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

2. Watts, the War on Poverty, and the Promise of Community Control

On the night of May 7, 1966, Leonard Deadwyler was driving his wife, Barbara, who was experiencing labor pains, from Watts to Los Angeles County Hospital, some ten miles to the north. Police pulled the car over after a fifty-block pursuit. One of the officers leaned into the driver’s sidewindowwithhisrevolverdrawn.Theofficerclaimedhisgundischarged accidentally after the car lurched, but Barbara Deadwyler maintained that the car had never moved and that the officer shot Leonard in cold blood. As he lay on his wife’s lap dying, his last words were, “She’s having a baby.”1 The shooting, nine months after the Watts uprising in August 1965, animated yet another round of organizing against police violence and impunity .2 The white police officer, Jerold Bova, was acquitted in what was Johnnie Cochran’s first case, and the first televised court inquest. The conditions of Deadwyler’s death illustrated what health activists had been saying for years: the inaccessibility of medical care for Watts residents was • CHAPTER 2 • Watts, the War on Poverty, and the Promise of Community Control The black poor, as well as the black health professional, are convinced that racism in health is a reality and not a myth. The insensitivity, the indifference, the apathy and the barriers all around, convince them that to extricate themselves from these locked-in situations, participation and control are the means to freedom. —Dr. Paul B. Cornely, Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly Folks from Watts were determined and would say, “We wanted to do it our way.” And in their way, Watts always had a broader view, anunderstandingabouttheissueofhealth.Itwasn’tjustmedicalcare. The issue of community involvement, it was as revolutionary and radical as one might imagine, in a sense. In a very true sense it wasn’t just going against, it was going for something. —Dr. Clyde Oden, in-person interview • 51 • deadlyserious.Thenearestpublicoutpatientclinicandhospitalweresome ten miles away from Watts. By car, the trip to County Hospital took thirty minutes, and by bus it was a taxing two hours.3 Distancewasonlyonemeasureofgapinghealthneeds.“Atriptoacounty hospital or clinic can be an exasperating, infuriating thing,” explained an activist medical student to the Los Angeles Times. “First there’s the condescending attitude of those at the reception desks, and then, a long wait, maybe of three, four or five hours,” only to be told to come back when they were sicker.4 “Ten dollars sick” became the measure of “sick enough” to justify the trek to the hospital.5 This chapter focuses on the ways in which community activists, health advocates,andpoliticiansseizedontheopeningsaffordedbythecivilrights movement to create just health institutions in and for Black Los Angeles. The passage of the Medicare entitlement and means-tested Medicaid programs were significant victories. But as leading civil rights and public health advocate Dr. Paul Cornely noted: “There seems to be a suspicion that neither Medicare nor Medicaid will accomplish the objective of providing a single system of medical care for all citizens and, therefore, the time has come to adopt a new abolition movement—‘Abolish Charity Medicine.’”6 This movement would take place in local battles to create new health facilities and increase access to medical care. One of the first of such facilities was King-Drew Medical Center, the culmination of a long battle to build a Black-run hospital in segregated LA. Championed by the Democratic establishment, local medical schools, and a labor-community union that also pushed for War on Poverty programs, King-Drew represented a convergence of institutional backers that were often in conflict with each other. The second project was the Southcentral Multipurpose Health Center in Watts. Community determined and state funded, it is a compelling example of the neighborhood health centers that War on Poverty architects imagined.7 Community leaders for Watts health insisted: “We don’t ever want this place to be a county clinic. We want to be treated with dignity.”8 At Southcentral Multipurpose Health Center, struggles for access were necessarily coupled with efforts to change the very practice of health care. Watts in Narratives of Liberal Consensus and Backlash Close observers of the civil rights movement knew that the limits of racial liberalism had been reached when the Democratic Party refused to seat 52 WATTS, THE WAR ON POVERTY, AND COMMUNITY CONTROL Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) delegates at the 1964 national convention. For others, the political terrain irrevocably shifted in the days after the Watts riots of August 1965. On August 7...