Science Vs - The Time the Protesters Won

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

A group of teenagers and college kids were fed up with the lousy healthcare in their New York neighborhood. So they came together as a group, calling themselves the Young Lords, and fought the system head on — a fight that still resonates today. Sid Davidoff, Mickey Melendez, and Cleo Silvers share their story. [REBROADCAST] Check out the full transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsProtestersWon  In this episode, we cover: (00:00) David vs. Goliath (05:01) The garbage offensive (10:20) Taking on lead paint and hunger (13:54) The tuberculosis offensive (17:08) The fight for Lincoln Hospital (28:39) The aftermath of the takeover  This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman, with help from Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn, Michelle Dang and Lexi Krupp. Editing by Caitlin Kenney with help from Jorge Just. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, Bobby Lord. The archive for this story came from Pacifica Radio Archive, and the documentaries: El Pueblo Se Levanta, and Palante, Siempre Palante!  A big thanks to Denise Oliver Velez, Dr. Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, Iris Morales, Walter Bosque Del Rio, Professor Jose R. Sanchez, and Professor Lloyd Novick. An extra thanks to Blythe Terrell, Amanda Aronczyk, the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. A question that's going around right now is how do you change things when it feels like the deck is stacked? So today on the show, it's David versus Goliath. And I just want to get straight into it. It's a Tuesday, July 14th, 1970. The sun is coming up over New York City. And word is out that a militant group has taken over a hospital. This is not a candy store that took over.

It took over a hospital. We didn't know how bad it was. This is Sid Davidoff. He worked for the mayor's office at the time. They're still putting their reports together. It's very sketchy. A bunch of people taking over a floor. They claim to have hostages and they have a list of demands and they want to talk to somebody. Sid is the guy that the mayor's office would call in to deal with crises across the city.

He'd negotiated with gangs in Manhattan, coordinated responses to race riots in Brooklyn. And so when he heard that some radicals were taking over a hospital, Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, he rushed over. Police were already there, surrounding the place. And it was chaos. Ambulances are pulling up. People are sick. People are dying, maybe.

They got 50 cops ready to come in and do what has to be done. Who knows what's going to happen. Inside are the radicals. About 100 women and men. Some are in fatigues, big army boots. And everyone is wearing purple berets.

They're standing by the door. They're being very militant. They're using their force, their anger. We had to get them out of the hospital. So who were these people in their purple berets? And why were they trying to take over a hospital? Well, they were the Young Lords, and we're about to hear their story. It's a fight to save thousands of lives. A fight that is still

at the forefront of American politics today. The Young Lords Party began an occupation of part of the Lincoln Hospital complex. That building was condemned 25 years ago. Condemned! The Young Lords opened up Pandora's box, is what they did. You're not going to get anything from this country. You're not going to change by pray-ins, love-ins, and all other kinds of be-ins.

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Non-investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. Okay, we're going back to a year before the takeover. We're in East Harlem, a neighborhood that was known as El Barrio. This neighbourhood was poor, really poor. A lot of the residents had recently migrated from Puerto Rico. They lived in cramped tenements.

Roaches were everywhere. Here's how one woman described everyday life in El Barrio at the time. We can't call this housing. We just call them dumps. Roaches live with you. They don't pay no rent, but you do. everyday life in El Barrio at the time. Mickey Melendez grew up here. To him, the roaches and crappy houses, they were just part of everyday normal life. But when he got into college, he started looking at it differently. Mickey and some new friends were reading all about inequality and socialism.

We were so excited. And we had been reading all this stuff about revolution, and we were going to bring the revolution to our community. You know, it wasn't a light going off, it was like hundreds of lights going off at the same time. They also started sharing books about the history of Puerto Rico. They realised that it was basically a colony under the US government. And they read about independence protests on the island and people getting killed. We were, you know, we were angry.

We were very angry and wanted to figure out how to fight back. So they formed a group and started going around the neighbourhood talking to people about getting Puerto Rican independence. So in our little broken-ass Spanish, we would just, like, you know, try to talk to people. And these guys were playing dominoes and they were almost like, you know, what are these young people bothering us for? Even though Mickey and his mates were well-intentioned,

they were college kids, talking about the system and politics to real grown-ups. Nice try. You know, we got frustrated and said, OK, well, what are your issues? What do you want to talk about? You know, they kind of just blew us away by just saying, why don't you turn around and look behind you?

You know, there's garbage there. The men said, OK, you want to help out? Go pick up the trash. Mickey looked around. Trash was everywhere. A disgusting sight. I can't even imagine it. I mean, I close my eyes and I look at, you know, liquid, brown liquid coming down the side of the sidewalk.

Stuff that had been laying there decomposing for five days on 90-degree heat. And it was, I mean, dead rats, you know, there were dead rats in the community and the stench stayed in your nose. And it was, it was really that bad. The trash was so bad because New York City was actually in the middle of a literal garbage crisis. Garbage trucks weren't picking up trash across the city and it was piling up, but it was particularly bad in poor neighbourhoods like El Barrio. So these college kids decided to do what the old men wanted. Okay, so we put the revolution aside, we put socialism aside, and we start cleaning up the garbage. Had you ever cleaned anything before in your life? Probably my nails, my nails maybe. Not anything like that, no, absolutely not.

They started sweeping the streets, cleaning it themselves. But then, Mickey said, something really cool happened. People started to come out with their own brooms, you know, these little old ladies with their little buns in their heads. We called them doñas. So the doñas would come out with their bathrobes and help us, you know, clean up. They used to call us muchachitos, you know, those little kids, you know, los niños. That's what they called you. Yeah, that's what they called us, yeah, right, 500 years ago.

And so it was that kind of connection. It was the beginning of a love affair between the organization and the community. Mickey and his friends kept cleaning the streets for a few Sundays in a row. But the sanitation trucks still didn't come. The neatly placed trash just sat there until the rats ripped it open and the trash littered the streets again. Soon, Mickey and his mates were fed up. And we were so angry, really pissed off. Said, OK, they're not picking up the garbage. They denied us this.

Sunday afternoon, we decided to take a more militant action. One Sunday in August, they took the trash they had collected and instead of leaving it on the sidewalk, waiting for sanitation to collect it, they dumped the trash bags in the middle of the street, all across Third Avenue, which is a large street in New York City. And then they didn't stop there. People in the neighbourhood joined in

and started throwing mattresses, abandoned cars, rusted fridges, all on the street until the entire intersection was filled. Traffic couldn't go through. To top it all off, someone doused this trash in lighter fluid and one by one, the young lords threw matches onto the pile. What did that feel like, to throw the match? That felt great. That felt like we were doing this for our community.

In the middle of the street, not only did they burn the garbage, but they burned a pile of mountain of garbage in the middle of the street. It was amazing. Cleo Silvers lived nearby, and she remembers seeing this burning heap. I'm like, oh, gosh, these are their kids. I call them kids.

Them young kids is crazy. They're nuts. Do you remember what the scene was like? The community, yeah, they was happy. People was cheering and stuff. It was good. Yeah, oh, and the old men, they were like, yeah, these young people, they got it going on.

For weeks, these kids would put the trash in the middle of the street and burn it, and it totally worked. A New York Times article wrote, quote, the mayor's office got the message and a 24-hour pickup of garbage was begun. For a while, El Barrio was cleaner than anyone remembered. Here's Cleo again. Garbage people started coming more frequently to pick up the garbage because they know them crazy-ass kids might burn up some more garbage in the street if you don't.

This protest became known as the Garbage Offensive, a play on the name the Tet Offensive, which were a series of surprise attacks by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. And the group behind the offensive were now infamous in New York City. And they were calling themselves the Young Lords, a name they got from a Puerto Rican gang in Chicago who wore purple berets. That was a nod to the Black Panthers, who wore black berets. And it was purple because in West Side Story,

you know, that dodgy musical with the Puerto Rican gang called The Sharks, well, the sharks wore purple. Seriously. As word spread of what the Young Lords had done, hundreds of kids, even some people who weren't Puerto Rican, would join them. They were ready to take on whatever the Young Lords asked of them, and eventually Cleo Silvers joined too.

Now let's go out next. What's next? What do we need to do next? The only problem was... We really had no idea. We didn't know what the next step was because it was evolving, you know, so it wasn't like we had a plan. The group had seized on something that people really cared about, the trash.

And now they had to figure out how to keep it going. It didn't take long to find their next cause. They read in the paper that a two-year-old kid from the neighbourhood had almost died from lead poisoning. And so they had a new target. Lead paint. Lead paint had been banned for almost a decade in New York, but layers of it still coated some apartments in the neighbourhood.

Here's Cleo. They'd been painted over and over and over again. The lead paint was so thick. I mean, it was really, really thick in these apartments. So chips would be falling everywhere. Chips, lead-based paint would be everywhere. And lead paint tastes sweet, so kids would eat the flecks of paint. At the time, doctors knew that this was harmful.

Lead poisoning can wreak havoc across the entire body, especially in children. It affects their gut, hormones and nervous system. It can cause seizures, permanent brain damage and even death. Cleo worked in a hospital at the time and saw what was going on. Children were dying from having access to lead. Do you remember a child that... So many kids. Oh my goodness, a child.

There's so many children. And it was an epidemic. But lots of parents in the neighbourhood didn't know how dangerous this paint was. The Young Lords wanted to change that. So they started going door to door, talking to families about lead poisoning and testing kids. We began by asking some medical students to help us out. Here's Young Lord Felipe Luciano

talking to a local radio station from the time. We began an intensive block-by-block campaign and we found out very interesting things. 30% of those children had lead poisoning. The young Lord's work got a tonne of attention. A headline from the village voice proclaimed, Lead poisoning tests. The young Lords do the city's work. lead poisoning tests, the young lords do the city's work. And pretty quickly, the young lords planned to fight

for the independence of Puerto Rico. They took a backseat to the health of their neighbours. Yeah, the lords had become unexpected public health crusaders. I asked Cleo about this. Why would a group like the young lords, whose number one goal was independence for Puerto Rico, why was healthcare so important to you? Because people from Puerto Rico was here dying.

To be very honest, people were dying. You can't have life if you don't have access to quality healthcare. These people are people we know and love. And so people you know and love having access to quality health care is like, that's just basic. In a newspaper they ran at the time, one young Lord wrote, quote, bullets and bombs aren't the only ways to kill people. Bad hospitals kill our people.

Rotten, forgotten buildings kill our people. Garbage and disease kill our people. Rotten, forgotten buildings kill our people. Garbage and disease kill our people. And so the Lords took a page from the Black Panthers. They started a breakfast program for young kids, opened up a free medical clinic, and people in the community loved them. The kids from the breakfast program even put on a play about the young Lords and their fight.

Our people are poor, and you know damn real nobody wants to be poor. This play is going to show that people start to take community control and liberate it back. But city officials and police, they weren't as big a fans. The Young Lords got into fights with the police during their protests, but the community came to their defence. And with the community on side, the lords got bolder and bolder. So, meet their tuberculosis offensive.

The city was running this TB testing program and they had these trucks with portable x-ray machines inside to help diagnose people with tuberculosis. Now, even though there were particularly high rates of TB in El Barrio, the truck was barely around. And so the young lords thought... Wouldn't it be cool if we got that truck? If we got that truck, we could test a whole lot of people. The lords asked the city to use the truck in their neighbourhood, but officials flat out refused.

And so they took matters into their own hands. Let's get it. That's it. That's the way it goes in the Young Lords. Let's go get it. The Young Lords decided to steal the city's truck. So in broad daylight one June afternoon, Mickey and two other Youngords put on lab coats,

grabbed some nunchucks, hey, it was the 70s, and approached the truck. They told the techs who were standing beside it... You know, get in the back, everything's going to be fine, nobody's going to get hurt, we're going to take you to people that need this service. And what did the technicians do?

They went into the back of the truck very quietly. I got the signal that everything was OK in the back. I started to drive off. Mickey zoomed through the city in this massive truck. Meanwhile, other lords had told sick people in the neighbourhood to meet them at a particular spot so they could get tested. About 50 people were there waiting. A young lord had also called the press in advance. And so just as Mickey arrived... The newspapers were there, the cameras were there, the line was there, and the technicians came out and started to X-ray people. But the police were there waiting too.

And they had helicopters, there were police cars, but because the media was there, the police just walked away from this one. Wow. And so right in front of the cops, the technicians tested people and the Young Lords put a flag of Puerto Rico on the X-ray truck. No one got arrested. And not only were the Young Lords not in jail, within a few days, get this,

the Department of Health said that the truck was now going to be parked in El Barrio and open for extended hours. The department even paid to have technicians staff the truck for the extra hours. Win after win after win. But the Young Lords weren't done yet. Their biggest fight was still to come. You know, we were like a flea going up against an elephant. But we're going to bite this elephant on its toe until it just flips over. And that's it.

We can whip this mother****** ass. Coming up after the break, the elephant fights back. Metrolinx and Crosslinx are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware and stay safe. Welcome back.

We've met the Young Lords, a ragtag group of kids who came together to fight for Puerto Rican independence and ended up fighting for the health of their community. As the young lords became more and more frustrated with the crappy conditions in their neighborhood, they zoomed in on one big target. It was the butcher shop. It was known as the butcher shop. It was not, and people were not kidding. You would go in there and you would hope that you came out of there with your life. Cleo Silvers is talking about the place she worked, Lincoln Hospital. And it was truly awful. There were days when the water pressure in the hospital was so low

that doctors couldn't wash their hands properly. Cleo told me there were rats and roaches running across blood-stained floors. Not only that... All of the equipment was old-fashioned. The building was falling down. What was the wait time at the hospital? The wait time was between 10 and 72 hours. You could be waiting 73 days? That's correct. You could be waiting three days to be seen in the emergency room. Now, you have to remember that that was the only healthcare facility in the neighbourhood. The place had a reputation.

Dr Lewis Fradd was the chief of paediatrics at another New York City hospital, and he was interviewed around this time about the problems at Lincoln. He described it like this. The problems are gigantic, and what the city and what everybody puts in is minimal. If you take a situation like lead poisoning, we have seen children get lead poisoning

while hospitalised at Lincoln Hospital. Now, this is disgraceful. In fact, the hospital had been condemned for years. The city was supposed to build a new hospital, but it had been delayed and delayed. The Lords felt like no new hospital was on the way and their crappy hospital wasn't getting fixed. Cleo and the young Lords protested.

That building, we send our people to... Cleo is standing outside the hospital and yelling to a crowd of about 40 people. It's a bit hard to hear, but she says that this hospital is supposed to serve 360,000 people. We have 360,000 people in South Brom. And Cleo didn't just yell outside the hospital. Inside, she was pushing for change too.

She and the Lords organised a group of doctors and healthcare workers who agreed with them. They wrote letters, tried to get meetings with administrators. But nothing changed. Here's Cleo. So many demonstrations, so many demands, so much hollering, and they still didn't do it. So now's the time. We're going to take this sucker over.

On July 14, 1970, just a month after they stole the TB truck, the Young Lords would try to take over Lincoln Hospital. At the time, the Young Lords were heavily infiltrated by police. We have documents from the FBI showing that basically as soon as the Young Lords picked up their first bag of garbage, secret police were trying to get into the group. So because of this, the group's leaders had to keep the hospital plan to only a very tight circle. But they needed a lot of people to take over a hospital. So, they threw a party to get around 100 young lords together in an apartment.

Some of us knew that it was not a party. Some of us knew that it was going to be the takeover. Did you know? Yeah, I knew. Everybody's partying, dancing, having a good time. And then, brothers and sisters turned the music off. One of the leaders of the Young Lords stood up and started talking. Everybody sit down, have a seat. We're here because this is a serious business. It is now time for us to take over the hospital.

So that's what we're here for. And did everyone cheer? Do you remember the reaction? It was cheering. It was cheering. Yay! We're ready to go. When are we leaving?

Not now. It was electric when people found out what we were there for. Everyone was assigned a buddy to keep an eye on them for the night, to make absolutely sure that no one ratted them out. I mean, you don't know who's who, and somebody might tell. So once you're in, you can't leave. And there's no phone calls and all that. This is it. Mickey Melendez was in charge of security.

Mickey's on security. Don't worry, we got it. I mean, there was a tremendous amount of adrenaline. It was exciting. It's like, you know, we're going to do this. The plan was for Mickey and a few others to sneak in first, barricade some doors and unlock others. The rest of the lords would pile into a large truck, drive up to the open doors and stream in. Mickey told me that getting through security, it wasn't a problem.

There were actually two guards that knew us and one of them had grown up with us and was very supportive of us. So to him, it didn't matter. Back at the party, it's still dark outside. The truck arrived to take everyone to the hospital. It was go time. Once we get in the truck, you got to have complete silence.

Shh, be quiet. Because now it's getting serious. And the closer you get to the hospital, the more serious things get. They got to the hospital and a hundred or so lords crept in. It was daylight was coming up, just about to come up. and so it was still a little

bit dark outside and here we go. As we were going in everybody's crouching very quietly tipping to your spot where you were assigned. Everyone had an assignment of where they needed to be. I was responsible for going to the administrative offices and kicking out the administrators. Cleo remembers seeing a few of them at their big wooden desks. And then I just walked in and went, we've taken over the hospital. You are out. You're bad administrators. You have to go get up and get out of here. Do you remember their reaction? Can we discuss? No, we cannot discuss this. It's too late.

The Young Lords wanted to kick out the hospital bosses so that they could run the hospital themselves. Some administrators refused to leave, and so the Young Lords told them to stay in their office. Meanwhile, other Lords were tasked with stringing up a huge sign across the two towers in the hospital. It said... Welcome to the in the hospital. It said, Welcome to the People's Hospital.

It was amazing. Welcome to the People's Hospital. Within the hour, the police knew what was going on and had already started lining up outside the hospital, ready to barge in. And this takes us to the moment we heard at the beginning of the show. It's 7.30am and Sid Davidoff, the crisis guy from the mayor's office, he steps through the lines of armed police. I walked in, I said, look, there's a bunch of guys out there with guns

who want to come in here. You cannot disturb a hospital because if I don't take you out of this, they're going to take you out of this, and that's not something you want. Until they were like, okay, you guys got to get out now. Get out. And we were like, we're not leaving. We're administering the hospital. We're not leaving. Sid and the Young Lords started negotiating. They told him they wanted a new hospital. Lincoln was bad and they deserved better. Here's Sid. The thing is, you don't change a hospital overnight. You don't rebuild a new hospital.

The young lords were impatient. They wanted it done quicker. And I'm thinking, how could you dare stand here and tell us that we can't get a new hospital right now? That's what I want to see. I want to see a new hospital. I want to see this one cleaned up. I want to see doctors treating patients with dignity and respect.

I want this right now. They reached a standoff. The Young Lords weren't backing down, and Sid wasn't going anywhere either. There were hundreds of patients in the hospital that day. And while the Young Lords were mainly gathered in an administrative floor of the hospital, Sid was worried that this would start affecting patient care. The clock kept ticking. Twelve hours went by, and the young lords got the sense that the police outside were ready to come in. In past scuffles, the police had beaten up the lords badly.

And then we kind of got the feeling these people were getting ready to come in here and kill us. That was scary when you're demonstrating and you know that it is possible that you can get beat up real bad. That's scary. Cleo said there were some young teenagers in the crew. They wanted to protect them. So the young lords agreed to leave, with the condition that Sid would meet with them later.

I'm the guy representing the mayor. And I'm not a low-level guy. I'm not a clerk. I'm not coming in and saying, I have to talk to somebody who's going to talk to somebody. I'm talking to the mayor. And I'm not a low-level guy. I'm not a clerk. I'm not coming in and say, I have to talk to somebody who's going to talk to somebody. I'm talking to the mayor. They understood it. So we got him out of there. No one was beaten up or arrested at the scene. The Young Lords were on their way to getting what they wanted. They'd secured private meetings with the mayor's office, got a ton of press, which they thought would pressure the government to do something.

But a few days after the takeover, a Puerto Rican woman died from complications in the obstetrics unit. A doctor was inexperienced and not supervised properly. And the young lords were furious. They barged into hospital meetings demanding to speak with administrators. They threatened the chief of obstetrics and forced him to leave. And some other doctors from his department walked out of the hospital

because they said it wasn't safe to go to work. Because of this, some patients were discharged without warning or transferred elsewhere. Here's the chief of paediatrics of Lincoln Hospital at the time, Dr Arnold Einhorn. He was interviewed soon after this. Their methods, their methods are terribly objectionable. They threaten, they threaten body harm.

And the fact is that they have absolutely no expertise to judge what is needed. They would like to direct priorities and programs and they haven't got the slightest idea. Cleo had a different version of events. Was there ever any violence towards any of the doctors? Never, never any violence. That's the one thing that we did not do

and one of the things that we would tell all of our cadre never to do. It's never inside of the hospital to engage in any violent activities. A hospital is a place of healing. This is not a place where you engage in violent activities. Sid from the mayor's office told me that while the young lords did scare administrators, they never brought in weapons to the hospital. And even though he was on the other side of the negotiation table, he says he had a lot of respect for what the Young Lords were doing. This group were there to make a difference, and I respected that. This was a situation with a real concern for health care, all right? You know, they're right. I mean, we all knew that Lincoln Hospital was not a particularly great hospital of its day. And after the takeover, changes did happen. Sid told me that they brought in new administration to run the hospital and made some

short-term fixes to the water supply so that there was enough pressure that doctors could wash their hands properly. And the big thing? Within weeks of the takeover, the city started clearing land where a new Lincoln Hospital would be built. In a lot of ways, the Youngwoods pushed the envelope to get a new Lincoln Hospital. You know, they claim that part of the reason that they weren't getting attention was because they were poor and it was a new immigrant community. Is that true?

I think in part, yes. I think it's a, you know, we say the voice of the voiceless. We're in a political world, right? Sometimes you need to be more vocal. They were vocal to a community that wasn't very vocal to us. The fight for Lincoln Hospital felt like a huge win for the young lords. They had the respect of people in high places. And from the outside, it looked like they were unstoppable. Their numbers were growing. But from the inside, cracks were starting to form.

It was getting tiring. The fights with the police, the constant surveillance, things were starting to break down and infighting began. And just as they were reaching the high point of their impact, it all came crashing down. About a year after the Lincoln takeover, something happened that for Mickey and Cleo would signal the beginning of the end for the Young Lords. It happened with a parade.

For the Puerto Rican community in New York, the Puerto Rican Day Parade is a big deal, a source of pride. And in 1971, the Young Lords found out that some cops were going to lead the parade. And they were like, nah, here's Mickey. Right, so we're going to take over the parade. We're going to take over the front of the parade because we protect and serve our people. Not the police. Not the police. They'd walk over the front of the parade because we protect and serve our people.

Not the police. Not the police. They'd walk out in front of the parade, cutting off the police. And they would come prepared with mace and wooden sticks strapped to their forearm to ward off police battens. We were ready to just fight it out with the cops. But the police knew they were coming. We found a handwritten note from a police infiltrator who knew about the whole plan. The mace, the sticks, everything. And so the cops came ready. Mickey had injured his shoulder,

so he couldn't be involved in the takeover. He stood back and watched what was happening. The parade starts. The New York City Police Department Hispanic Association starts marching. From a side, young lords start coming out to take over the front of the parade. And the cops then move in and start beating the young lords. Young lords were arrested. Some had to be taken to hospital.

And this sort of thing had happened before. But the community supported the young lords. This fight, though, it didn't feel like it was for the community. And so Cleo said the people didn't have their back. The people did not demand that they stop beating us. They didn't come out. They kind of just let us get our asses beat. And I think that they thought we had gone too far. The people in the community thought that the Young Lords had gone too

far. Mickey saw regular folks getting pulled in the scuffle between police and the group, and he knew things would never be the same. This is huge. You know, this is big. And it wasn't for anything. It wasn't for healthcare. Taking over the front of the parade, and then what? We ended the love affair with our community. The community didn't end it with us.

After the parade, the Donyas in the neighbourhood, they stopped coming around. Mickey and Cleo both told me that this parade was the first of many missteps. Over the next few years, the Young Lords would step away from healthcare and go back to their original goal of bringing independence to Puerto Rico. Soon, there was no more TB testing, no more breakfast programs. And by the mid-1970s, just as the new Lincoln Hospital was opening, the Young Lords had basically disbanded. They were over.

But even though they didn't last long, the ripples of their work can still be felt today. Their lead offensive helped to get New York City to introduce mandatory lead poisoning tests for kids. And soon after, the CDC pushed states around the country to do this too. These programs are still going on today. Their TB testing and protests at Lincoln brought attention to how unequal healthcare was across the city. And it's a conversation that's still playing out across America today. We're demanding free, quality healthcare for all.

Or whatever it is, whatever that call is, we've been saying this since 1960. And it's just now getting to be a political issue. But we were naive and I have to admit there was a level of naivete that is still shocking to me as I am now a grown up person. We thought we could whip their ass. And that and that is a wonderful thing to have that kind of courage and determination that yes we're going to make this thing change it is so naive that's science versus That's Science Versus. by Caitlin Kenney with help from Jorge Just. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, Bobby Lord and Blue Dot Sessions. The archive for this story came from Pacifica Radio Archive

and the documentaries El Pueblo Se Levanta and Palante Siempre Palante. A big thanks to Denise Oliver-Velez, Dr Daryl Wanzer-Serrano, Iris Morales, Walter Bosco de Rio, Professor Jose Sanchez, Pedro J. Hernandez, Professor Lloyd Novick and others. An extra thanks to Blythe Terrell, Amanda Orozniak, the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle-Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time. Thank you.