Revolutionaries,” in Foner, Black Panthers Speak, 50.
19. Seale, Seize the Time, 12–13; Seale, Lonely Rage, 125–26; Marine, Black Panthers, 24–34; Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 104; Stern, “Call of the Black Panthers,” 67; Foner, Black Panthers Speak, xv.
20. This ideological difference resulted in grave consequences in January 1969 when members of the Party were involved in a confrontation with the black cultural nationalist US Organization at the University of California at Los Angeles that resulted in the deaths of Panthers John Huggins and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter. For more on this fatal infighting, see Scot Brown, Fighting for Us: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2003), chap. 5. Brown, like Murch, stresses the importance of the California college and university system to the emergence of black radicalism in the late 1960s. Members of the Party and US were students in UCLA’s “High Potential Program”—a college entrance program for black and Latino nontraditional students—during the 1968–69 academic year (95). It later came to light that the FBI stoked and exaggerated these ideological differences as part of its COINTELPRO campaign to destroy black radicals.
21. Maulana Ron Karenga, quoted in Brown, Fighting for Us, 108.
22. See “OEO Gives Grant for Health Care,” Los Angeles Sentinel, June 1, 1972. See also Bonnie Lefkowitz, Community Health Centers: A Movement and the People Who Made It Happen (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007).
23. See Seale, “Using the Poverty Programs,” in Seize the Time, 35, 44. See also Seale, Lonely Rage, 152; Foner, Black Panthers Speak, xv; and Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 350–52, 517; Marine, Black Panthers, 39, 137; and Daniel Crowe, Prophets of Rage: The Black Freedom Struggle in San Francisco, 1945–1969 (New York: Garland, 2000), 168.
24. The organization’s name was inspired by the independent Lowndes County Political Party (LCPP) that had been organized with the assistance of SNCC in Alabama and which used an image of the black panther as its symbol (Heath, Off the Pigs! 14). Indeed, in a September 22, 1966, essay published in the New York Review of Books titled “What We Want,” SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael reflected on his experiences with community organizations like the LCPP. In this essay, he proclaimed, “The creation of a national ‘black panther party’ must come about; it will take time to build, and it is much too early to predict its success.” In addition, Party members Kathleen Cleaver, H. Rap Brown, and, for a time, Carmichael were former members of SNCC (Carson, In Struggle). Brown writes that the voter registration drive organized by the Party in Oakland in 1975 was inspired by SNCC drives during the civil rights movement (Taste of Power, 417).
25. The platform detailed the Party’s goals and demands, among them self-determination for black communities; an end to police brutality; food, clothing, and shelter; education; full employment; military service exemptions for black men; trials for black people by truly representative juries; and the release of all black inmates from U.S. jails and prisons.
26. Seale, Seize the Time, 59; and Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (1972; repr. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1995), 46, emphasis added.
27. Newton, To Die for the People, 25.
28. Kessler-Harris, “In Pursuit of Economic Citizenship.”
29. See Seale, “Using the Poverty Programs,” 35, 44.
30. See ibid.
31. Brown, Taste of Power, 148.
32. “Panthers on Antipoverty Board,” Los Angeles Sentinel, June 22, 1972; “‘The Black Panther Party Is Not a Separatist Party’: An Interview with Huey Newton,” Washington Post, August 16, 1972; “Tame Panthers?” 13–14. Not all observers viewed the Party’s inroads into local politics as radical politics. The Time article contended that the Party’s victories in local electoral politics indicated the activists’ “shift toward moderation” (13). The alternative publication Grassroots was skeptical that the Panthers’ involvement in mainstream politics could result in more than perpetuating the status quo; while the Party is applauded for adding “20,000 new voters on the registration list,” it is criticized for adding these voters to the ranks of traditional partisan politics, as Democrats, rather than “independents, Peace & Freedom, or even Panthers.” See Anton Wood, “The New Bobby Seale’s Old Politics,” Grassroots, July 1973, 14.
33. Former Panther JoNina Abron has argued that the self-determination philosophy expressed by former SNCC leader Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, published in 1967, “urged Black communities to develop experimental programs ‘out of day-to-day work out of the interaction between organizers and the communities in which they work’” (“‘Serving the People’”).
34. “Huey Newton Talks to the Movement,” in Foner, Black Panthers Speak, 64.
35. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: Free Press, 1969), xi.
36. Office of Economic Opportunity, Community Action Program Guide (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, October 1965). A comprehensive analysis and critique of CAP is offered in Kenneth B. Clark and Jeanne Hopkins, A Relevant War against Poverty: A Study of Community Action Programs and Observable Social Change (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).
37. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding.
38. Brown, Taste of Power, 149–50.
39. Clark and Hopkins, Relevant War against Poverty, especially chaps. 3, 4. In a postmortem of the CAP, Clark and Hopkins concluded that the programs may have helped more to create and sustain a class of black managers and professionals than to alleviate urban poverty. See also Self, “‘To Plan Our Liberation.’” For how this debate over community control played out with the federally backed medical clinics, see Lefkowitz, Community Health Centers, 11–13.
40. Quoted in Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 227.
41. Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 158.
42. Quoted in Brown, Taste of Power, 248–49.
43. Crowe, Prophets of Rage, 185. See also Self, “‘To Plan Our Liberation,’” 773. This association with federal programs continued. In 1972 Party members Erika Huggins, William Roberts, Andrea Jones, and Herman Smith were elected as board members of a Berkeley antipoverty program (“Panthers on Antipoverty Board,” Los Angeles Sentinel, June 22, 1972).
44. Crowe, Prophets of Rage, 179–81; Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, 46–50. According to Smith, a similar situation occurred in Mississippi in the early twentieth century with black midwives, who “reshaped” government intervention “to the benefit of black community health” (Sick and Tired, 118).
45. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, xvii.
46. Lefkowitz, Community Health Centers, 11.
47. Kenneth M. Ludmerer, Time to Heal: American Medical Education from the Turn of the Century to the Era of Managed Care (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), chap. 1. See also Starr, Social Transformation of American Medicine, 112–23.
48. Ludmerer, Time to Heal, xxii.
49. Byrd and Clayton, American Health Dilemma, 101.
50. Skloot, Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
51. Ludmerer, Time to Heal, 120.
52. Ibid.
53. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 90–91; Byrd and Clayton, American Health Dilemma, 452–59.
54. See, for example, “Sterilize Welfare Mothers?” Black Panther, May 1, 1971, 4.
55. Interview with author, March 18, 2009, Los Angeles.
56. Crowe, Prophets of Rage, 166; Self, “‘To Plan Our Liberation,’” 773.
57. Seale, Seize the Time, 412.
58. Bobby Seale, interview with Ronald Jemal Stephens and Clyde Robertson, 1989, cited in Crowe, Prophets of Rage, 219; see also page 223.
59. Seale, Seize the Time, 71–72. Brown recalls that Newton was also inspired by revolutionary struggles in Africa in which activists created “alternative institutions” including schools and hospitals” (Taste of Power, 303–4). See also Black Panther Party (guest editors), “Survival Programs of the Black Panther Party,” CoEvolution Quarterly 3 (Fall 1974).
60. Heath, Off the Pigs! 40.
61. Seale, Seize the Time, 62, 73, 99–106, 226; Marine, Black Panthers, 73, Foner, Black Panthers Speak, xix; Seale, Lonely Rage, 153, 157–58.
62. “Armed Negroes Protest Gun Bill,” New York Times, May 3, 1967; Wallace Turner, “Gun Is Power”; Stern, “Call of the Black Panthers,” 10; Seale, Seize the Time, 148–66. See also Seale, Lonely Rage, 166–74; and Terry Cannon, All Power to the People: The Story of the Black Panther Party (San Francisco: Peoples Press, 1970), 21.
63. Stern, “Call of the Black Panthers,” 11; Hampton and Fayer, Voices of Freedom, 372.
64. Seale, Seize the Time, 187.
65. Stern, “Call of the Black Panthers,” 11; Seale, Seize the Time, 228. Seale explained that local police sought to weaken the Party by harassing its leaders including Newton, Hilliard, and himself.
66. Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 141. Clayborne Carson writes, “As Newton awaited trial, the BPP concentrated its efforts on building mass support for his successful legal defense, and Eldridge Cleaver emerged as the Party’s major spokesman and the central figure in its relations with SNCC” (In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s[Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981], 279).
67. Heath, Off the Pigs! 3; Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 192–99.
68. Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 192–99; see also Heath, Off the Pigs! 67.
69. Seale, quoted in Hampton and Fayer, Voices of Freedom, 354; see also Foner, Black Panthers Speak, xix.
70. Hampton and Fayer, Voices of Freedom, 517.
71. “Panthers to Put Down Guns, Newton Says,” Los Angeles Times, January 31, 1972.
72. Terry Kupers, telephone interview with author, October 16, 2007.
73. Ibid.
74. The Portland chapter’s dental clinic was named for revered black leader Malcolm X.
75. “Panthers to Put Down Guns”; Heath, “New Strategies for the Period, 1969–1971,” in Off the Pigs! 82–115; Hampton and Fayer, Voices of Freedom, 517; Marine, Black Panthers, chap. 9.
76. Carol Rucker, “Interview of Carol Rucker by Lewis Cole,” Columbia University Black Panther Project (Alexandria, Va.: Alexander Street, 2005), 55.
77. Ibid.
78. “Panthers to Put Down Guns”; and Brown, Taste of Power, 220–23.
79. Eldridge Cleaver, “On Meeting the Needs of the People,” Black Panther, August 16, 1969, quoted in Foner, Black Panthers Speak, 167. See also Brown, Taste of Power, 233, 248–49; and Abron, “‘Serving the People,’” 179.
80. Hampton and Fayer, Voices of Freedom, 518; Black Panther, November 16, 1968; Heath, Off the Pigs! 84–85; Brown, Taste of Power, 248, 276; Abron, “‘Serving the People,’” 182. The name for this campaign of community service programs was borrowed from a phrase frequently used by Mao Zedong—“serving the people.” The influence of Mao on the philosophies of the Party is elaborated below.
81. Roy Wilkins, “The ‘New’ Panthers,” New York Post, February 26, 1972; Brown, Taste of Power, 247–49; and “Panthers to Put Down Guns.” The Party’s extensive “survival kit” of community programs was detailed in the CoEvolution Quarterly supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog in the fall of 1974. Newton required that new chapters of the Black Panther Party establish at least two of these four survival programs—Free Breakfast Program, Free Clothing Program, Free Health Clinic, Free Bussing Program (Huey P. Newton to Sastreo Yemanja, July 22, 1971, series 2, box 1, folder 21, Dr. Huey P. Newton Archives, Special Collections, Green Library, Stanford University).
82. Martha Gies, “A Father’s Story,” Portland Monthly, March 2005, 154. Ford is now president of a labor union in Portland, Oregon.
83. Rucker, “Interview.”
84. Austin, Up against the Wall, 140–42.
85. In a recent essay on the Black Panther Party titled “Global Solidarity,” Michael L. Clemons and Charles Jones situate the Party in an international context and show that the organization inspired radical imitators from as far away as India and the United Kingdom—the authors call them “global emulators”—who attached the Panther name to their local struggles. In turn, the Party was motivated, Clemons and Jones argue, by “a wide array of revolutionary theorists from Africa, Europe, Asia and Latin America,” including Mao, Guevara, and Fanon. See Clemons and Jones, “Global Solidarity: The Black Panther Party in an International Arena,” in Cleaver and Kastiaficas, Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party, 27. See also C. Guevara, “The Revolutionary War,” in Venceremos! The Speeches and Writings of Che Guevara, ed. J. Gerassi (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 27–88; and C. Guevara, “On Revolutionary Medicine,” in Gerassi, Venceremos! 112–19.
86. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 111.
87. Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 119–21, 140, 152, 163, 180, 183, 247, 267. Hilliard writes, “Fanon—and the Algerian Revolution—has provided our most important theoretical model” (247). In Seize the Time Seale claimed to have read The Wretched of the Earth on six occasions (25–26). For more on the role that Fanon’s, Mao’s, and Guevara’s writing played in the political theory of the Party, see Seale, Seize the Time, 26, 30–31, 34; and Brown, Taste of Power, 109, 112, 135–38, 245, 248, 251, 255, 285.
88. Members of the Party recall that Malcolm X was also an important source of inspiration. See, for example, Eldridge Cleaver, Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, ed. Robert Scheer (New York: Random House, 1967), 36. As a member of the Nation of Islam (NOI), Malcolm X encouraged black communities to develop their own institutions. See Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove, 1966), 5–7, 37–40. In his autobiography, Malcolm X distinguishes racial segregation “forced” on blacks by powerful whites from freely chosen separation in which blacks would supply their own “jobs, food, clothing and housing” (The Autobiography of Malcolm X[New York, Grove, 1965], 201–4). According to Manning Marable, Malcolm X’s post-NOI agenda was “reformist” and included “the election of independent black candidates for public office, voter registration drives, rent strikes to promote better housing conditions for blacks, the building of all-black community schools, the creation of cultural centers, and initiating black community and neighborhood self-defense” (Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1990, 2nd ed. [Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991], 90).
89. Guevara, “On Revolutionary Medicine,” 112.
90. Ernesto Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, ed. Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 79; Clemons and Jones, “Global Solidarity,” 28, 31.
91. Ernesto Che Guevara, Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1956–1958, ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder, 1996), 88–91. See also Ernesto Che Guevara, “The Duty of Revolutionary Medical Workers,” in Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution: Writings and Speeches of Ernesto Che Guevara (Sydney: Pathfinder, 1987), 124–32.
92. Guevara, “On Revolutionary Medicine,” 115.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid., 114.
95. See Fanon, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” in Wretched of the Earth, 249–310.
96. Eldridge Cleaver, “Psychology: The Black Bible,” in Post-Prison Writings and Speeches (New York: Vintage/Ramparts Books, 1967), 18–20. For the influence of Fanon on Cleaver’s thinking, see also Robert Scheer, introduction to Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, xi–xii. Seale recalls introducing Newton to the work of Fanon (Seize the Time, 25; see also Marine, Black Panthers, 31–32, 36). Seale writes, “Some brothers would come into the Party, and see us with guns, and they related only to the gun. But one of the things that the Party did from the very beginning was to sit brothers down and politically educate them. We assigned books and materials like The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Wretched of the Earth, and helped them to understand their constitutional rights and some basic points of law” (Seize the Time, 365).
97. Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 247.
98. Cleo Silvers, interview with author, August 4, 2007, New York. Brown recounts that in framing the Party “survival programs,” Newton was also inspired by “third world” revolutionary struggles, including the struggle in Mozambique where activists created “alternative institutions” including schools and hospitals (Taste of Power, 303–4).
99. Jock McCulloch, Black Soul, White Artifact: Fanon’s Clinical Psychology and Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 85.
100. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963), 296.
101. Ibid., 301.
102. Ibid., 284; and McCulloch, Black Soul, White Artifact, 107.
103. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 251. On the politicization and racialization of mental health issues in the mid-twentieth century, see Metzl, Protest Psychosis.
104. The name of the newsletter often varied from issue to issue: a March 25, 1970, issue was called Community News Bulletin; a March 11, 1970, issue was called the Black Panther Community News Bulletin; and a May 25, 1970, issue was called People’s News Service. Because most of the newsletters that I have access to were printed with the latter title, I have opted to use that one.
105. “Free Medical Clinic,” Community People’s News Service, March 25, 1970. Notably, this skepticism about whether African Americans could hope to receive adequate health care was voiced two years before the atrocities of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment were brought to public attention in a New York Times news article in July 1972. See also “Bunchy Carter Free Clinic,” January 19, 1970; “Medical Genocide,” People’s News Service, June 12, 1970.
106. People’s News Service, July 28, 1970.
107. Ibid.
108. McCulloch, Black Soul, White Artifact, 83.
109. Ibid., 82–85.
110. In their important work Black Power, Hamilton and Carmichael assert that although “Black people are legal citizens of the United States . . . they stand as colonial subjects in relation to white society. Thus institutional racism has another name: colonialism” (Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America[New York: Random House, 1967], 5). Cleaver used a colonial analogy to describe the status of black communities in the United States: “You have a black colony and you have a white mother country and . . . two different sets of political dynamics” (Eldridge Cleaver, “The Land Question and Black Liberation,” in Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, 57). See also “Huey P. Newton Speaks,” in Foner, Black Panthers Speak, 54–55.
111. Quotations from Chairman Mao, ed. Stuart Schram (New York: Praeger, 1967), 33.
112. Seale, Seize the Time, 82; Seale, Lonely Rage, 158; Foner, introduction, xv; and Newton, “Correct Handling of a Revolution,” in Black Panthers Speak, 44; Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 118–21, 247; Earl Anthony, Picking Up the Gun: A Report on the Black Panthers (New York: Dial, 1970), 1–3; Heath, 28, 148; and Seale, quoted in Hampton and Fayer, Voices of Freedom, 352. “The Red Book” or “The Little Red Book” was published in the United States in 1965 as Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. For an account of the use and significance of Mao’s ideas to the Party, see Seale, Seize the Time, 79–85; Seale, Lonely Rage, 158–59.
113. “Medicine and Fascism,” Black Panther, June 14, 1969.
114. Robin D. G. Kelley and Betsy Esch, “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution,” Souls 1 (Fall 1999): 8.
115. Schram, introduction to The Political Thought of Mao Tse-Tung (New York: Praeger, 1969), 15–149.
116. Mao Tse-Tung, “Serving the People,” in Schram, Quotations from Chairman Mao, 95–97; and Clemons and Jones, “Global Solidarity,” 28.
117. Schram, Quotations from Chairman Mao, 25; and Stuart Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-Tung (New York: Praeger, 1969), 108–9. Throughout Quotations, the category of “the people” was used to signal Mao’s interpretation of Marxist-Leninism, which held that the masses were rightly composed of the rural peasantry.
118. See Brown, Taste of Power, 231–32; Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 109–11; Small, interview with author, October 18, 2005, Oakland, California. See also “The RW Interview: Dr. Tolbert Small: Journey of a People’s Doctor,” Revolutionary Worker, February 17, 2002, http://www.rwor.org/a/v23/1130-39/1139/drsmall.htm.
119. “The Barefoot Doctors of Rural China” (dir. Diane Li; 1975). According to Party collaborator Dr. Tolbert Small, China’s “barefoot doctors” program was a model for the Panthers’ health politics (interview).
120. Norma Armour wrote a grant to purchase a van for the George Jackson PFMC. “I heard that the city had some money. I wrote a proposal to get money to buy a van for the clinic, so that we could do some local services. . . . So, I wrote it. And it was the first grant; I didn’t know anything about grant writing. I put something together and it got accepted. We started doing [healthcare] in the community in addition to being about to pick up patients and bring them to see the doctor” (interview).
121. Maurice J. Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, 3rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1999).
122. Kelley and Esch, “Black Like Mao,” 39.
123. According to Hilliard, other Party members’ travels to Cuba and China and their study of collectivist healthcare practices in these countries also shaped the direction of the organization’s health politics. See Brody, “Panthers Map a People’s Medical Plan,” 9.
124. Ibid.
125. Black Panther Party, “Black Panther Party Program,” 48–49.
3. The People’s Free Medical Clinics
1. “Death of a 4 Month Old Baby,” Black Panther, February 7, 1970.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. “Health Care—Pig Style,” Black Panther, February 7, 1970.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 15.
9. “The Opening of the Bobby Seale People’s Free Health Clinic,” Black Panther, May 15, 1971.
10. Abron, “‘Serving the People,’” 178, 184. Party minister of justice Ray “Masai” Hewitt announced the Party’s plan to extend the PFMC network in November 1969, several weeks prior to Seale’s mandate.
11. Black Panther Party, “People’s Free Medical Research Health Clinics,” 21. For more on the philosophy of community-based free clinics during this period, see “People’s Medicine: The Free Clinic Movement,” Grassroots, February 1973. See also Abron, “‘Serving the People,’” 149.
12. Interview, March 19, 2009.
13. Sheffield, “People’s Medical Care Center,” 174; “The Opening of the Bobby Seale People’s Free Medical Clinic,” Black Panther, May 15, 1971; “Racism and Red Blood Cells,” Black Panther, October 7, 1972, 5; and Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1987), 217.
14. An unnamed medical student volunteer at Winters People’s Free Medical Care Center in Chicago, quoted in “The Free Clinics; Ghetto Care Centers Struggle to Survive,” American Medical News, February 21, 1972, 12.
15. Epstein, Impure Science, 9–10.
16. Bazell, “Health Radicals,” 506–9; Beckwith, “The Radical Science Movement in the United States,” Monthly Review, July 1986, 118–19.
17. Irene R. Turner, “Free Health Clinics: A New Concept?” American Journal of Public Health 62 (October 1972): 1348. Turner was a leader of MCHR; see Mullan, White Coat, Clenched Fist, 53.
18. Cleo Silvers, interview with author, February 22, 2007, New York. See also Fitzhugh Mullan, telephone interview with the author, October 29, 2007.
19. Interview, February 22, 2007.
20. Lefkowitz, Community Health Centers. See also Constance Bloomfield and Howard Levy, “Underground Medicine: Ups and Downs of Free Clinics,” Ramparts, March 1972, 35–36.
21. A fine discussion of the women’s health movement is offered in Morgen, Into Our Own Hands. See also Ruzek, Women’s Health Movement. On the history and significance of the SHO, see Rogers, “‘Caution’”; and Bronston, interview. On the MCHR, see Dittmer, Good Doctors. On the “rainbow coalition,” see Sheffield, “People’s Medical Care Center,” 175; Miguel “Mickey” Melendez, We Took to the Streets: Fighting for Latino Rights with the Young Lords (New York: Macmillan, 2003), 85.
22. Or, as Armour put it, “We firmly believed that health care is a right and not a privilege” (interview).
23. “Health Radicals: Crusade to Shift Medical Power to the People,” Science 173 (1971): 508–9.
24. “The Free Clinics: Ghetto Care Centers Struggle to Survive,” American Medical News, February 21, 1972, 14.
25. Ibid., 13; “The Free Clinics Put It Together,” Medical World News, February 4, 1972, 15.
26. It also evolved in critical response to the community health center program initiated by the federal government in 1965 as I suggest in chapter 3. For a history of the federal neighborhood clinic program, see Lefkowitz, Community Health Centers, 36. On the “free clinic” movement that grew out of 1967’s Summer of Love, see Gregory L. Weiss, Grassroots Medicine: The Story of America’s Free Health Clinics (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 38–40. In his Good Doctors, Dittmer discusses how the experiences of MCHR members during Freedom Summer and afterward influenced the clinic movement in subsequent years.
27. “People’s Medicine: The Free Clinic Movement,” Grassroots, February 1973, 12.
28. McAdam, Freedom Summer; Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press, 1984.
29. Dittmer, Good Doctors, 31; Mullan, White Coat, Clenched Fist, 11–16.
30. Ibid.
31. Geiger became an important collaborator with the OEO on its federal community clinic program, as did the SHO, to sponsor medical summer projects in 1966 in California and in California, New York City, and Chicago, the following year (Mullan, White Coat, Clenched Fist, 57; Bronston, interview).
32. Dittmer, Good Doctors, chap. 8.
33. William Bronston, “Student Health Summer Project,” Health Rights: A Publication of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, Spring 1966, 12. See also Bronston, interview. The MCHR also came to work closely with the SHO, which for several years, beginning in 1966, contributed to the radical health movement stream of medical services and facilities. (Independent of the MCHR, SHO organized the Summer Health Projects (SHPs), short-term initiatives funded by the OEO, in which nursing, medical, and dental students worked in poor urban and rural communities, at clinics, public hospitals, and in migrant worker camps, to provide healthcare services for the poor.)
34. Interview with author, March 18, 2009, Los Angeles.
35. Weiss, Grassroots Medicine, 38–40.
36. “The Free Clinics: Ghetto Care Centers Struggle to Survive,” American Medical News, February 21, 1972, 13.
37. Armour, interview.
38. In the Party newspaper, for example, the organization was described as “the Vanguard of the American Revolution.” See Connie Matthews Tabor, “Intercommunal Solidarity Day for Chairman Bobby Seale,” Black Panther, January 23, 1971, 4.
39. The concept of the biocultural broker is introduced in Alondra Nelson, “The Inclusion and Difference Paradox: A Review of Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research by Steven Epstein,” Social Identities 15, no. 5 (2009): 741–43.
40. Elizabeth H. Harding, Charlene Harrington, and Gloria Jean Manor, “The Berkeley Free Clinic,” Nursing Outlook 21 (January 1973): 42.
41. Ibid.
42. Valerie A. Jones, “The White Coat: Why Not Follow Suit?” Journal of the American Association 281 (January 1999): 478.
43. Sheffield, “People’s Medical Care Center,” 84–85.
44. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove, 1988); Fanon, Wretched of the Earth; Joshua S. Horn, Away with All Pests: An English Surgeon in People’s China, 1954–1969 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970); and Schram, Quotations from Chairman Mao.
45. Mullan, interview.
46. Silvers, interview.
47. “Employed Persons by Occupation and Race: 1957–1969,” in Labor Force, Employment and Earnings (Washington, D.C.: Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, December 1969), 226–28. On the shortage of African American nurses and other nurses of color in the 1970s, see Marie F. Branch, “Catch Up or Keep Up? Ethnic Minorities in Nursing,” Urban Health (August 1977): 49–52. Courtesy of personal archive of Marie Branch, R.N., D.C.
48. The Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention of 1970 that was organized by the Party and attended by feminist groups, New Left groups, health radicals, and members of the “rainbow coalition,” as well as gay and lesbian rights activists, was indicative of the cross-fertilization I am highlighting (Church League of America, “The Black Panthers in Action,” 1969, Collection of Underground, Alternative, and Extremist Literature, 1900–1990, UCLA Special Collections). This report of the Party’s activities describes its collaborations with SDS and the MCHR among other groups.
49. Sheffield, “People’s Medical Care Center,” 174.
50. Ibid.
51. Harding, Harrington, and Manor, “Berkeley Free Clinic,” 42.
52. Ibid.
53. Interview.
54. Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, American Health Empire, 13.
55. Morgen, Into Our Hands, 4.
56. Epstein, Impure Science, 8–17.
57. Morgen, Into Our Own Hands. See also Ruzek, Women’s Health Movement.
58. Morgen, Into Our Own Hands, 22; see also chaps. 1, 2.
59. Armour, interview. See also “Free Pap Smear for Women,” People’s New Service (Black Panther Party Southern California Chapter), June 30, 1970.
60. Armour, interview.
61. Mullan, White Coat, Clenched Fist.
62. William Bronston, “Medical Committee for Human Rights Preliminary Position Paper on National Health Care, September 1971,” William Bronston, M.D., papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
63. Goldberg, “Panthers after the Trial,” 26–27.
64. “Black Panther Party Plans Health Clinics,” Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1969, 24; “Black Panthers Set Up Clinics,” Washington Post, November 26, 1969.
65. Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 339; “The Sickle Cell ‘Game’: Phoney Foundations Try to Sabotage Black Panther Party’s Sickle Cell Program,” Black Panther, May 27, 1972; Abron, “‘Serving the People,’” 184; Daniel Joseph Willis, “A Critical Analysis of Mass Political Education and Community Organization as Utilized by the Black Panther Party as a Means for Effecting Social Change” (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, 1976), 77–80; Williams, Black Politics/White Power, chap. 7; Marine, Black Panthers, chap. 5, 180–83. Details about the formation of the Chicago Party are provided in Hampton and Fayer, Voices of Freedom, 519–38. The Berkeley PFMC opened in May 1971; see “The Opening of the Bobby Seale People’s Free Health Clinic,” Black Panther, May 15, 1971. The Portland PFMC opened in 1969. For details on this clinic, see Martha Gies, “Radical Treatment,” Reed Magazine, Winter 2009, http://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/winter2009/features/radical_treatment/index.html. The Seattle clinic opened in December of that same year: “A doctor helped to found and operate the clinic, which was open two days per week, a former Seattle Panther said, but lack of privacy and the presence of Panthers with guns tended to discourage community use of the facility. Services offered involved ‘referrals’ more often than treatment” (98–99). Heath noted that there was also a clinic in the Brooklyn branch of the New York City branch of the Party (Off the Pigs! 98–99). On the Kansas City clinic, see Black Panther, August 16, 1969; and Black Panther, September 13, 1969; Testimony of Reverend Phillip C. Lawson, Committee on Internal Security, Public Hearing on the Black Panther Party, March 4, 1970, 2638, 2672, U.S. House of Representatives; Testimony of Walter Parker, Committee on Internal Security, Public Hearing on the Black Panther Party, March 5, 1970, 2699, U.S. House of Representatives; Testimony of Everett P. O’Neal, Committee on Internal Security, Public Hearing on the Black Panther Party, March 7, 1970, 2752–2753, U.S. House of Representatives; and Testimony of Richard A. Shaw, Committee on Internal Security, Public Hearing on the Black Panther Party, March 10, 1970, 2780, U.S. House of Representatives.
66. Dennis Levitt, “Panthers Open Free Clinic,” Los Angeles Free Press, January 2, 1970, 3; Kupers, interview. “Bunchy” Carter was deputy minister of defense of the Southern California chapter of the Party who was shot to death at the University of California, Los Angeles, in January 1969 during a dispute with the US Organization led by Ron Karenga (Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 237–41; Brown, Taste of Power, chap. 8).
67. On the formation of the PFMCs, see “Bunchy Carter Free Clinic”; People’s Health Center Vandalized,” Black Panther, April 3, 1971, 3; Brown, Taste of Power, 181; Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret War against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston: South End, 1988), 69; G. Louis Heath, ed., “Activities and Programs,” in The Black Panther Leaders Speak (New York: Scarecrow, 1976), 127. On New Haven, see Williams, “No Haven,” 272.
68. “The Black Panther Party Announces . . . The Grand Opening of the Bobby Seale People’s Free Health Clinic Saturday April 24th, 1971” (flyer). Courtesy of Billy X Jennings and It’s About Time Black Panther Party.
69. “Dr. Tolbert Small: Journey of a People’s Doctor.”
70. John Saar, “Health Clinic Is Opened by Panthers,” Washington Post, May 21, 1974.
71. Goldberg, “Panthers after the Trial,” 27.
72. Andrew Witt, The Black Panthers in the Midwest: The Community Programs and Services of the Black Panther Party in Milwaukee, 1966–1977 (New York: Routledge, 2007), 62–63. Several ex-Panthers went on to found another free health center—not affiliated with the Party—in that city in 1970.
73. “Black Panther Party Plans Health Clinics,” Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1969.
74. Turner, “Free Health Clinics,” 1349.
75. Brody, “Panthers Map a People’s Health Plan,” 9.
76. Taressa Stone, “The Sidney Miller Clinic—Breakfast and More,” University of Washington Daily, April 27, 1978; Judith Black, “Panthers’ Progress,” Seattle Times, October 24, 1986.
77. In this way, the Party shared the challenges faced by all free clinics. See Bloomfield and Levy, “Underground Medicine,” 35–42.
78. Interview with author, March 19, 2009, Los Angeles.
79. Brody, “Panthers Map a People’s Medical Plan,” 9.
80. Ibid.
81. Cox, quoted in Brody, “Panthers Map a People’s Medical Plan,” 9.
82. Ibid.
83. Interview with author, December 6, 2008, Savannah, Georgia.
84. At the school, children also had their sight and hearing screened and received glasses and auditory aids, if necessary. Armour, interview; also Brown, interview, December 6, 2008.
85. Brown, interview with author, December 6, 2008; also Armour, interview; and Small, interview with author, May 12, 2006, Oakland, California.
86. Interview with author, December 6, 2008.
87. Saar, “Health Clinic Is Opened by Panthers.”
88. Sheffield, “People’s Medical Care Center,” 174.
89. “Interview of Dr. Tolbert Small by Lewis Cole,” Columbia University Black Panther Project (1990; repr. Alexandria, Va.: Alexander Street Press, 2005), 23. See also Heike Kleffner, “The Black Panthers: Interviews with Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt and Mumia Abu-Jamal,” Race and Class 35 (1993): 9–26.
90. Untitled police report on the arrest of Nelson Malloy in Nevada in October 1977, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University.
91. Seale, Lonely Rage, 177.
92. Brown elevated many women to positions of power in the Party after becoming chairwoman in 1974. Her staffing decisions were met with complaints from male Party members. See Brown, Taste of Power, 362.
93. Jules Boykoff and Martha Gies, “‘We’re going to defend ourselves’: The Portland Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Local Media Response,” Oregon Historical Quarterly (Fall 2010): 290.
94. Levitt, “Panthers Open Free Clinic”; Kupers, interview; Brown, Taste of Power, 215, emphasis added; and Shakur, Assata, 198, 216–17. Joan Bird was a student at Bronx Community College (Angela D. LeBlanc-Ernest, “‘The Most Qualified Person to Handle the Job’: Black Panther Party Women, 1966–1982,” in Jones, Black Panther Party, 311, 313). Shakur and Bird were part of the group of Panthers known as the New York 21, who were arrested in April 1969, on charges of conspiring to bomb several locations in the city.
95. Saar, “Health Clinic Is Opened by Panthers.”
96. Williams, “No Haven,” 272–73.
97. Tracye Matthews, “‘No One Ever Asks, What a Man’s Place in the Revolution Is’: Gender and the Politics of the Black Panther Party, 1966–1971,” in Jones, Black Panther Party, 267–304. On gender in black health advocacy, see also Smith, Sick and Tired.
98. Smith, Sick and Tired.
99. For the most part, the gender dynamics of the Party’s health activism fits with Smith’s assessment of women’s roles and gender in black health advocacy more generally. Though Smith’s focus is on six decades preceding the Party’s medical advocacy, several characterizations of black women’s health activism were consistent with the Party. For example, Smith notes that women were often leaders of black health programs and also “formed the backbone of the black health movement” as grassroots organizers. Black women’s centrality to health initiatives owed partly to “their influence on the physical and moral health of their families.” See Smith, Sick and Tired, 1.
100. Elichi Tsuchida to Huey P. Newton, February 21, 1972, and Huey P. Newton to Elichi Tsuchida, February 23, 1972, Dr. Huey P. Newton Papers, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University.
101. Abron, “‘Serving the People,’” 184.
102. Small, interview with author, February 26, 2006, Oakland, California.
103. Small, interview with author, October 8, 2007, Oakland, California.
104. Small, interview with author, February 26, 2006, Oakland, California.
105. Gies, “Radical Treatment.”
106. Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 259, Seale, Seize the Time, 414; “Racism and Red Blood Cells,” Black Panther, October 7, 1972; and “The Opening of the Bobby Seale People’s Free Health Clinic,” Black Panther, May 15, 1971. Black medical students from Stanford University were inspired by the Party’s efforts to begin their own screening program led by Don Williams (Anonymous and Don Williams, “Combatting Genocide, Part III/Origin of Sickle Cell Anemia and G6PD Deficiency,” Black Panther, December 4, 1971). In 1970 the medical staff of the Chicago chapter’s clinic consisted of “10 doctors, twelve nurses, and two registered technicians” as well as interns “from medical schools around the city” (Sheffield, “People’s Medical Care Center,” 174). Volunteers—physicians and community members—were also critical to the operation of the Berkeley and Oakland clinics. See “Dr. Tolbert Small: Journey of a People’s Doctor,” 6.
107. Brody, “Panthers Map a People’s Medical Plan,” 9.
108. The Willowbrook State School was an infamous New York State institution for mentally disabled children. Mike Wilkins and several other doctors were fired in 1971 protesting and exposing the decrepit conditions at the school. Public outrage over the conditions at Willowbrook spurred legislators to pass the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act of 1980.
109. McClanahan was well known for exposing the atrocity of the war with photographs of Vietnamese children who had been burned by U.S. troops with the chemical weapon napalm that were published in Ramparts magazine.
110. Michael Wilkins, interview with author, August 19, 2007, New York.
111. Richard Fine and Phillip Shapiro to Mr. Henry W. Kerr, Chairman, Adult Authority, June 29, 1973, Huey P. Newton Collection, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University. On incarcerated Party members in need of medical attention, see also William J. Drummond, “Panthers in Jail Fight Need Medical Aid, Doctor Reports,” Los Angeles Times, February 8, 1970.
112. Small, interview with author, October 8, 2007.
113. Sheffield, “People’s Medical Care Center,” 174.
114. “Interview of Dr. Tolbert Small by Lewis Cole,” 21.
115. Ibid.
116. “Fred Hampton Memorial Clinic Offers Free Health Services,” TK Press, April 29, 1970; “People’s Clinic from Panthers and HEALTH-RAP,” Williamette Bridge 11 (October 1970): 7.
117. “Fred Hampton Memorial Clinic Offers Free Health Services.”
118. Sheffield, “People’s Medical Care Center,” 174; Bronston, interview.
119. Sheffield, “People’s Medical Care Center,” 174; “The Opening of the Bobby Seale People’s Free Medical Clinic,” Black Panther, May 15, 1971; “Racism and Red Blood Cells,” Black Panther, October 7, 1972; and Shakur, Assata, 217.
120. “Bunchy Carter Free Clinic.” This was the case in New Haven, Connecticut, where the community clinic established by the Party in 1971 continued after the Party dissolved there in 1983. See Williams, “No Haven,” 274, 279.
121. “People’s Clinic from Panthers and HEALTH-RAP,” 1.
122. “Fred Hampton Memorial Clinic Offers Free Health Services”; “The Black Panther Party Free Health Clinic” (flyer), Seattle Black Heritage Society.
123. Levitt, “Panthers Open Free Clinic.”
124. Turner, “Free Health Clinics,” 1350. The Chicago PFMC reopened in January 1970 as the Spurgeon “Jake” Winters People’s Free Medical Care Center; it was named in honor of a chapter member who had been spearheading the work of the clinic before he was killed during an altercation with police in November 1969. See “Illinois Panthers Rebuild Office,” Second City 2, no. 2 (August 1969): 5, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.
125. Quoted in Gies, “Radical Treatment.”
126. Interview with author, February 26, 2006, Oakland, California.
127. Interview.
128. Ibid.
129. Interview with author, March 18, 2009, Los Angeles.
130. “Black Panther Party Plans Health Clinics,” Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1969.
131. See Black Panther, August 16, 1969, and September 13, 1969; Reynaldo Anderson, “The Kansas City Black Panther Party and the Repression of the Black Revolution,” in On the Ground: The Black Panther Party in Communities across America, ed. Judson L. Jeffries (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 101–2. See also Testimony of Reverend Phillip C. Lawson; Testimony of Walter Parker; Testimony of Everett P. O’Neal; and Testimony of Richard A. Shaw.
132. Michael Wilkins, interview with author, August 19, 2007, New York.
133. Charles E. Jones, “Arm Yourself or Harm Yourself: People’s Party II and the Black Panther Party in Houston, Texas,” in Jeffries, On the Ground, 25–26.
134. Stone, “Sidney Miller Clinic,” 4.
135. Ibid.
136. Mullan, White Coat, Clenched Fist, 44; “Black Panthers Set Up Clinics.”
137. “Fred Hampton Memorial Clinic Offers Free Health Services”; William C. Davis, telephone interview with the author, October 10, 2007.
138. Jeffrey Zane and Judson L. Jeffries, “A Panther Sighting in the Pacific Northwest: The Seattle Chapter of the Black Panther Party,” in Jeffries, On the Ground, 73.
139. “Work Ledger (1971),” courtesy of Tolbert Small; see also Small, interview with author, May 12, 2006, Oakland, California.
140. Simon Anekwe, “St. Matthew’s Host to Panther Show,” Afro-American Journal, April 16, 1970, 7.
141. Williams, “No Haven,” 272.
142. Saar, “Health Clinic Is Opened by Panthers.”
143. “Illinois Panthers Rebuild Office,” Second City 2, no. 2 (August 1969): 5, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. The Chicago PFMC reopened in January 1970 as the Spurgeon “Jake” Winters People’s Free Medical Care Center.
144. Saar, “Health Clinic Is Opened by Panthers.”
145. Black Panther Party, “People’s Free Medical Research Health Clinics,” 21; Stone, “Sidney Miller Clinic—Breakfast and More,” 5.
146. Kupers, interview.
147. Interview with author, March 19, 2009.
148. “Interview of Dr. Tolbert Small by Lewis Cole,” 25.
149. Ibid.
150. Stone, “Sidney Miller Clinic—Breakfast and More”; Judith Black, “Panthers’ Progress,” Seattle Times, October 24, 1986.
151. Branch, interview with author, March 18, 2009, Los Angeles.
152. Roz Payne, interview with the author, August 4, 2007, New York.
153. Ibid.
154. “Black Panthers Set Up Clinics.”
155. “‘Bunchy Carter Free Clinic,” Community News Service.
156. Ibid.
157. Davis, telephone interview; “New Medical Clinic Opens in Albina to Provide Neighborhood Health Care,” Oregonian, January 13, 1970 (courtesy of Dr. William C. Davis). One article suggests that the activists did not initially intend to use state and federal funding. See “People’s Clinic from Panthers and HEALTH-RAP,” 1.
158. Interview with author, March 19, 2009.
159. “People’s Clinic from Panthers and HEALTH-RAP.”
160. Zane and Jeffries, “Panther Sighting,” 79.
161. Gies, “Father’s Story,” 156.
162. Ibid., 191.
163. Cannon, All Power to the People, 35; Williams, “No Haven,” 272; “Black Panther Party to Provide Free Sickle Cell Anemia Test to Blacks,” Medium (Seattle), December 17, 1970; and Abron, “‘Serving the People,’” 184. Similarly, Bay Area medical clinics were staffed by local doctors and medical students who volunteered their services (Seale, Seize the Time, 414). Heath writes that the Oakland medical clinic “depended upon community donations of money, medical supplies, and professional services” (Off the Pigs! 98); “Fred Hampton Memorial Clinic Offers Free Health Services.”
164. On the Seattle chapter’s well-baby clinic, see Zane and Jeffries, “Panther Sighting,” 74.
165. Kupers, interview.
166. Ibid.
167. Ibid.
168. From the Bridge, quoted in Gies, “Radical Treatment.”
169. Kupers, interview.
170. Ibid.
171. Heath, Off the Pigs! 98–99.
172. Patient advocates were common in community clinics in this period. See Rogers, “‘Caution,’” 18; and Turner, “Free Health Clinics,” 1349.
173. Turner, “Free Health Clinics,” 1349.
174. Telephone interview with author, October 16, 2007.
175. Davis, telephone interview.
176. Levitt, “Panthers Open Free Clinic.”
177. Benjamin R. Friedman, “Picking Up Where Robert F. Williams Left Off,” in Comrades: The Local History of the Black Panther Party, ed. Judson L. Jeffries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 47–88.
178. “Free Ambulance Service,” Black Panther, June 26, 1971, 7; and J. Smithe, comments, Black Panther Party Fortieth Anniversary conference, October 14, 2006, Oakland, California.
179. Larry Little, quoted in Friedman, “Picking Up Where Robert F. Williams Left Off,” 74.
180. Friedman, “Picking Up Where Robert F. Williams Left Off,” 74.
181. Ibid., 76.
182. “The Legacy of the Black Panther Party,” It’s About Time 5 (Fall–Winter 2001): 20; Friedman, “Picking Up Where Robert F. Williams Left Off,” 75.
183. Leigh Somerville McMillan, “Exhibit Tells Story of Winston-Salem’s Black Panther Party,” Winston-Salem Journal, September 11, 2007; and “Legacy of the Black Panther Party,” 20.
184. Davis, telephone interview; Willa Bee Holmes, “Fred Hampton Memorial Clinic Offers Free Health Services.”
185. “Fred Hampton Memorial Clinic Offers Free Health Services.”
186. Gies, “Father’s Story,” 156.
187. Ibid., 191.
188. Boykoff and Gies, “‘We’re going to defend ourselves,’” 290.
189. Turner, “Free Health Clinics.”
190. Ronald Kozoil, “Move against Panther Clinic,” Chicago Tribune, January 21, 1970; also see Turner, “Free Health Clinics,” 1351.
191. “2 Panther Clinic Medics Oppose Licensing by City,” Chicago Tribune, February 20, 1970.
192. Ibid.
193. Ibid.
194. Boykoff and Gies, “‘We’re going to defend ourselves,’” 303.
195. Williams, “No Haven,” 272.
196. Marie Branch, “Prisoners Are Denied Health Rights” (pamphlet/flyer), December 30, 1969.
197. Marie Branch, Black Panther Party Clinic Meeting Notes, December 7, 1969, personal papers of Marie Branch, Ph.D., in author’s possession.
198. Levitt, “Panthers Open Free Clinic.”
199. Davis, telephone interview.
4. Spin Doctors
1. Seale, Lonely Rage, 224; Bobby Seale to Eve Kenley, April 5, 1972, series 1, box 4, folder 9, Dr. Huey P. Newton Archives, Special Collections, Green Library, Stanford University; Dick Hallgren, “Black Panthers Draw Big Crowd,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 30, 1972. The second day of the conference took place at Oakland’s Greenman Field and the third at San Pablo Park. See also Brown, Taste of Power, 185–86. See also Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 298. Bobby Hutton was the first Party member, besides Seale and Newton; he was killed in a shooting incident with Oakland police on April 6, 1968.
2. Black Panther, April 1, 1972; and Seale to Kenley. The mainstream press confirmed that the conference had significant attendance; on March 27 Oakland Auditorium was at “near capacity” of just over five thousand. See “Black Panthers Draw Big Crowd,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 30, 1972. In the United States, on average, one in twelve persons carry the recessive genetic trait for sickling.
3. Seale, Lonely Rage, 224. On mobile medical units, see Seale’s appearance on The Mike Douglas Show, February 12, 1972. A mobile unit was used by the Chicago Party to conduct sickle cell anemia testing. See “Will the Real Sickle Cell Program Please Come Forward,” Black Panther, February 2, 1972.
4. Michael G. Michaelson, “Sickle Cell Anaemia: ‘An Interesting Pathology,’” in Anti-Racist Science Teaching, ed. Dawn Gill and Les Levidow (London: Free Association Books, 1987), 62–69.
5. The word “crisis” in reference to sickling was coined by the physician V. P. Sydenstricker.
6. C. Lockard Conley, “Sickle Cell Anemia: The First Molecular Disease,” in Blood, Pure and Eloquent, ed. Maxwell M. Wintrobe (New York: McGraw Hill, 1980), 325. In 1972 the noted geneticist, sickle cell anemia researcher, and activist James E. Bowman characterized the many factors involved in establishing screening programs as a “sickle cell crisis” (“Sickle Cell Screening—Medical-Legal, Ethical, Psychological, and Social Problems: A Sickle Cell Crisis,” First International Conference on the Mental Health Aspects of Sickle Cell Anemia [Rockville, Md.: National Institutes of Mental Health, 1974]). See also Michaelson, “Sickle Cell Anaemia,” 64.
7. For example, “Neglect of Black Disease Sickle Cell Anemia,” Medium, December 3, 1970.
8. Brown, Taste of Power, 223; and Williams, “No Haven,” 271–74.
9. This act, Public Law 92-294, which was unanimously approved by both the U.S Senate and House of Representatives, was passed on May 16, 1972.
10. Petryna defines “biological citizenship” as a special status or practice that arises from a “subsystem of the state’s public health and welfare infrastructure where increasingly poor citizens . . . mobilize around their claims . . . of injury.” See Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 5. Kessler-Harris, “In Pursuit of Economic Citizenship.”
11. On the various epistemologies of sickling, see Tapper, In the Blood.
12. Todd Savitt, “The Invisible Malady: Sickle Cell Anemia in America, 1910–1970,” Journal of the National Medical Association 73 (1981): 739. See also B.J. Culliton, “Sickle Cell Anemia: The Route from Obscurity to Prominence,” Science 178, no. 4057 (1972): 138–42.
13. Savitt, “Invisible Malady,” 744. Although, in 1959 a popular African American issues magazine ran the college student Marclan A. Walker’s first-person account of her life with sickle cell anemia. See “I’m Living on Borrowed Time,” Ebony 14 (January 1959): 41–42, 44–46.
14. Savitt, “Invisible Malady,” 745.
15. See, for example, “The People’s Fight against Sickle Cell Anemia Begins,” Black Panther, May 22, 1971; and “Black Genocide: Sickle Cell Anemia,” Black Panther, April 10, 1971.
16. “Medicine and Fascism,” Black Panther, June 14, 1969; and Brody, “Panthers Map a People’s Medical Plan.”
17. Robert B. Scott, “Health Care Priority and Sickle Cell Anemia,” Journal of the American Medical Association 214 (1970): 731.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 733.
20. Ibid.
21. The foundation was also referred to as the People’s Sickle Cell Anemia Fund.
22. For example, Small and Williams met at Stanford on November 6, 1971 (“Work Ledger”).
23. A short item requesting donation for the foundation stated “the Party is initiating a program to help research really begin that can eventually discover the cure” (Black Panther, May 1, 1971; see also “Fight against Sickle Cell Anemia, Black Panther, June 26, 1971).
24. For example, one solicitation for donations to support the sickle cell anemia campaign sought support to initiate “a program to help research really begin that can eventually discover the cure . . . a fund has been established for this purpose” (Black Panther, May 1, 1971).
25. Tolbert S. Small, interview with author, October 18, 2005, Oakland, California; see also Black Panther Party, “Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation,” CoEvolution Quarterly 3 (Fall 1974): 23.
26. Small, interview.
27. For example, “Combatting Genocide”; Williams, Black Panther, December 4, 1971.
28. One such solicitation carried the heading, “You Can Help Destroy One of the Attempts to Commit Black Genocide”(Black Panther, May 1, 1971). I was unable to locate any information to suggest that the Party’s planned research foundation ever initiated research projects, although in an issue of the CoEvolution Quarterly edited by the Party, it claimed to “maintain a national advisory committee of doctors to research” the disease (“Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation,” 23).
29. Black Panther Party, “Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation,” 23; Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, November 15, 1975.
30. Gies, “Father’s Story,” 190.
31. L. Pauling, H. Itano, S. Singer, and I. Wells, “Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease,” Science 110 (1949): 543–48. For accounts of the meeting with the physician William Castle, which led Pauling to investigate sickle cell anemia, see Linus Pauling, In His Own Words: Selected Writings, Speeches, and Interviews, ed. Barbara Marinacci (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 116–18; and Conley, “Sickle Cell Anemia,” 338–46. On electrophoresis, see Stuart J. Edelstein, The Sickled Cell: From Myths to Molecules (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 92–93; Conley, “Sickle Cell Anemia,” 338–42. See also Wailoo, Drawing Blood, 155.
32. On electrophoresis, see Edelstein, Sickled Cell, 92–93; Conley, “Sickle Cell Anemia,” 338–42. See also Wailoo, Drawing Blood, 155.
33. Davis, telephone interview.
34. Ibid. Elaine Ayala, “Black Inventor Busts Stereotypes,” San Antonio Express-News, February 26, 2006, http://mysanantonio.com/default/article/Black-Inventor-busts-Stereotypes.php.
35. Davis, telephone interview.
36. “Interview of Dr. Tolbert Small by Lewis Cole,” 8; Adam Bernstein, “Roland B. Scott Dies; Sickle Cell Researcher,” Washington Post, December 12, 2002.
37. “Interview of Dr. Tolbert Small by Lewis Cole,” 22; Kimberly Hayes Taylor, “Remembering a Pioneer: Dr. Charles Whitten,” Detroit News, September 5, 2008, http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID =/20080905/OBITUARIES/809050405/1263/OBITUARIES.
38. Bert Small, e-mail correspondence with author, March 10, 2009; Kupers, interview; Davis, telephone interview.
39. Quoted in Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 383.
40. Scott, “Health Care Priority and Sickle Cell Anemia,” 733.
41. Ibid.
42. Wailoo, Drawing Blood.
43. Hearings before the Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare of the United States, Ninety-Second Congress, S.676, To Provide for the Prevention of Sickle Cell Anemia, November 11, 12 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), 20.
44. “People’s Fight against Sickle Cell Anemia Begins.” Similar sentiment appears in an earlier article as well: see “Black Genocide.”
45. Small, interview with author, May 12, 2006; Tolbert Small, personal notes from SCA campaign tour (copy in author’s possession); “Dr. Tolbert Small: Journey of a People’s Doctor,” 6. Satchel, who had been minister of health (sometimes referred to as deputy minister of medicine) for the Chicago Party, came to the Bay Area shortly after the Panthers Mark Clark and Fred Hampton were murdered as they slept during a raid by the Chicago police department in December 1969; Satchel was shot and seriously injured in this incident.
46. “People’s Fight against Sickle Cell Anemia Begins.”
47. “Sickle Cell Anemia: From Despair to Hope,” Black Panther, April 1, 1972.
48. Stepan and Gilman, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science.” I return to this discussion below.
49. Black Panther Party, “Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation,” 23; Michael G. Michaelson, “Sickle Cell Anemia: An ‘Interesting Pathology,’” in Anti-Racist Science Teaching, ed. Dawn Gill and Les Levidow (London: Free Association Books, 1987), 62–63.
50. Including Health and Community Action Committee, “People’s Health Center Vandalized,” April 3, 1971, 3; “Black Genocide”; “You Can Help Destroy One of the Attempts to Commit Black Genocide—Fight Sickle Cell Anemia,” May 1, 1971, 12; “Free Sickle Cell Anemia Tests,” June 5, 1971, 6; “Twenty-Five Doctors Have Not Helped Sickle Cell Victim,” August 14, 1971, 4; “‘So, He Has Sickle Cell Anemia,’” September 25, 1971; Williams, “Combatting Genocide,” 3–4, 17–18; “Sickle Cell Anemia: From Despair to Hope,” April 1, 1972; “Sickle Cell ‘Game’”; “Phoney Sickle Cell Group Conspires with Police in Panther Arrests! Bobby Seale Exposes Los Angeles Sickle Cell Foundation’s Treachery,” Black Panther,” August 19, 1972, 3, 9–10; “Racism and Red Blood Cells,” October 7, 1972, 5, 13; and “BPP Trains Houstonians for Free Medical Testing Program,” June 22, 1974, 5.
51. For example, the Party served as guest editors of the West Coast alternative press magazine the CoEvolution Quarterly, and used this publication as a platform to detail all of its community service programs, including its ambulance service, sickle cell anemia campaign, and health clinics. The Boston chapter of the Party broadcast a half-hour show on sickle cell anemia in 1971 on the local Public Broadcasting Service affiliate, WGBH (to the consternation of some) during which it “charge[d] that the medical profession has ignored the disease because it almost exclusively afflicts blacks.” See “A TV Channel Gives Prime Time to Anyone with a Cause or Gripe,” Wall Street Journal, December 16, 1971.
52. Sickle cell anemia disease results from the presence of recessive traits in both parents. When this is the case, there is a 50 percent chance of a child being a carrier of the sickle cell trait (heterozygous), a 25 percent chance that the child will contract the disease (homozygous), and a 25 percent chance that the child will be completely unaffected. Recent figures indicate that one in five hundred (or 0.2 percent) persons of African descent have sickle cell anemia disease and that one in twelve (or approximately 8 percent) carry the genetic trait (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, “Sickle Cell Anemia,” 1996, http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/sicklecellanemia.html). Individuals who are carriers of the sickle cell trait typically show no symptoms of the disease or experience no ill effects from their carrier status.
53. “Sickle Cell Anemia: From Despair to Hope,” Black Panther, April 1, 1972; and Williams, “Combatting Genocide.”
54. Despite the decidedly middle-brow nature of his show, Douglas was no stranger to the concerns of African American communities, having hosted both Martin Luther Jr. and Malcolm X a few years prior.
55. By “authentic expertise” I refer to the legitimacy vested in medical professionals and scientific researchers by lay communities based on shared cultural experiences or histories and scientific authority. See Alondra Nelson, “The Factness of Diaspora: The Social Sources of Genetic Genealogy,” in Revisiting Race in a Genomics Era, ed. Barbara Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah Richardson (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 253–70.
56. Williams’s work with the Party included writing articles, including some of the very few bylined in its newspaper. See, for example, Williams, “Combatting Genocide.” This article encapsulated the substance of Williams’s presentation on The Mike Douglas Show.
57. Tapper, Drawing Blood, 3–4. He writes, “Throughout the twentieth century, sickling has emerged and reemerged at the intersection of a variety of medical, genetic, serological, anthropological, personal, and administrative discourses on whiteness, hybridity, tribes and citizenship.”
58. Brown, interview, December 6, 2008.
59. Black Panther Party, “Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation,” 7.
60. Ibid., 24.
61. Michael Tabor, The Plague: Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide (Party pamphlet); “The Sterilization Bill,” Black Panther, March 13, 1971; “Sterilize Welfare Mothers?” Black Panther, May 1, 1971; and “‘They Told Me I Had to Be Sterilized or Die’: Racist Doctors Try to Give Black Panther Party Comrade Genocidal Hysterectomy,” Black Panther, July 15, 1972.
62. Jonathan Spivak, “Boon or Bane for Blacks? The Battle against Sickle-Cell Anemia Progresses, But It Brings Some Problems Along with Results,” Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2008; Howard Markel, “Appendix 6: Scientific Advances and Social Risks: Historical Perspectives on Genetic Screening Programs for Sickle Cell Disease, Tay-Sachs Disease, Neural Tube Defects, and Down Syndrome, 1970–1997,” in Promoting Safe and Effective Genetic Testing in the United States: Final Report of the Task Force on Genetic Testing, ed. Neil A. Holtzman and Michael Watson (Washington, D.C.: Human Genome Research Institute, 1997), 165; Bowman, “Sickle Cell Screening,” 40–54. However, the October 7, 1972, issue of the Black Panther included a reprint of an article from the alternative paper the Chicago Guide by now-renowned journalist Edwin Black about its sickle cell anemia campaign that was critical of the city’s board of health for failing to provide genetic counseling to those to whom it had administered genetic tests. The article stated that “obviously, if both parents have the trait, they could have been counseled against further contraception and on how to care for their offspring, should the children be diseased. Although the article was not authored by the Party, its reprinting suggested the Party’s endorsement and undercut its accusations of state genocide. See “Racism and Red Blood Cells,” Black Panther, October 7, 1972.
63. On the concept of “life itself,” see Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). For Foucault, the state’s ability “to make live and to let die” are expressions of “biopower” in the modernity.
64. “People’s Fight against Sickle Cell Anemia Begins.”
65. William L. Patterson, ed., We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government against the Negro People (1951; repr. New York: International Publishers, 1970), xiv. Although the UN did not respond to the report, owing to pressure from the American delegation, it received widespread attention in the domestic and international press. Two similar petitions, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, were submitted to the UN in the 1940s.
66. Patterson, We Charge Genocide, xiv.
67. Spivak, “Boon or Bane for Blacks?” 22.
68. “Black Genocide.”
69. Tolbert Small, “Address to Li’l [sic] Bobby Hutton Day Celebration,” Commemorator, May 2005, 4.
70. “Black Genocide.” Slavery and sickling were frequently associated in the organization’s written media. One item, for example, stated that the “disease originated primarily as the body’s own protection from malaria—before black people were carted here from Africa to become slaves.” See “So, He Has Sickle Cell Anemia.” This article, moreover, frames sickle cell anemia as a problem of the black “nation” in its totality, though it affects relatively small numbers of people of African descent. In the United States, one in twelve blacks have the sickle cell anemia trait, and one in four hundred to five hundred persons have the disease. As such, sickle cell anemia was depicted as a disease of the African American body politics, with the individual body in “crisis” standing in for the all blacks. For more on sickling as an ill of the “black social body,” see Tapper, In the Blood, 104.
71. Anthony C. Allison, “Protection Afforded by Sickle-Cell Trait against Subtertian Malarial Infection,” British Medical Journal, February 6, 1954, 290–94. The sickling of red blood cells in those with the sickle cell anemia trait inhibits the growth of the malaria parasite. See also Anthony Allison, “The Distribution of the Sickle-Cell Anemia Trait in East Africa and Elsewhere, and Its Apparent Relationship to the Incidence of Subtertian Malaria,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 48 (1954): 312–18; and Con-ley, “Sickle Cell Anemia,” 331. Tapper notes that Allison’s observation was a product of the project of colonial medicine. He writes, “The natural selection approach owed much to colonial medicine, as did the migration-miscegenation discourse. . . . Traveling throughout the British colonies, he [Allison] had long been involved in the colonial medical project of drawing blood and establishing racial and tribal affinities. Privy to the malaria association’s findings over the years, he eventually marshaled the available evidence to advance the hypothesis that carriers of the sickle-cell trait were immune to malaria” (In the Blood, 87). For a biographical sketch of Allison, see Conley, “Sickle Cell Anemia,” 350–53. See also Wailoo, Drawing Blood, 180–81.
72. Self, “‘To Plan Our Liberation,’” 767–68. In addition, Shakur’s biography notes that Afrocentricity was one point on which the New York chapter of the Party diverged ideologically from the Oakland-based national headquarters (Assata, 190).
73. On sickling, African history, and appeal of Allison’s findings for African American cultural politics, see Wailoo, Drawing Blood, 180.
74. Wailoo, Drawing Blood, 160; see also Tapper, In the Blood, 87. Subsequent research by the anthropologist Frank Livingstone offered that malaria was endemic to regions where slash-and-burn agriculture was used, changing the existing ecosystem such that humans became the most available host for the malaria parasite. See Frank B. Livingstone, “Anthropological Implications of Sickle Cell Gene Distribution in West Africa,” American Anthropologist 60 (1958): 533–62.
75. Black Panther, December 4, 1971.
76. Testimony of Representative Dan Kuykendall, Hearings before the Subcommittee, 33; also quoted in Wailoo, Dying in the City of Blues, 188–89.
77. James B. Herrick, “Peculiar Elongated and Sickle-Shaped Red Blood Corpuscles in a Case of Severe Anemia,” Archives of Internal Medicine 6 (1910): 517–21. An account of Herrick’s contribution is also provided in Conley, “Sickle Cell Anemia.” Although Herrick’s intern, Ernest Irons, had previously alerted Herrick to the sickling of red blood cells in the patient, Herrick’s publication is regarded as its “discovery” in the medical literature. See Todd L. Savitt and Morton F. Goldberg, “Herrick’s 1910 Case Report of Sickle Cell Anemia: The Rest of the Story,” Journal of the American Medical Association 261 (1989): 266–71. Sickle cell anemia disease was known in African oral history. Savitt writes, “Though Western medicine did not discover SCA until Herrick’s report in 1910, the condition had actually existed for centuries: first in Africa and the southern Mediterranean area and later, transported by black slaves, in the West Indies, South America, and the United States. African tribes in Ghana, Nigeria, and the Cameroons had known of the disease and had named it centuries earlier. Oral traditions had kept knowledge of SCA and its hereditary character alive for each succeeding generation” (“Invisible Malady,” 739–40). Probable cases of the disease were described in eighteenth-century southern medical papers. See Savitt, Medicine and Slavery.
78. For example, in 1943, a southern physician, M. A. Ogden, wrote that “intermarriages between Negroes and white persons directly endanger the white race by transmission of the sickling trait. . . . Such intermarriages, therefore, should be prohibited by federal law” (“Sickle Cell Anemia in the White Race,” Archives of Internal Medicine 71 [1943]: 164–82, quoted in Wailoo, Drawing Blood, 137. See also Tapper, In the Blood, 3.
79. Ogden, “Sickle Cell Anemia in the White Race,” 164–82, quoted in Wailoo, Drawing Blood, 137.
80. Savitt, “Invisible Malady,” 744.
81. On sickling and the privileging of patient’s experience, see Wailoo, Dying in the City of the Blues, 167–68. An exemplary case study of how “experiential knowledge” can be mobilized by activists is presented in Epstein, Impure Science.
82. Following Wailoo, this perspective was also consistent with “African medicine’s historical concern for pain and the patient’s experience” (Dying in the City of the Blues, 167).
83. Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 49.
84. A first-person account from a sickle cell sufferer was published more than a decade prior to the Party’s illness narratives in the black issues magazine Ebony. In the article “‘I’m Living on Borrowed Time,’” twenty-one-year-old college student, Marclan Walker, described the more than 250 blood transfusions that had been required to keep her alive and her struggle to finish school, despite the hurdle presented by her illness. See Marclan A. Walker, “‘I’m Living on Borrowed Time,’” Ebony, January 1959, 41–46.
85. “America’s Racist Negligence in Sickle Cell Research Exposed by Its Victims, Black Panther, June 19, 1971, 3–4.
86. Ibid.
87. There were other instances in which having the trait for sickle cell anemia or the disease itself was used to justify educational or workplace restrictions. For example, after four unrelated deaths of U.S. Army basic training recruits in high altitudes were associated with the sickle cell anemia trait, the U.S. Air Force banned those with the trait or disease from flight duty. This ban lasted for six years. See Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, 24–28. Yet the Party argued that such exclusions could be highly subjective and politically motivated, as was alleged to be the case with Army Private James Powell. According to the Panthers’ account, Powell, who was a carrier of sickle cell trait, was denied a medical discharge and thus exemption from military service in Vietnam (which required a long, pain-inducing flight). Moreover, he was subsequently assigned to duty at a military base located at a high altitude in Colorado despite the fact that others in the armed forces were being excused from some duties based on their sickling carrier status. The state “discriminated against” Powell, the Party contended, by using the soldier as “cannon fodder for the U.S. Imperialists’ genocidal military aggression against innocent Vietnamese people” rather than attending to his healthcare needs. For more on the risks of discrimination presented by genetic screening, see also Dorothy Nelkin and Laurence Tancredi, Dangerous Diagnostics: The Social Power of Biological Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
88. The Panther leader’s imperious presence also brought into relief a gender paradox both of the Party’s vanguard philosophy of “serving the people body and soul” and of its valorization of popular wisdom; for this positioning of Seale (and by implication Party cadre) as the caretaker of these women had the subtle effect of undermining the very experiential knowledge it sought to celebrate, by perhaps rendering it subject to male authority.
89. In a discussion of Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks, she writes insightfully about the role of the icon of the respectable woman in civil rights movement era politics.
90. “America’s Racist Negligence,” 4.
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid.
94. “Another Battle Lost in War on Black Genocide: Sickle Cell Anemia Claims Life of 11-Year Old,” Black Panther, August 19, 1972.
95. “So, He Has Sickle Cell Anemia.”
96. Kleinman, Illness Narratives, 3, 5.
97. Ibid., 6.
98. “BPP Trains Houstonians for Free Medical Testing Program”; “Legacy of the Black Panther Party,” It’s About Time, Fall–Winter 2001, 11.
99. Brody, “Panthers Map a People’s Medical Plan,” 9.
100. Anonymous, “Sickledex—a Rapid Sickle-Cell Screening Test,” Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics, July 25, 1969, 61; D. M. Canning and R. G. Huntsman, “An Assessment of Sickledex as an Alternative to the Sickling Test,” Journal of Clinical Pathology 23 (November 1970): 736–37; James B. Powell and Douglas J. Beach, “A Modification of the ‘Sickledex’ Test for Hemoglobin S,” Clinical Chemistry 17 (October 1970): 1055–56; and J. M. Ravi, “Detection of Hemoglobin S Utilizing Sickledex Solubility, Reduced Oxygen Tension, and Electrophoresis,” American Journal of Medical Technology 38 (January 1972): 7–8. In 1953 H. A. Itano, a coauthor of Pauling’s important work on the molecular attributes of hemoglobin S, reported that HbS was insoluble when placed in a phosphate buffer solution. Drawing from Itano’s observation, a solubility test that used a dithionite-phosphate reagent to detect the presence of HbS in a blood sample was developed. See Israel Davidsohn, “The Blood,” in Todd-Sanford Clinical Diagnosis by Laboratory Methods, ed. Israel Davidsohn and John Bernard Henry, 13th ed. (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1974), 19.
101. Small, interview with author, February 26, 2006.
102. “Sickledex—a Rapid Sickle Cell Screening Test,” 61. The pathologists Canning and Huntsman described the test similarly as “reliable in inexperienced hands”; see D. M. Canning and R. G. Huntsman, “An Assessment of Sickledex as an Alternative to Sickling Test,” Journal of Clinical Pathology 23 (8): 736–37.
103. Brody, “Panthers Map a People’s Medical Plan.” Sickledex is the brand name of a differential solubility test. Slide elution tests were also used by the Party and had limitations similar to that of Sickledex as described below.
104. The research that would make Linus Pauling famous was his introduction of a technique typically used in chemistry—electrophoresis—a technology adapted from chemistry by Pauling and his colleagues to test the electrophoretic mobility of hemoglobin molecules.
105. “Sickledex,” 61.
106. “Another Battle Lost,” 6; “Interview with Dr. Tolbert Small by Lewis Cole.”
107. “BPP Trains Houstonians for Free Medical Testing Program,” 5; Edwin Black, “Racism in Red Blood Cells: The Chicago 45,000 and the Board of Health,” Chicago Guide, September 1972, 5; “Black Panther Party to Provide Free Sickle Cell Anemia Test to Black,” Medium (Seattle), December 17, 1970, 1. Although only these nine clinics carried out sickle cell testing, because much of the Party’s health education outreach took place via forms of widely and readily disseminated media, to some extent the entire network of PFMCs might be said to have participated in the sickle cell anemia campaign.
108. Black, “Racism in Red Blood Cells,” 5; Turner, “Free Health Clinics,” 1350.
109. Zane and Jeffries, “Panther Sighting,” 74.
110. Black, “Racism in Red Blood Cells,” 5. This chapter subsequently administered Sickledex tests to students at additional elementary schools, a high school, and a junior college in the greater Chicago metropolitan area. See also “Will the Real Sickle Cell Program Please Come Forward,” Black Panther, February 5, 1972; and Turner, “Free Health Clinics,” 1348.
111. Black, “Racism in Red Blood Cells,” 5. See also “Will the Real Sickle Cell Program Please Come Forward”; and Turner, “Free Health Clinics,” 1348.
112. “The Black Panther Party’s Anti-War, African Liberation, Voter Registration, Survival Conference,” Black Panther, June 10, 1972.
113. On Portland, Davis, telephone interview. See also “Panthers Sweep Berkeley Elections!” Black Panther, June 10, 1972.
114. “Dr. Tolbert Small: Journey of a People’s Doctor,” 7. Electrophoretic analysis was also required in those instances in which the liquid’s density was “borderline”; see “Sickledex,” 61.
115. Susan Reverby, Tuskegee’s Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
116. Small, interview.
117. Small, interview with author, October 18, 2005. See also “Dr. Tolbert Small: Journey of a People’s Doctor.”
118. Ibid.; “Interview of Dr. Tolbert Small by Lewis Cole”; Armour, interview.
119. Zane and Jeffries, “Panther Sighting,” 73–74.
120. Black, “Racism in Red Blood Cells,” 13.
121. “Fred Hampton Memorial Clinic Offers Free Health Services,” Chicago Guide, April 29, 1970.
122. Davis, telephone interview.
123. Black, “Racism in Red Blood Cells,” 5, 13.
124. Ibid., 43.
125. Ibid.
126. Ibid.
127. Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, 47–48.
128. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 257. Lack of knowledge about sickle cell anemia was widespread. Health activists and health organizations were not the only ones to commit the error of confusing sickle cell trait and disease. For example, a sickle cell law in Washington, D.C., “equated sickle cell anemia with a communicable disease.” In the state of Massachusetts, a “sickle cell anemia law” confused the disease and the trait, referring to “the disease, known as sickle cell trait or sickle cell anemia” (all quotes from Robert Milton Schmidt, “Law, Medicine, and Public Policy: The Sickle Cell Anemia Control Act of 1972, A Case Study” [PhD diss., Emory University, 1982], 60, 67. Schmidt was program director of the Center for Disease Control National Sickle Cell Disease Laboratory from 1972 to 1978).
129. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 257.
130. Markel, “Appendix 6,” 163. See also Leslie Roberts, “One Worked; the Other Didn’t (Genetic Screening Programs for Tay-Sachs and Sickle Cell Anemia),” Science, January 5, 1990, 18.
131. Markel, “Appendix 6,” 163. See also Roberts, “One Worked,” 18.
132. Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 339.
133. Bert Lubin, interview with author, October 7, 2007, Oakland, California.
134. Davis, telephone interview.
135. Keith Wailoo, “Detecting ‘Negro Blood’: Black and White Identities and the Reconstruction of Sickle Cell Anemia,” in Drawing Blood, 154.
136. Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret War against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston: South End, 1988); Brian Glick, War at Home: Covert Action against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do about It (Boston: South End, 1989); Nelson Blackstock, COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom (New York: Vintage, 1975); and Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars against Domestic Dissent (Boston: South End, 1990).
137. Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, 37–99.
138. During the Watergate scandal, it was also revealed that Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party had been identified by the Nixon administration in 1971 as an “enemy” of the White House. See Paul Houston, “White House Plan to Use IRS to Harass Foes Told in Memos,” Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1973; and “White House List of Nixon ‘Enemies,’” Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1973.
139. In Chicago the FBI used a media smear campaign to discredit the local Party chapter’s Breakfast for Children program (Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, 68).
140. Lincoln Webster Sheffield, “People’s Medical Care Center,” in Foner, Black Panthers Speak, 173.
141. Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 383; also Churchill and Vander Wall, COINTELPRO Papers, 146 and chap. 5; and J. F. Palmer Jr., “Out to Get the Panthers,” Nation, July 28, 1969.
142. Brown, Taste of Power, 196; Churchill and Vander Wall, COINTELPRO Papers, 142–43; Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, 68.
143. Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, 68.
144. Churchill and Vander Wall, COINTELPRO Papers, 159, 161–64.
145. “Phoney Sickle Cell Group Conspires with Police.”
146. From FBI file, p. 56, roll 58, slides 112–13.
147. Ibid.
148. Ibid., 57.
149. On the evolution of the Nixon’s sickle cell initiative, see Schmidt, “Law, Medicine, and Public Policy,” 82.
150. “President’s Message to Congress,” Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971), 253–54. The Party’s sickle cell anemia campaign preceded Nixon’s address.
151. Savitt argues that it was the twinned effects of Scott’s 1970 JAMA article and the Nixon address that transformed sickle cell anemia from “an unknown disease” to “a recognizable badge of black identity and subject of explosive national importance” (“Invisible Malady,” 745).
152. Schmidt, “Law, Medicine, and Public Policy,” 19.
153. Wailoo, Dying in the City of Blues, 113.
154. In addition, the heavyweight boxer Joe Frazier, whose son Mark has sickle cell anemia, established the Yancy Durham Jr. Memorial Clinic for the treatment of sickle cell anemia in Philadelphia (“Frazier Joins Sickle Cell Fight,” Los Angeles Times, November 5, 1973).
155. Hearings before the Subcommittee, 20. Scott’s study was also invoked by Senator Ted Kennedy, a cosponsor of the bill, as well as senators Jacob Javits and Edward W. Brooke (Hearings before the Subcommittee).
156. This act, Public Law 92-294, which was unanimously approved by both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, was passed on May 16, 1972.
157. “Sickle Cell ‘Game.’”
158. Brown, Taste of Power, 276–77.
159. “Sickle Cell ‘Game.’”
160. Williams, “Combatting Genocide.”
161. “Sickle Cell ‘Game.’”
162. My use of categorical is drawn from the sociologist Steven Epstein’s use of the same term. Epstein writes of “‘categorical alignment’—the merging of social categories from the worlds of medicine, social movements, and state administration.” The Party’s response to the mainstreaming of sickle cell anemia eradication suggests that the categorical statement process may extract different types and degrees of concessions from distinct stakeholders, with activists potentially having the most to lose. The Black Panther example, in which varied black philanthropies and cultural groups vied to speak on behalf of African Americans’ biological citizenship, also indicates that the agents who fill the “activist” function in the categorical alignment process may be moderates and reformers rather than health radicals. See Epstein, Inclusion, 13, 90–93.
163. Tapper, In the Blood, 113.
164. Although both organizations had been involved with black health issues for many years. See, for example, Gamble, Making a Place for Ourselves; Hearings before the Subcommittee, 21.
165. Spivak, “Boon or Bane for Blacks?” 22.
166. Ibid.
167. Elaine Brown, Flores Forbes, and some others who were actively involved with the Party in the early 1970s argue that the organization’s change of course during this time did not reflect a shift to less radical politics. Rather, they contend that the group’s engagements with health politics and electoral politics were facets of a reimagined (but never discarded) revolutionary strategy. With this new strategy, the Party aimed to incrementally take over the city of Oakland by assuming positions as political appointees and elected officials. I have no reason to doubt that this was the Party’s intent. However, because members of the organization were aware of this strategy but members of the general public were not necessarily, the impression—and most importantly, the overall effect—was of a shift to a more reformist position. See Flores Forbes, Will You Die with Me? My Life and the Black Panther Party (New York: Atria Books, 2006); Brown, Taste of Power, chaps. 15, 16; Brown, interview.
168. Black Panther Party, “Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation,” 23.
169. Ibid. In her autobiography, Brown recalled that Party members without medical training worked as “maintenance people, records clerks, drivers, and liaisons with medical professionals” (Taste of Power, 330).
170. “Community Health Fair Emphasized Preventative Medicine,” Black Panther, July 28, 1975.
5. As American as Cherry Pie
1. For more on the Party’s health-related programs, see Black Panther Party (guest editors), CoEvolution Quarterly 3 (Fall 1974). For information on the radical health movement that was contemporaneous with the Party’s activism, see, for example, Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, American Health Empire; Ann Arbor Science for the People Collective, Biology as a Social Weapon (Minneapolis: Burgess, 1977); and Robert J. Bazell, “Health Radicals: Crusade to Shift Medical Power to the People,” Science, August 6, 1971, 506–9. For a historical account of one aspect of the radical health movement, see Rogers, “‘Caution.’” For women’s health advocacy, see Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Our Selves: A Course by and for Women (Boston: Boston Women’s Health Course Collective and New England Free Press, 1971); and Ruzek, Women’s Health Movement.
2. Herbert Weiner and Joe Yamamoto, “Obituary: Louis Jolyon West, M.D. (1924–1999),” Archives of General Psychiatry 56 (July 1999): 669.
3. For example, David Abrahamsen, “Comeback of Violence in America,” US News and World Report, October 22, 1973, 45–49; Joseph Morgenstern, “New Violence,” Newsweek, February 14, 1972, 66–69; Jesse L. Steinfeld, “TV Violence Is Harmful,” Readers Digest, April 1973, 37–38; P. J. Weber, “Violence Stalks the Land,” America, December 29, 1973, 501–3; and National Center for Health Statistics, “Death Rates for Assault (Homicide), according to Sex, Race, Hispanic Origin and Age: United States, Selected Years, 1950–99 (Table 46)” (Hyattsville, Md.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2001), 215.
4. A COPAP leader described the organization as a “Bay Area group” of “primarily social scientists, lawyers, and physicians” that came together “out of our joint work last year in questioning the propriety of the psychosurgery project that had been proposed through the CCCJ . . . for the University of California, San Francisco” (Edward M. Opton Jr., Ph.D., to Dr. Charles E. Young, Chancellor, University of California, February 14, 1973, 1, Chancellor Charles E. Young Papers, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles).
5. “H. Rap Brown on Violence,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scYQGiybjbY (accessed November 24, 2009).
6. Phil Brown, Toxic Exposures: Contested Illness and the Environmental Health Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
7. Zola, “Medicine as an Institution of Social Control,” in The Cultural Crisis of Modern Medicine, ed. J. Ehrenreich (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 95.
8. David Shaw, “Bright, Young Lawyers Seek Social Change,” Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1974.
9. Kline had worked as an attorney for the Party in the past (Brown, Taste of Power, 361–62).
10. Shaw, “Bright, Young Lawyers Seek Social Change,” 14.
11. Fred J. Hiestand, “Of Panthers and Prisons: An Interview with Huey P. Newton,” National Lawyers Guild Practitioner 29 (Summer 1972): 57–65.
12. Fred J. Hiestand, interview with author, June 1, 2006, Sacramento, California.
13. Fred J. Hiestand, telephone interview with author, May 20, 2002.
14. Newton, War against the Panthers, 32.
15. Hiestand, telephone interview; see also Shaw, “Bright, Young Lawyers Seek Social Change,” 14.
16. Hiestand, interview; see also Black Panther Party v. Granny Goose, No. 429566, Alameda I Superior Ct. (1972).
17. See Black Panther Party v. Kehoe (1974) 42 C.A.3d.
18. Hiestand, interview. Members of Seniors Against a Fearful Environment were also taught to be peer health workers; working with Party medical cadre, they conducted hypertension testing at the Oakland Tower Senior Citizen Center. See Black Panther Party, “Seniors Against a Fearful Environment (S.A.F.E.),” CoEvolution Quarterly 3 (Fall 1974): 19–20; and Shaw, “Bright, Young Lawyers Seek Social Change,” 14.
19. Hiestand, telephone interview; Testimony of Fred J. Hiestand before the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, May 9, 1973, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University; and Fred J. Hiestand to UCLA Chancellor Charles Young, August 17, 1973, box 41, Chancellor Charles E. Young Papers, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles. See also Committee Opposing Psychiatric Abuse of Prisoners to Dr. Charles E. Young, Chancellor, University of California, February 14, 1973, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles.
20. Brown discussed her working relationship with Anthony Kline of Public Advocates in Taste of Power (chaps. 17–18). She also briefly mentions Hiestand on page 407.
21. Jeffrey Ogbar, “Rainbow Radicalism: The Rise of Radical Ethnic Nationalism,” in The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era, ed. Peniel E. Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006). On the Party and the Brown Berets, see Brown, Taste of Power, 155. On the Party and UFOC, see Brown, Taste of Power, 373–74. On the Party and the NWRO, see Guida West, The National Welfare Rights Movement: The Social Protest of Poor Women (New York: Praeger, 1981), 219.
22. “Chronological Sequence of Events—Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, June 28, 1972 to July 27, 1973,” box 41, series 594 (Administrative Files of Chancellor Charles E. Young), Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles; and Stubblebine, Hearing on Proposed Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence at UCLA.
23. Loïc Waquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment and Society 3 (2001): 95–134; and Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
24. I will leave for other scholars to consider the place of the violence center in the politics of race and incarceration in the United States. Here I focus on the particular role of the Party in contesting the center, employing a strategy that drew on its activities in prison politics and personal experiences therein and also in the broader context of its health politics and its challenge to medical discrimination.
25. One supporter of the violence center believed that it was the public support from Governor Reagan that undermined the center’s success. See Ursula Vils, “UCLA’s Strife-Torn Violence Center,” Los Angeles Times, March 21, 1973. This mistrust of government extended to the federal level. West acknowledged in a Los Angeles Times article that “the Watergate revelations have provided ‘an example of the power of people high in government to use science . . . for nefarious purposes.” The Watergate scandal “raised the level of suspicion of the center’s motives” (Harry Nelson, “Watergate Dims Hope for Center on Violence,” Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1973).
26. William Endicott, “$850 Million Surplus in Taxes Told. Reagan Calls for Refunds,” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 1973.
27. Ibid.
28. See Verne Orr, Director, California Department of Finance, to Honorable Willie L. Brown, et al., May 2, 1973, UCLA Library, Dr. Louis Jolyon West Papers, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles.
29. Louis Jolyon West, “Center for Prevention of Violence,” Neuropsychiatric Institute, UCLA, September 1, 1972, box 41, series 594 (Administrative Files of Chancellor Charles E. Young), Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles.
30. Ibid.
31. However, there were serious disagreements as to whether to lay the blame at the feet of the U.S. military and its domestic partner, local law enforcement agencies; popular culture; or “militant” activists like the Black Panther Party (William Gamson, “Violence and Political Power,” Psychology Today, July 1974, 35–41; and Ernest Van Den Haag, “Political Violence and Civil Disobedience,” Commentary, April 1973, 97–98; see also Abrahamsen, “Comeback of Violence in America”; Morgenstern, “New Violence”; Steinfeld, “TV Violence Is Harmful”; and Weber, “Violence Stalks the Land”).
32. Louis Jolyon West, Center for Prevention of Violence proposal, Neuropsychiatric Institute, UCLA, September 1, 1972, Dr. Louis Jolyon West Papers, 1–2, UCLA Library, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles.
33. Louis Jolyon West, State of California Health and Welfare Agency, Center for the Reduction of Life Threatening Behavior grant proposal, 2, 5–6.
34. See Testimony of Fred J. Hiestand, 4.
35. Ibid.
36. Vernon H. Mark and Frank R. Ervin, Violence and the Brain (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 3. Violence and the Brain received mixed reviews. A reviewer in Psychosomatic Medicine noted that “the high level of their previous scientific publications lends weight to the interpretations the authors give to their clinical research.” Although this reviewer commented that the work was a “small volume” that seems “hastily written” and that contains “a number of inaccuracies in the bibliography,” he concluded that the “importance of the message vastly overshadows deficiencies in the volume.” A review by the influential neuroscientist Bryan Jennett described the work as “a biologically oriented approach to the problem of violence.” He suggested that the book was a marked departure for a “medical profession [that] has not been greatly involved in the polemics of violence.” Jennett observed that the work’s “canvas is broad” and concluded that it was “an interesting and unusual little book.” See Russell R. Monroe, “Review of Violence and the Brain,” Psychosomatic Medicine 34, no. 3 (1972): 286; and Bryan Jennett, “Review of Violence and the Brain,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 35 (1972): 420.
37. Mark and Ervin, Violence and the Brain, 7.
38. Ibid., xi.
39. Ibid., 5.
40. Ibid., 70. A comprehensive history of psychosurgery is provided by Elliot Valenstein in Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
41. Valenstein, Great and Desperate Cures, 30–31.
42. “Letter to the Editor: The Role of Brain Disease in Riots and Urban Violence,” JAMA, September 11, 1967, 895. A similar thesis was expressed in chapters 11 and 12 of Violence and the Brain.
43. Mark report, cited in Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 39, 376, 377n.
44. Peter Conrad and Joseph W. Schneider, Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).
45. Ibid. Conrad and Schneider maintain that medicalization occurs in five stages: definition of a behavior as deviant; prospecting for medical discovery; competing claim-making by medical and lay communities; legitimacy by authorities (usually the state), and finally, institutionalization, in which a condition or behavior becomes accepted as medicalized by medical profession and in other domains including the legal system.
46. Louis Jolyon West, “Center for Prevention of Violence,” Neuropsychiatric Institute, UCLA, September 1, 1972, box 41, series 594 (Administrative Files of Chancellor Charles E. Young), Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles.
47. Louis Jolyon West, Center for the Prevention of Violence proposal, Neuropsychiatric Institute, UCLA, 5, Dr. Louis Jolyon West Papers, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles.
48. Erving Goffman, Asylums (New York: Anchor, 1961). See also Samuel Wallace, “On the Totality of Institutions,” in Total Institutions, ed. S. E. Wallace (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1971), 1–7.
49. See, for example, Arthur R. Jensen, “How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement?” Harvard Educational Review 33 (1969): 1–123; and Jensen, Genetics and Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).
50. Jensen, Genetics and Education.
51. “Black Panther Party Challenges Racist to Intellectual Duel,” Black Panther, September 8, 1973. Courtesy of Billy X. Jennings, Its About Time Black Panther Party Archive, Sacramento, California.
52. On race and psychiatry in the 1960s and 1970s, see Metzl, Protest Psychosis. On the persistence on racial science between the end of World War II and the genomic turn, see Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 17–44.
53. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” American Negro Academy Occasional Papers, no. 2 (1897), in W.E.B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1890–1919, ed. Philip Foner (Atlanta: Pathfinder, 1971), 75.
54. “Black Panther Party Challenges Racist to Intellectual Duel.”
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Epstein, Impure Science, 17.
58. On biomedical knowledge and credibility struggles, see Epstein, Impure Science, 14–19. Stepan and Gilman identify “scientific counterdiscourses” as a tactic employed by opponents of scientific racism (“Appropriating the Idioms of Science,” 183).
59. “Black Panther Party Challenges Racist to Intellectual Duel.”
60. Ibid.
61. Richard C. Lewontin, “The Apportionment of Human Diversity,” Evolutionary Biology 6 (1972): 391–98.
62. “Black Panther Party Challenges Racist to Intellectual Duel.”
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. Jessica Mitford, “Experiments behind Bars: Doctors, Drug Companies, and Prisoners,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1973, 66–73. Mitford was a Party supporter; she raised money and spoke in support of the Panthers’ activities. Thus there was likely some mutual influence between the Party’s campaign against the medicalization of violence at UCLA and her reporting on research on prisoners at Vacaville. On Mitford’s support of the Black Panthers, see Kate Coleman with Paul Avery, “The Party’s Over,” New Times, July 10, 1978, 28.
67. Leroy Aarons, “Brain Surgery Is Tested on 3 California Convicts,” Washington Post, February 25, 1972.
68. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1968; repr. New York: Dell, 1991).
69. George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Bantam, 1970).
70. See, for example, “Political Prisoners Southern California,” People’s News Service (Southern California chapter), July 13, 1972; and Sharon Williams, “Sharon on Prisons,” Black Panther Community New Service (Southern California chapter), January 19, 1970.
71. Fred J. Hiestand, telephone interview with author, May 20, 2002.
72. Mitford, “Experiments behind Bars,” 72.
73. Hiestand, telephone interview.
74. B. J. Mason, “New Threat to Blacks: Brain Surgery to Control Behavior—Controversial Operations Are Coming Back as Violence Curbs,” Ebony, February 1973, 62–64, 66, 68, 72.
75. See J. B. Barber, “Psychosurgery: Viewpoint of a Black Neurosurgeon, Urban Health 4 (October 1975): 22–23, 48; V. Cohn, “Psychosurgery Makes Gain—Two Black Doctors Urge Limited Use of Operation,” Washington Post, January 8, 1976; “Minority Speakers Criticize Researchers,” JAMA 235 (February 1976): 462; and “On the Issue: Psychosurgery—Murder of the Mind (Congressional Black Caucus),” Essence 7 (September 1976): 6.
76. Mason, “New Threat to Blacks,” 64.
77. Ibid., 63. In an essay on the evolution of psychosurgery, Elliot Valenstein, the foremost historian of brain surgery, explained that evaluations of psychiatric surgical procedures judged success by how manageable the patient became after treatment. He writes, “A number of studies that emphasized the positive results of psychosurgery gave too much weight to the elimination of behavior that was most troublesome to the hospital staff and family and placed less emphasis on the present quality of the life of the lobotomized patients. There is a recurrent and disquieting theme throughout the older psychosurgical literature suggesting that problems of management played too large a role, both in the selection of patients and in the evaluation of the results. . . . Although these descriptions of the consequences of psychosurgery were written by strong advocates of this operation, they contain much that could be used by those opposed to this practice.” See Elliot Valenstein, “Historical Perspective,” in The Psychosurgery Debate: Scientific, Legal, and Ethical Perspectives, ed. Elliot Valenstein (San Francisco: Freeman, 1980), 35, 38.
78. One such pamphlet was the SDS-authored “A UCLA Center for Psychosurgery?” n.d., UCLA Special Collections, Students for a Democratic Society folder. See also “Violence Center Foes at Work,” UCLA Daily Bruin, January 11, 1974; Byron H. Atkinson, UCLA Oral History Project, 206. On rallies, see Coalition Against Psychosurgery at UCLA and Students for a Democratic Society, “Forum on Psychosurgery and the ‘Violence Center’” (announcement flyer), (Administrative Files of Chancellor Charles E. Young), Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles; and Coalition Against Psychosurgery and Human Experimentation and SDS, “Stop Psychosurgery and the UCLA ‘Violence Center,’” July 19, 1973 (Administrative Files of Chancellor Charles E. Young), Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles.
79. See “The Psyche and the Surgeon,” New York Times, September 1973.
80. Louis Jolyon West to Dr. J. M. Stubblebine, director of health, California State Office of Health Planning, January 1973. See also Alan Gilbert, “Shooting Down the Violence Center,” UCLA Daily Bruin, January 31, 1974; and Ken Peterson, “Plans for Acquiring Missile Base by Violence Center Fail,” UCLA Daily Bruin, January 25, 1974. Stubblebine’s agency had had jurisdiction over the Neuropsychiatric Institute until it was turned over to the control of UCLA in July 1973. The letters were circulated by the office of state Senator Henry Waxman who had requested correspondence dealing with the violence center (Peterson, “Plans for Acquiring Missile Base by Violence Center Fail”).
81. See “Psyche and the Surgeon.”
82. Al Hick to Charles V. Keeran, associate director, Administration, Neuropsychiatric Institute (internal UCLA memo), April 11, 1974, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles; and Jim Stebinger, “Three Demonstrators Arrested in NPI Office,” UCLA Daily Bruin, April 12, 1974.
83. See Louis Jolyon West, M.D. to Mr. Tommy Curtis and Mr. Bill Walton, February 12, 1974, box 41, series 594 (Administrative Files of Chancellor Charles E. Young), Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles. A more influential local celebrity, the actor Charlton Heston, was a supporter of the violence center. See Charlton Heston to The Honorable Ronald Reagan, Governor of California, May 15, 1973 (Administrative Files of Chancellor Charles E. Young), Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles.
84. Isidore Ziferstein, “Critic of Violence Center Speaks Out,” Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1974. For more about Ziferstein’s stance on the violence center, see Ursula Vils, “UCLA’s Strife-Torn Violence Center,” Los Angeles Times, March 21, 1973.
85. Hiestand, telephone interview.
86. Report of Budget and Program, Center for the Study and Reduction of Violent Behavior, Phase One (to June 30, 1973), UCLA University Archives, Department of Special Collections, box 42, series 594 (Administrative Files of Chancellor Charles E. Young), Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles; and Verne Orr, Director, California State Department of Finance to Honorable Willie L. Brown, et al., May 2, 1973, box 42, series 594 (Administrative Files of Chancellor Charles E. Young), Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles. For press coverage of these planned allocations of state funds, see David Perlman, “Violence Control—Senators’ Doubts,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 4, 1973; and “State Center for Study of Violence,” Daily Commercial News (San Francisco), April 11, 1973. Monies allocated in section 28 of the state budget were technically apportioned to the California Department of Health and Welfare, which would then pass these monies on to the violence center.
87. West to Beilenson, June 11, 1973, Dr. Louis Jolyon West Papers, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles; and Stubblebine, Hearing on Proposed Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence at UCLA.
88. West expressed this sentiment in a letter to Health and Welfare Committee chair Senator Anthony Beilenson; West to Beilenson, June 11, 1973.
89. Peter Breggin, “The Return of Psychosurgery and Lobotomy,” Congressional Record, February 24, 1972, 5567. Breggin expressed similar views in Congressional Record, March 30, 1973, 11396.
90. New York Times Magazine, September 30, 1973. See also Valenstein, Great and Desperate Cures.
91. In September 1973 Congress passed the National Research Act. Part of the act placed a two-year moratorium on psychosurgery in facilities or research programs funded by the federal government, until a presidential body, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, could track the extent of the use of surgeries and evaluate whether they were ever necessary or appropriate (The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, Psychosurgery: Reports and Recommendations, March 14 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977).
92. Perlman, “Violence Control—Senators’ Doubts.”
93. Ibid. For an illuminating discussion of the role of metaphor in social and cultural conceptions of medicine, see Susan Sontag, “Illness as Metaphor,” in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Doubleday, 1990).
94. Senator Anthony Beilenson, State of California Health and Welfare Committee, Hearing on Proposed Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence at UCLA, May 9, 1973, boxes 66, 68, series 590, CSRV file, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles; Senator Anthony Beilenson, State of California Senate Health and Welfare Committee, in the Matter of The Proposed “UCLA” Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence (Reporter’s Transcript of Proceedings), April 11, 1973, 1; and Perlman, “Violence Control—Senators’ Doubts.”
95. Terry Kupers, “Violence Center: Psychotechnology for Repression,” Science for the People, May 1974, 17–21. See also Kupers, telephone interview with author, October 16, 2007.
96. Fred J. Hiestand, State of California Health and Welfare Committee, Hearing on Proposed Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence at UCLA, May 9, 1973, box 66, 6, series 590, CSRV file, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles.
97. Ibid.
98. Black Panther Party et al. v. Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence et al., Administrative Complaint, filed Before the California Council on Criminal Justice, July 26, 1973, 1-2, Dr. Huey P. Newton Papers, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, Stanford University Library.
99. Black Panther Party et al. v. Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence et al., Administrative Complaint, filed Before the California Council on Criminal Justice, July 26, 1973, 7, Dr. Huey P. Newton Papers, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, Stanford University Library.
100. This phrasing appeared in the violence center proposal submitted to the CCCJ on May 1, 1973, and which was initially approved for $750,000.
101. Black Panther Party et al. v. Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence et al., Administrative Complaint, filed Before the California Council on Criminal Justice, July 26, 1973, 7, Dr. Huey P. Newton Papers, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, Stanford University Library.
102. Fred J. Hiestand, State of California Health and Welfare Committee, Hearing on Proposed Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence at UCLA, May 9, 1973, box 66, 20, 22, series 590, CSRV file, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles. Hiestand claimed that the proposals had been sanitized in response to the fact that there was little evidence that the center’s research intentions had truly changed. See Black Panther Party et al. v. Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence et al., Administrative Complaint, filed Before the California Council on Criminal Justice, July 26, 1973, 11, Dr. Huey P. Newton Papers, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, Stanford University Library. Ziferstein characterized the many revisions to the violence center proposal as “‘launderings in response to criticism and protests,’” while West described them as being written specifically for the funding audience to whom they were submitted. See Ziferstein, “Critic of Violence Center Speaks Out.”
103. Correspondence from Anthony C. Beilenson to Robert H. Lawson, Executive Director, California Council on Criminal Justice, May 21, 1973, CSRV file, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles.
104. Ibid.
105. 1973 Budget Act (Stats. 1973, Ch. 129, Section 28.8, A.B. 110), 167.
106. Fred J. Hiestand, State of California Health and Welfare Committee, Hearing on Proposed Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence at UCLA, May 9, 1973, box 66, 20, 13, series 590, CSRV file, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles.
107. “Chronological Sequence of Events,” Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, box 41, series 594 (Administrative Files of Chancellor Charles E. Young), Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles.
108. U.S. Department of Justice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration Guideline, “Use of LEAA Funds for Psychosurgery and Medical Research,” February 14, 1974, Dr. Jolyon West Papers, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles. In July 1973 the CCCJ, the state agency in charge of allocating federal LEAA funds, had agreed to provide $750,000 in funding to the violence center. These monies were to be matched by state funds. At this time, a CCCJ report said that it believed that no experimentation on prisoners was planned and hoped that the studies at the center would help curtail violence at California Youth Authority facilities (“The State,” Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1973, pt. 2; and “$750,000 Grant Approved for Center on Violence Research,” Los Angeles Times, July 28, 1973, pt. 1). But the LEAA’s reversal of this decision six months later effectively meant that previous promises of funding for the center from the CCCJ were withdrawn.
109. Robert A. Jones, “Mind Control Studies Will Lose Funding,” Los Angeles Times, pt. 1. See also Lesley Ceisner, “United States Bans Crime Fund Use on Behavioral Modification,” New York Times, February 15, 1974.
110. LEAA guidelines defined medical research as “those medical or surgical procedures on human beings involving: observation, systematic changes in conditions, accompanied by observation before, during, and after these changes are made, and involving some degree of risk, however slight, and which is experimentally applied to the individual subject, not so much in his own interest as in the interest of humanity through the advance of medical science” (Santarelli, “Use of LEAA Funds for Psychosurgery and Medical Research,” 1–2; see also Ceisner, “United States Bans Crime Fund Use on Behavioral Modification”; and Jones, “Mind Control Studies Will Lose Funding”).
111. Louis Jolyon West, M.D. to Anthony L. Palumbo, Director, Office of Criminal Justice Planning, April 2, 1974, and Anthony L. Palumbo to Louis Jolyon West, M.D., April 10, 1974, Chancellor Charles E. Young Papers, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles.
112. Memo to Albert A. Barber, et al. from Louis Jolyon West, April 15, 1974, Chancellor Charles E. Young Papers, Department of Special Collections, University Archives, University of California, Los Angeles.
113. Ken Peterson, “Violence Center Draft Receives Major Revision,” UCLA Daily Bruin, February 8, 1974; and Edwin S. Shneidman, “The Case for Violence Research,” UCLA Daily Bruin, February 8, 1974. West contended that the change stemmed from the fact that new centers are usually developed for new research endeavors. According to West, the center was not a new research initiative “involving activities unlike anything going on before”; rather, the “Center was mainly a device to get funding for faculty already working in these areas who were not able to develop their work for lack of funds.” Later West said that through the CCCJ the LEAA would give away more than $50 million in research money, mostly to the police. “If there are any finds that can be gotten freely, as the law permits, then I say get them. Some of that [CCCJ] money can be used for research if it can be connected with the prevention of crime. We stretched that point and said acts of violence by mentally, emotionally unstable people qualify . . . as I see it: it is a better use of the money to study certain kinds of violence behavior in a medical setting than to buy computers or weapons for the police” (Memo to Albert A. Barber, 16).
114. Shneidman, “Case for Violence Research.”
115. Brown, Taste of Power, 395–96.
116. Ibid.
117. Armour, interview, March 19, 2009.
118. The violence center controversy might be understood as marking a moment of transition between biologization and medicalization, or biomedicalization. I use the hyphenated “bio-medicalization” to mark this moment of flux. For Clarke et al., “biomedicalization” refers to the emergence, professionalization, and institutionalization of “scientific medicine,” characterized by (1) a bios-centered political economy of medicine, illness, and life itself, (2) a focus on “health” very broadly conceived, including enhancement and optimization; (3) intervention of technoscience into biomedicine; (4) a computer and information-mediated production of biomedical knowledge; and (5) the constitution of “technoscientific identities.” Some of these currents are present or just emerging at the time of the Black Panthers’ health politics. The Party’s initiatives reflected the use of or response to the expansion technological developments including Sickledex and psychosurgery, but did not include the structural technoscientific shifts that Clarke and colleagues describe; its mobilization of sickle cell anemia relied on the framing of the trait and disease as a collective identity, but the identity as an oppressed class, as slave descendants and poor people was more salient. On the other hand, its social health perspective did attend to health and well-being in the widest terms in addition to both healing bodies and protecting them from harm. See this important article: Adele E. Clarke, Jennifer Fishman, Jennifer Fosket, Laura Mamo, and Janet Shim, “Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine,” American Sociological Review 68 (April): 161–94; and the elaboration of these themes in Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S., ed. Adele E. Clarke, Janet Shim, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Fosket, and Jennifer Fishman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).
119. Conrad and Schneider, Deviance and Medicalization, 224–26.
Conclusion
1. Arthur Harris, interview with author, July 15, 2007, Seattle, Washington.
2. Silvers, interview with author; Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ed., Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973).
3. Small named the clinic in honor of Tubman, who in addition to being a leading abolitionist “also performed as a medic in the Union Army.” See Wiley Henry, “‘Dr. Tubman, We Presume,’” Tri-State Defender, June 12–16, 2004.
4. “Dr. Tolbert Small: Journey of a People’s Doctor”; “Black Panther Party Members on Way to China,” Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1972. Eighteen Party members and affiliates were on this trip, including Small, Los Angeles minister of justice Masai Hewitt, Oakland minister of culture Henry Douglas Jr., and Allan Brotsky, an attorney.
5. The Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals is a voluntary organization that advocates for universal, free preventative health care. Similar to the Party’s health politics coalitions, membership in the organization is open to medical professionals and laypeople, who are provided with training.
6. Interview with author, March 19, 2009.
7. On the history of the New Orleans Party chapter, see Orissa Arend and Judson L. Jeffries, “The Big Easy Was Anything but for the Panthers,” in Jeffries, On the Ground, 224–72.
8. Ibid., 24.
9. Malik Rahim, UNC Oral History Project, 31. My thanks to Josh Guild for bringing this narrative to my attention. See also Orissa Arend, “Birth of the Common Ground Clinic,” New Orleans Tribune, October–November 2007, 20–21.
10. Not only did Rahim bring past experience to bear on the formation of Common Ground, he also reactivated activist alliances: “I knew that after seeing that this city was without healthcare, that it was something that had to be developed. . . . it wasn’t nothing for me to make a call for healthcare professionals. . . . I knew a doctor that had been in the Party. . . . I made a call out to her; she called other health professionals” (UNC Oral History Project, 24).
11. Ibid., 29–30.
12. Judith Blake, “Panthers’ Progress,” Seattle Times, October 24, 1986.
13. Ibid.
14. Nikolas Rose, “The Politics of Life Itself,” Theory, Culture, and Society 18 (2001): 1-30; in biopolitical citizenship, see Epstein, Inclusion, 21. See also Clark et al., Biomedicalization, chap. 1.
15. Petryna, Life Exposed.
16. “Civil Rights and Medical Leaders Call for Social Justice in Health Care,” National Minority Quality Forum, press release, September 26, 2007, http://www.nmqf.org/press%5CPress%20Release_9-26-07_final-2.pdf.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. See http://www.bidil.com/pnt/questions.php#1.
20. “Civil Rights and Medical Leaders Call for Social Justice in Health Care.”
21. Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 46.