Health Rights Are Civil Rights

Health Rights Are Civil Rights tells the story of the important place of health in struggles for social change in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. Jenna M. Loyd describes how Black freedom, antiwar, welfare rights, and women’s movement activists formed alliances to battle oppressive health systems and structural violence, working to establish the principle that health is a right. For a time—with President Nixon, big business, and organized labor in agreement on national health insurance—even universal health care seemed a real possibility.

Health Rights Are Civil Rights documents what many Los Angeles activists recognized: that militarization was in part responsible for the inequalities in American cities. This challenging new reading of suburban white flight explores how racial conflicts transpired across a Southland landscape shaped by defense spending. While the war in Vietnam constrained social spending, the New Right gained strength by seizing on the racialized and gendered politics of urban crisis to resist urban reinvestment and social programs. Recapturing a little-known current of the era’s activism, Loyd uses an intersectional approach to show why this diverse group of activists believed that democratic health care and ending war making were essential to create cities of freedom, peace, and social justice—a vision that goes unanswered still today.

Jenna M. Loyd received her PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and is assistant professor of public health policy and administration at the Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is a coeditor of Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis.

Contents

AcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsIntroduction: War, American Exceptionalism, and the Place of Health Activism

Part I. Desegregating Health, Transforming Health Care1. Urban Geopolitics and the Fight for “Equal Justice in Health Care Now”2. Watts, the War on Poverty, and the Promise of Community Control

Part II. Urban Crisis3. Economic Conversion, Survival, and Race in “Dodge City”4. Mothering Underground: The Home in Women’s Welfare and Peace Organizing5. The War at Home: Forging Interracial Solidarities for Peace and Freedom

Part III. Cold War Body Politics6. Population Scares and Antiviolence Roots of Reproductive Justice7. Where Is Health? The Place of the Clinic in Social Change8. “Property Rights over Human Life”: Taxes and Austerity in the Divided City

Epilogue: The Right to Health Meets the Right to the CityNotesBibliographyIndex