At 3 a.m. on a summer morning in July 1970, a group of activists climbed into the back of a rented U-Haul truck believing they might not make it out alive.
The action was led by members of the Young Lords — a predominantly Puerto Rican revolutionary organization — and included members of the patient-worker “Think Lincoln” committee and the Health Revolutionary Unity Movement (HRUM), a formation of left-wing black and Puerto Rican hospital workers. Roughly 150 people were involved in the takeover of the hospital’s nurses’ residence building in the South Bronx on July 14, 1970.
By dawn, they were inside. A Puerto Rican flag hung from the building. A banner read: “Welcome to the People’s Hospital.”
Lincoln was the main public hospital serving one of the poorest congressional districts in the country. Residents called it a “butcher shop.” Paint peeled from emergency room walls. Roaches crawled into pill cups. Infant mortality in the surrounding neighborhood far outpaced city and national averages. Days after the occupation, a young woman named Carmen Rodríguez died at Lincoln following a legal abortion procedure — her death becoming, for many Bronx residents, further evidence that the hospital’s standard of care was not simply stretched but dangerously inadequate.
More than fifty years later, that confrontation is the subject of a city-funded, yearslong project inside the New York City Department of Health, a process that brought former Young Lords and public health officials together last week at Hostos Community College to revisit what was built, how it was dismantled, and what repair would now require.
The Lincoln Hospital takeover did not erupt from nowhere. In the months leading up to July 1970, the Young Lords and their allies had already been running what they called a “health offensive” in the South Bronx. They seized a city-owned X-ray truck and drove it through the neighborhood with the original technicians to test residents…
Auteur: Alex N. Press
