AJPH SPECIAL SECTION: BLACK PANTHER PARTY
Working With the Panthers to Transform Health Care
for Poor Black Communities
Theodore M. Brown, PhD
I n this excerpt from his autobiographical memoir Everybody
In, Nobody Out, Quentin Young, MD, describes his work in
the late 1960s and early 1970s with the “Spurgeon ‘Jake’ Win-
ters Free People’s Medical Care Center” organized by the Black
Panther Party (BPP) in Chicago, Illinois. It was no surprise that
when looking for allies to help with their free medical clinic for
impoverished and underserved Black people in Chicago (“so
poor that they never go to the doctor until they are practically
dying”) the Panthers turned to Quentin Young.Young had
long been a local and national leader in the movement to end
discrimination in medicine and bring equity to health care.1 As
an undergraduate at the University of Chicago in the 1940s,
he had campaigned to end the ugly disparity in health care op-
tions offered to students—White students received treatment at
the University Hospital while Black students were shunted to
Provident Hospital, an underfunded, run-down, and segregated
facility. As a medical student, intern, and resident he had fought
for national health reform and to end racial discrimination in
medical care. In the 1950s he helped lead the Committee to
End Discrimination in Chicago’s Medical Institutions in its de-
mand that licensure and tax exemptions be denied to hospitals
that “turn away patients solely because of their financial situa-
tion, race, creed, or color.”
In the 1960s,Young played a major role in the Medical
Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) and joined volun-
teers from across the country who traveled south to provide
medical support for sick, injured, and jailed civil rights work-
ers, and who sometimes—like H. Jack Geiger—returned to
organize new forms of care to impoverished Black residents of
the southern states, as he tells us in this issue of AJPH (p1738).
Back in Chicago,Young worked with Martin Luther King in
his campaign to confront segregation and discrimination in
northern cities and in 1966 King became Young’s patient. In
1967 to 1968 and again in 1970,Young was elected MCHR
national chair and moved the Committee’s office to Chicago.
Young and many other MCHR members fully understood
the motives, and were deeply sympathetic with the social and
service goals of the Panthers. They knew that the Panthers
“were skilled at engaging their constituency” and were
impressed that “people were fashioning their own solutions
to their own problems.” MCHR offered office space to help
1756 Voices From the Past Brown
facilitate planning activities and worked closely with Chicago
BPP members. Charismatic Panther leader Fred Hampton,
before being killed in a police raid, became one of Young’s
patients.
As the excerpt makes clear, both in Chicago and elsewhere,
MCHR had already been committed to opening free medi-
cal clinics before being approached by the Black Panthers.
Alondra Nelson in her book, Body and Soul:The Black Panther
Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, explains
how and why the Panthers came to the idea of free medi-
cal clinics.2 First, it was a tactical maneuver and a survival
strategy enabling the Panthers to build a strong political base
by providing essential services to Black communities instead
of remaining targets of police violence for efforts to defend
those communities by direct physical means. Second, the
idea of free, community-controlled medical clinics for poor
people was part of a wave of radical health experimentation
that the Panthers identified with ideologically along with
other American followers of Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon, and
Mao Zedong. Third and perhaps most powerfully, promoting
free medical clinics was a continuation of the long-standing
tradition of Black health activism that exposed poor or non-
existent services for Black communities, segregated institu-
tions, and rampant discrimination and abuse in all aspects of
health provision and within the health professions. Chicago
Panthers pursued Black health activism so effectively, in fact,
that the Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health
quoted their scathing critique of Cook County Hospital in an
article published in the 1970 American Journal of Public Health.3
MCHR and BPP were thus natural allies in Chicago, where
they could join forces in attacking a dysfunctional medical
system and in “delivering health care to the most disadvan-
taged among us.” Quentin Young was the widely admired,
deeply committed local physician who could most effectively
bring it all together.
The alliance between the BPP and Quentin Young with his
extensive network of personal and institutional contacts allowed
the Chicago BPP clinic to achieve real success and recognition.
Through Young and MCHR, the clinic readily recruited eager
professional volunteers and acquired in-kind contributions
as well as occasionally “liberated” equipment, supplies, and
Brown Voices From the Past

medicines. John Dittmer in The Good Doctors, his history of
MCHR, adds these details:
The Chicago MCHR . . . assessed each member five dollars to
support the center, and supervised the schedules of more than 150
nurses, technicians, physicians, and health science students who
volunteered to work in the evenings and Sundays.4(p227)
The clinic’s work was described very positively in a survey
of Chicago free medical clinics published in the American
Journal of Public Health in 1972. According to that account, the
Spurgeon Jake Winters Free People’s Medical Care Center pro-
vided services and patient advocacy in a remodeled storefront
facility in the North Lawndale neighborhood on the West Side
of Chicago. Over a period of 14 months it saw 1400 patients
at least once, and during the sample week of April 1971 served
the needs of 75 patients.5 Like other free clinics in Chicago, it
provided services according to the following principles:
1) Health care is a right and must be free at the point of delivery;
2) the community served must have the controlling interest in the
planning, organization and administration of the clinics; 3) hu-
manity, dignity and concern for the patient must be the mode in
which health care is delivered; and 4) the present health care sys-
tem is a failure and the free clinics offer a model for a new health
care delivery system.5(p1348)
It is not clear how long the clinic survived, but it was prob-
ably not very far into the 1970s. Like free clinics throughout
the country, it lived a precarious existence and was beset with
frustrations and contradictions, not least of which was the risk
of cooptation by the very medical institutions that it criticized
and confronted.6,7 In addition, in 1972 Young accepted the
chairmanship of the Department of Medicine at Cook County
Hospital and tried hard to reform the hospital from within and
use some of its resources to help support community-based
clinics without taking them over. But his new administra-
tive obligations and the political constraints of his position
removed him from weekly volunteer stints at the Free Peoples
Medical Care Center and other forms of direct and indirect
support. Adapting to changing realities, the BPP in Chicago
and elsewhere turned its attention in a concentrated way to
screening for sickle cell anemia and other genetically transmit-
ted diseases, and downplayed the direct provision of clinical
interventions.
But as John Stoeckle predicted in 1972,
Voices From the Past Brown
AJPH SPECIAL SECTION: BLACK PANTHER PARTY
[When] the short half-life of the clinics runs out, they will have
served useful purposes by making new groups of patients vis-
ible and acceptable and by creating new conditions of clinical
work.7(p605)
Their involvement with BPP clinics certainly left fond
memories and long-term positive associations in professional
“alumni,” as we can see clearly in Alondra Nelson’s interview
with Cleo Silvers (p1744) and Mary T. Bassett’s editorial
(p1741) in this issue of AJPH. There are, in addition, indications
of empathy and appreciation on the part of a younger genera-
tion, as seen in Amy Garvey’s comments as a spokesperson for
White Coats for Black Lives, also in this issue (p1749). Silvers,
Bassett, and Woode all point to the basic recognition, as H. Jack
Geiger puts it so clearly in this issue, that for the poor and
powerless Black population the BPP worked so hard to serve,
it is time . . . to return to those early initial models that saw health
care as an instrument of social change—partnering with commu-
nities to confront the social, economic, environmental, and politi-
cal circumstances that so powerfully shape the population health
status of the disadvantaged and marginalized.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Theodore M. Brown is with the Departments of History and Public Health Sciences,
University of Rochester, Rochester, NY.
Correspondence should be sent to Theodore M. Brown, History Department, Univer-
sity of Rochester, NY 14627 (e-mail:Theodore_Brown@urmc.rochester.edu). Reprints
can be ordered at http://www.ajph.org by clicking the “Reprints” link.
This article was accepted July 16, 2016.
doi:10.2105/AJPH.2016.303402
REFERENCES
1. Brown TM, Fee E, Healey MN. Quentin Young (1923–2016): Advocate,
activist, and “rebel without a pause.” Am J Public Health. 2016;106:
1025–1027.
2. Nelson A. Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medi-
cal Discrimination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press; 2011.
3. Yoder FD, Reed S. Cook County health care facilities and the state health
department. Am J Public Health. 1970;60:1706–1711.
4. Dittmer J. The Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and
the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press;
2009.
5. Turner IR. Free health centers: a new concept? Am J Public Health.
1972;62:1348–1353.
6. Bloomfield C, Levy H. Underground medicine: ups and downs of the free
clinics. Ramparts. 1972;10:35–42.
7. Stoeckle JD, Anderson WH, Page J, Brenner J. The free medical clinics.
JAMA. 1972;219:603–605.
AJPH October 2016, Vol 106, No. 10 1757
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