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Reviewed by:
  • Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination by Alondra Nelson
  • Thomas J. Ward, Ph.D.
Keywords

African Americans, Black Panther Party, health activism

Alondra Nelson. Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination. Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 307 pp., illus., $24.95.

The Black Panther Party (BPP) for Self Defense, organized in Oakland, California, in 1966, has been the subject of increased interest by academics over the past decade, but while most chroniclers have concentrated on the political impact of the party, in Body and Soul sociologist Alondra Nelson of Columbia University focuses her attention on the important, but less well-known, health-care programs administered by the Party. Clinging to the image of gun-toting, bereted, leather jacket-wearing militants, most Americans do not appreciate the social programs instituted by the Black Panthers for inner-city communities, including food, clothing, and even legal aid. Nelson argues that the development of health programs by the BPP were part of a “shift in emphasis from self-defense to self-help,” (72) and places the creation of the Party’s health-care programs in the larger context of health-care activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Central to the BPP’s outreach was improving the health-care delivery for inner-city blacks who suffered from both inadequate and racist health-care facilities and delivery.

The first People’s Free Medical Clinics (PFMCs), as they came to be known, were established in 1968 and 1969 in Kansas City (MO), Chicago, Seattle, and Portland. In April 1970, Black Panther chairman Bobby Seale called for all Party chapters to establish free health-care clinics in their areas. While not every chapter was able to establish a PFMC, eventually clinics were opened in thirteen cities. Delivering mostly very basic services—first aid, immunizations, blood pressure testing, and physical examinations—the amount of care given at PFMCs varied dramatically from city to city, as most of the clinics relied on donations of both supplies and labor to survive. For example, while Kansas City’s Bobby Hinton Clinic offered little more than sickle cell and high blood pressure screenings, the Portland chapter offered a wide range of services, including dental care in cooperation with a [End Page 179] local dental school, and the Winston-Salem chapter ran its own free ambulance service. As Nelson states, “the healthcare services offered at a given Panther clinic were … indicative of the resourcefulness of a Party chapter, the extent to which the chapter was supported by the surrounding neighborhood, and the availability of local supplies” (93).

In addition to the free medical care, the BPP was also involved in debates regarding race and health. Sickle cell anemia, a blood condition that affects primarily persons of African descent, became one of the central tenants of the Panther’s health program. The Party engaged in both a major education program regarding sickle cell anemia and genetic screening clinics. Through these programs, Nelson contends, “the Party established its legitimacy in the black communities and among the broader public” (119). The sickle cell anemia campaign also played into political issues of race and health that the Panthers hoped to emphasize, including a legacy of black suffering in the United States and the neglect of black health-care needs. The politicization of race and health was also central to the Party’s fight against the establishment of a “Violence Center” at University of California Los Angeles, which sought to examine biological causes of violence in people. Condemned by the BPP (and many other groups, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Organization for Women) as the “biologization of violence” (155), where social explanations for behavior would be subsumed by medical ones, the Panthers and their allies successfully fought the funding of the center.

A better understanding of the health-care programs of the BPP is vitally important to both scholars of the African American experience and those of health activism. Unfortunately, Nelson spends too much time in this book dealing with other programs and persons that influenced the healthcare activism of the BPP and...

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