Content area
Full Text
It has been 50 years since the Black Panther Party was founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California. Today the organization is remembered for its black-clad, black-bereted members in disciplined formation, bearing arms. These are compelling images, but they in no way capture the organization's historical significance or its lasting contribution to public health. These iconic images provide opportunities to tell unfinished stories.
Fifty years is a long time to wait to restore the Black Panther Party's image to reflect its full and lasting legacy. This legacy should acknowledge that, in just a few years, the Party rapidly extended its initial commitment to armed self-defense against police violence to mobilization against a more ambitiously framed concept of violence. In this broader view, lack of adequate housing, education, and jobs were also forms of violence. And the Party proclaimed its obligation to act against these injuries as well. Protection came in the form of programs, not guns. In expanding its perspective beyond the problem of police violence to the farreaching consequences of racism in everyday life, the Party aligned itself with progressive forces such as the civil rights and women's movements in the United States, and liberation movements in Africa and Asia.
The Party took up the right to health. It would be a mischaracterization to see the Party's range of activities as a cobbled-together, mismatched chimera-part paramilitary and part social work. Rather, its vision hewed closely to the fundamentally radical idea that achieving health for all demands a more just and equitable world. To model ways in which such a world might work, the Black Panthers opened free health clinics across the country. Eventually 13 were established.
The Black Panther Party clinics were part of a movement to deliver community-based health care that had roots in the civil rights movement, which gave rise to the Medical Committee for Human Rights. In 1965, two physician-activists- H. Jack Geiger...