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

1. Urban Geopolitics and the Fight for “Equal Justice in Health Care Now”

When liberal Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff came toLosAngelesin1963tocommemoratetheanniversaryofaSouthland hospital, he exposed the Cold War racial politics shaping U.S. cities and health care. Ribicoff had just served in President Kennedy’s cabinet as the head of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), where he engaged in a high-profile showdown with the American Medical Association (AMA) over Medicare, a federal health care program for the elderly that Kennedy was then pushing. During his speech, he questioned why the nation would prioritize spending money on the space race “while we let children in the slums fall victim to ills” that were preventable.1 Ribicoff also called for repeal of Hill-Burton legislation. Hill-Burton was a postwar program that provided public funds for the construction of • CHAPTER 1 • Urban Geopolitics and the Fight for “Equal Justice in Health Care Now” Negroes pay a “black tax” in higher rents, higher interest rates, higher insurance rates and premium prices for over-priced properties as they enlarge the peripheral areas of the ghetto. . . . It is quite evident that the cancer of the racial ghetto must be eliminatedfromourcity.Wejustcannotaffordtoplacepropertyrights above human rights in a world in which the central international issue is the equality of all mankind. —United Civil Rights Committee, “To Men of Good Will: A Statement of Major Grievances and Immediate Requirements of the Negro Community” Can we justify spending billions to reach the moon before our political adversaries, while we let children in the slums fall victim to ills for which we have long discovered preventive vaccines[?] —Senator Abraham Ribicoff, Los Angeles Times • 23 • private hospitals, which in turn were required to provide some measure of freecaretothepublic.Thelegislationaccommodatedprivatemedicalinterests who inveighed against government interference at the same time as they benefited from state support of the “voluntary” sector.2 The Hill-Burton program also accommodated powerful Southern segregationist interests because it funded the construction of “separate but equal” hospital facilities . By the early 1960s, civil rights leaders had made Hill-Burton’s Jim Crow funding the target of concerted organizing. The campaign would be a lever to force the desegregation not just of hospitals, but all forms of federal funding. Ribicoff’s indictment clearly targeted misguided national priorities and atavisticSouthernsegregationists,buthowdidthesecriticismsspeaktothe concrete realities of federal aerospace and hospital investments in southern California? While Ribicoff certainly knew the challenge that his stance posed to Southern segregation, it is unclear the extent to which he appreciated how Hill-Burton and federal defense spending dovetailed with the legal forms of “contract racism” that Scott Kurashige and others argue has undergirded Los Angeles racial and class segregation.3 Civil rights (and peace) activists would show the concrete connections between militarization and segregation, and segregation and health. In their hands, Jim Crow medicalcarebecameakeyfrontinthedomesticColdWarbattleoversocialized medicine and suburban segregation alike. Cold War Urban Geopolitics Los Angeles as a place of health, prosperity, and new beginnings has long been part of the city’s image-making.4 During the Cold War, this sunny imagination would also become a weapon in the national battle over racism and racial segregation in Los Angeles. The Red Scare didn’t only play out in Hollywood. As we will see, a highly publicized battle over public housinginLosAngeleseffectivelyputanendtopublichousinginvestments nationwide. Further, Cold War anticommunism would provide the basis for local police activities and collaboration with the federal government. This battle would have international implications. As the United States sought global leadership, discontent over racial discrimination and wealth divides would tarnish its image of freedom.5 On his exit from office in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a warning about the ways in which war-making priorities could come 24 “EQUAL JUSTICE IN HEALTH CARE NOW” todominateindustrial,state,andsocietalcapacitiestothedetrimentofother state commitments and forms of economic development. His speech is often believed to have signaled the beginning of the military-industrial complex. The MIC was a new name for, but not a departure from, the central role of collective violence and war-making in U.S. political, economic, cultural, and territorial development.6 Rather, Eisenhower’s speech can be used to mark an era in which industrial war-making became consolidated and more thoroughly shaped the economy and state institutions, including policies of citizenship and social reproduction.7 Geopolitics is usually understood as battles between individual nationstates or blocs of states for material and ideological control over territories . It also entails imaginative battles that rely on and recreate geographic conceptualizations of space and the interrelations between people and...