Healing Otherwise
Embodied Care, Counter-Knowledge, and Assemblage in Black Panther Health Activism
Care as a Practice
How was care practiced, shared, and made real—in clinics, on doorsteps, and within relationships?
1. Diagnosis as Resistance
The Black Panther Party’s free clinics in the early 1970s reimagined care in mobile, community-controlled, and distinctly political ways. Figure 3 shows Dr. Mary T. Bassett—who was then a medical student and is now a prominent public health leader—performing sickle-cell anemia testing at the Franklin Lynch People's Free Health Center in Boston, about 1970. At that time, sickle-cell disease was disproportionately impacting black Americans and was largely invisible to federal health systems. This framed structural medical racism (Nelson, 2011, p. 159). By developing their own screening programs, the Panthers convert the act of diagnosis into an act of resistance and visibility that filled a massive gap in their communities’ health (Bassett, 2019, p. 354).
Figure 3
Dr. Mary Bassett conducting a sickle cell screening.
Photo from Bassett (2019), Journal of African American Studies.
2- Embodied Practice and Redefining Relationships
Figure 4 shows a Panther health worker performing a home-based medical checkup for a
young child, c. 1970. The setting is personal, embodied, and relational—emphasizing care beyond the clinic.
Panther members didn't only offer care; they provided it. They proceeded deliberately through communities, carrying medical kits, paper charts, and diagnostic tools. Their presence was not clinical; it was human. Through this physical proximity, they altered the hierarchical logic of care into something more relational and reciprocal (Nelson, 2011, p. 64)
Panther clinics fostered interaction rather than imposing tight boundaries between practitioners and patients. The act of knocking on doors, listening, noting symptoms, and providing knowledge fostered trust, and thus authority.
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Figure 4
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Black Panther member attending to a young girl.
Image reproduced in Nelson (2011), p. 85​
3- Inside the Clinic: Organization, Dignity, and Resistance.
Though they were perpetually dealing with funding constraints, the Panther clinics were extraordinarily organized. There were waiting rooms, intake forms, tables for examinations, and protocols for doing the work that married the professional standard of medical practice with a people-first ethic (Robertson, 2020).
As Alondra Nelson explained:
"There were waiting rooms, patient intake forms, and medical charts. This was not an ad hoc situation. These clinics were organized with intentionality an organization" (Robertson, 2020).
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Figure 5 illustrates the visual and political atmosphere of the clinic. The walls carried Panther imagery, the layout was welcoming but purposeful, and the space embodied dignity alongside treatment.
As Nelson noted:
“It wasn’t just about giving people medicine; it was about affirming their dignity” (Robertson, 2020).
Interior of a Panther-run free clinic. Note the exam tables, chairs, and visible Panther iconography on the walls.
Figure 5: Interior of a Panther-run People’s Free Health Clinic.
Image reproduced in Nelson (2011), p. 93.