Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination

Introduction: Serving the People Body and Soul

[ 1 ] O ver three days in the spring of 1972, the Black Panther Party, the radical political organization that had emerged in Oakland, California, almost six years prior, held a Black Community Survival Conference—a gathering that combined elements of a rally, a street fair, and a block party—in that city’s De Fremery Park.1 On March 27, standing before a large banner carrying the slogan “Serve the People Body and Soul,” the Party’s chairman and cofounder Bobby Seale spoke on a public address system to the assembled mass of Panther loyalists, political allies, locals, police, and passers-by about the organization’s slate of free community service programs. These “survival programs” were established partly to help poor blacks cope with the surveillance and harassment they experienced at the hands of agents of a mounting “law-and-order” state. These programs were also intended as a stopgap solution to the diminished provision of social services by a shrinking welfare state. Against a backdrop of barbecuing; children’s presentations on black and radical history; speeches by members of other activist groups, such as Johnnie Tillman of the National Welfare Rights Organization; a performance by the pioneering a cappella group the Persuasions, and other entertainment, Party cadre and volunteers distributed information about more than a dozen no-cost community service initiatives, including escorts for senior citizens to medical appointments, free elementary INTRODUCTION Serving the People Body and Soul [ 2 ] introduction education at their school, and a bus service to prisons for visits with incarcerated friends and family.2 Concurrently, Party rank and file showed Seale’s words in action, handing out bags of free food and clothing to an appreciative crowd.3 On this same weekend, the Party also held a voter registration drive in anticipation of its May 1972 announcement of Seale’s and Minister of Information Elaine Brown’s respective candidacies for mayor and Sixth District city council seat—on a “Community Survival ticket”—in upcoming Oakland elections.4 Accordingly, some scholars have interpreted this gathering and the subsequent survival conferences that occurred that year as marking the Party’s “deradicalization”—a shift in the organization from revolutionist to reformist principles and from radical militarist tactics to mainstream electoral politics.5 Less remarked on, however, is the fact that this episode was also a signpost of the Party’s health politics.6 At this event, the breadth of the Party’s health-focused activism was Bobby Seale addresses attendees to the Community Survival Conference in Oakland at De Fremery Park in March 1972, at which the Black Panther Party featured its health programs. Courtesy of Steven Shames and Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries. Panther children make a presentation at the Community Survival Conference. Courtesy of Steven Shames and Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries. Community Survival Conference at De Fremery Park: musical performers are onstage, and behind the stage are bags of free groceries to be dispensed at the event, an element of “serving the people body and soul.” Courtesy of Steven Shames and Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries. [ 4 ] introduction evident: Party members publicized the activities of the People’s Free Medical Clinics. Party cadre touted grocery giveaways as ameliorating the malnutrition that often accompanied poverty and thus as contributing to community members’ healthfulness. Working with their collaborators and also with volunteers, the activists reportedly screened thousands for sickle cell anemia—a genetic disease that predominates in persons of African descent. Moreover, in this same month, Party cofounder Huey P. Newton and Brown, the group’s chairwoman, amended the organization’s founding ten-point platform to include a revised point 6, a demand for “COMPLETELY FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE.” The extent of these activities confirms that the provision and politicization of medicine was a significantly developed feature of the Party’s broader mission. By spring of 1972, Party health activism was full-fledged.7 This community survival conference illustrated in microcosm the scope and ambition of the Black Panthers’ health politics. Given the extent of these efforts, it is surprising that the Party’s health initiatives have received mostly passing mention in both scholarly analysis and popular recollection and have been overtaken in popular memory by the penumbra of debates about whether the Party’s primary aim and lasting bequest was social disorder...