Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963–1978

Epilogue: The Right to Health Meets the Right to the City

New light rail tracks gleamedinthestreet,andconstructionbarriers for landscaping and sidewalks still lined the stretch of Figueroa BoulevardwherehundredsofusgatheredinDecember2010.Wehadmade ourwayfromthesecondSouthLosAngelesHealthandHumanRightsconference to where a community hospital once stood. It was now a vacant lot used for parking and attended by vigilant security guards. Across the street, signs advertised luxury condominiums that were a short train ride from downtown Los Angeles to the north and the University of Southern California to the south. We began walking a narrow picket along the sidewalk, holding signs that read “La Salud Es un Derecho Humano” (“Health Is a Human Right”) and “Yes to Affordable Housing, No to Luxury Housing.”1 ThisrallyhadbeenconvenedbytheUNIDADCoalition(UnitedNeighbors in Defense against Displacement). Groups such as UNIDAD and Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE) have been organizing against displacement and slum housing in the low-income Latina/o and Black neighborhoods along the Figueroa Corridor for decades. “Save the Q!” was the rallying cry for this mobilization. The “Q” referred to a zoning condition requiring that a land parcel be used for medical and education services. The property owner and real estate developer Geoffrey Palmer wanted the city to grant an exception to that requirement so that he could build more than nine hundred market-rate condominiums on the site. Palmer had gained a reputation for opposing affordable housing. People walking the picket were speculating about whether the developer, with his clout and that of nearby University of Southern California, might try to get around the Q condition by partnering with USC. This would ensure an educational use, but a cynical one that hardly met the spirit of the zoning or needs of the low-income residents of South Los Angeles. Before the hospital was closed, it housed the lauded health promotoras program run jointly by Esperanza Community Housing Corporation and Epilogue The Right to Health Meets the Right to the City • 239 • the St. John’s Well Child and Family Center, and an innovative health sciences high school. The hospital and outpatient offices had provided 15,000 emergency room visits, served 8,500 dental patients, and provided diabetes prevention services. The closure of these health facilities amplified South LA residents’ already serious problems of access to health care. The “Save the Q” mobilization illustrates the ongoing legacy of the civil rights movement and its understanding that affordable housing and accessible health care are inseparable parts of creating freedom and justice. The destruction of the Orthopaedic Hospital is part of the same undeclared urban war that had resulted in the closure of King-Drew Medical Center two years earlier, in 2007. King-Drew remained a symbol of the Watts uprising and testament to Black bodily suffering, contributions to medicine, and capacity for healing. Its demise was preceded by a decadeslong and polarizing debate over “Killer King,” as it had become known, and meant that residents of South LA once again were miles from a public hospital and the emergency and trauma care imperative for treating auto accidents, gunshots, or other immediate ailments.2 The closure of King-Drew was the fifteenth hospital to close in Los Angeles County since the year 2000.3 Three Kings Three kings mark Los Angeles’s contemporary landscape of warfare and welfare: Dr. King, the hospital that is his namesake, and Rodney King. Dr. King brought a spotlight to the gap between the city’s avowed racial progressivism , while King Hospital exemplifies the contradictory legacy of civil rights and urban liberalism. Rodney King did not want the spotlight, but he inherited a city where race and class divides were perhaps even more heavily policed than when Dr. King called on Angelenos to fight discrimination in the city. All of these figures met untimely deaths. The 1992 Los Angeles uprisings are part of the same response to the urban crisis of the 1960s. The 1992 unrest was sparked by the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers who had been tried for assault and excessive use of force against Rodney King. Police apprehended King following a car chase, and his subsequent beating was captured on videotape. The footage became a conduit through which contradictory understandings of race, crime, and violence would be debated in Los Angeles and around the world. For some viewers, he was the Black male folk devil whose inherent 240 EPILOGUE violenceandcriminalitywouldalwaysjustifythepolice’sbehavior.Formany others, the beating King endured while on the ground, and the not-guilty verdict for the police that an...