Healing Otherwise
Embodied Care, Counter-Knowledge, and Assemblage in Black Panther Health Activism
Historical Context
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1- Histroy of the Black Panther Party and People's Free Medical Clinics
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The Black Panther Party (BPP), begun in 1966 in Oakland, California, was a radical response to racialized state violence, economic oppression, and systemic neglect (Bloom & Martin, 2013). The Party is frequently remembered for its militant self-defense but was equally devoted to building community survival programs based on care, dignity, and self-determination (Spencer, 1999).
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Begun in 1969 as part of their “survival programs,” the People’s Free Medical Clinics (PFMCs) offered free first aid, diabetes and sickle-cell screenings, gynecological and mental health services—staffed by licensed professionals and trained community volunteers. These clinics embodied the Panthers’ belief that collective care could challenge structural violence by centering health in the hands of those most oppressed (Bassett, 2019, p. 354).
In response, they built clinics that did not just provide health care, but challenged structural violence by placing care in the hands of the most oppressed populations. In 1970, Bobby Seale commissioned every chapter of the Party to build at least two programs: a Free Breakfast for Children program and a medical clinic. Without any centralized funding stream, each chapter had to build community space from scratch, with full local agency. These clinics weren't add-ons; they were radical projects. They embodied the Party's vision for health as a collective right, a methodology of empowerment, and a greater means to serve people, physically, mentally, and spiritually (Black Panther Party, 1972; Nelson, 2011).
Figure 1
Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in front of the Black Panther Party headquarters.
Photograph courtesy of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (2012).
2- State Neglect and Medical Racism
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What the Black Panther Party called "health disparities" were not a coincidence, but an occasion of a system function to under-serve or completely disregard Black patients (Nelson, 2011, p. 58). Hospitals and clinics provided routine care that lacked critical qualification and/or consistent regard for the needs of these patients, creating a normalized suffering of these patients that, in turn, made their suffering seem inevitable rather than unjust. This "medical racism" was more than the hardship of accessing care on uneven terms, but rather an intervention, a broader disregard for the lives of Black patients within state public service allocation. Nelson's view is that these disparities were "symptoms of deeper racial hierarchies that reside in public service" (Nelson, 2011, p. 59), therefore rather than appealing for reform the Panthers build clinics that enacted an alternative, liberated model of care.
Figure 2
Flyer for the Bobby Seale People's Free Health Clinic.
Black Panther Party, 1971. Reprinted in Nelson (2011), p. 76.
3- Clinics as Political Acts: Visualizing Care as a Right
The Bobby Seale People’s Free Health Clinic grand opening flyer recontextualized health from an institutional service to a collective right, publicly asserting care as part of Black self-determination and survival (see Figure 2).
While the Free Clinics were certainly not unlinked forms of charity, they were elements of the Panthers’ larger Survival Programs; quick-response services created to address immediate community needs amidst systemic neglect. The Panthers took provide a service “out of the eyes of the state,” suspecting the use of the state’s power to define “health” and guard who was authorized to “heal” (Nelson, 2011, p. 60).
This begs a key anthropological question: What does care look like when it is taken away from the state?
By using care as a collective project with dignity and solidarity, the Panthers also erased the boundaries between healing and fighting in resistance, directly connecting health to not just wellbeing, but also to safety, to being recognized, and to demand to exist on your own terms (Nelson, 2011, p. 60).
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