Cleo Silvers is a former Young Lord and Black Panther Party member who has organized across many states and for many decades. She joined our interview from Memphis over Zoom, with a backdrop of over 100 books haphazardly stacked, Anthony Hamilton playing in the background. Cleo had just gotten out of the hospital and remarked on how the healthcare system has not seemed to change much. She wore big, funky black glasses and a bright yellow t-shirt with the writing “Mutulu is Home,” referencing the release of Dr. Mutulu Shakur, a member of the Black Liberation Army. After reminiscing briefly about her long-lasting friendships in the East Bay, she sipped her green tea, smiled, and we began.
You have such a rich history in organizing, from the Young Lords to the Black Panther Party to now as you continue to teach so many—including medical and public health professionals—on how to mobilize. For people who are new to you and your activism, can you tell us about your political ideology and how you got there?
This is pretty simple and easy and it’s rather shocking to me that most young people don’t come to this automatically, if you’re living in the United States and you’re seeing what’s happening right in front of you. I was the only little child in a household of grandparents, parents, aunts, and uncles. We had a huge family. And, everybody in my family was involved in one way or another in community activism. Either in the church, bringing people together in the church, helping people, people that didn’t have Thanksgiving meals were always able to come. We had a huge garden and people in the community would come to our garden and there was never a question as to whether or not you could get food out of our big ol’ garden. We had chickens, we gave away chickens…you know, my family was kind of a community center almost. The other important thing is that everything that had to do with Black people, you could find out in my house. The whole community would come to read magazines, every Black magazine, Ebony, Jets, Sepia, every Black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, the New York Independent, Amsterdam News, the Chicago Independent, all the newspapers from all over the country that Black people put out were there for people to come and read. So my house was a place where it was kind of a discussion community where people in the neighborhood came.
The other thing is I was very spoiled. Cause I thought I was as grown up as the rest of the people in the house. So they would talk to me like I was a grown up, and I’d respond like I was a grown up. And I started talking around 10 months old, something like that. I wanted to be like everybody else in the house, so I’d walk around with my books and my toys. My cousins used to come to the house and visit and they used to want to play with my toys. And I was like, “absolutely no, you cannot touch my toys. I’ll share my grandmother with you but I will not share my toys.” My mother said to me, “come over here, I want to tell you something.” And my cousins are there having a tantrum, that’s the other thing I love. I was having a tantrum, they’re touching my stuff. She said, “It’s not fair for you to have all these toys and have your cousins come over here and you’re not letting them play with your stuff. And I want you to be a fair person. You hear?”
That was the core of the essence of where my family had an impact on what my views are, my political views. Fairness is the key to this whole thing. Fairness in regard to how Black people are treated in this country, fairness as to the history of our being in this country, how we got here, fairness was at the core of everything that happened in my house. I promised my mother that I would be fair and I would let the other kids play with my toys. Which, I did. So, I found out that being fair actually was a good thing. And, it made me feel like a better person. Even at 3 years old, I felt like okay, I can handle this.
When people ask me what’s the history of your political viewpoint, the core to this whole thing is what is just and what is fair. And it’s real simple, I didn’t start out with a sophisticated understanding of stuff. I was just like, well this is right. It’s either right or wrong. It’s not right for one group of people to have the access to all the resources in society and for the larger number of people not to have access to any of the resources in the society.
Then, when I was in the fifth grade, I was 10, and the teachers that we had were coming back from NATO. My teacher was a lieutenant in NATO, and his whole thing, all he wanted to talk about was anti-communism. His whole thing was communism is bad and democracy is good. He wrote the definition of communism is “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.” And the definition of democracy was laissez faire, dog-eat-dog, the person who is the strongest reaps the benefits. Immediately, I raised my hand and I was like I think I’m a communist. He had a fit! “What! My best student? How can you?” I was like it’s obvious that if this is your definition of the two systems, then communism is a better system! Now this is very funny, he spent the rest of the semester trying to disabuse me of the idea that I was a communist. And he never paid any attention to any of the other kids.
Anyways, that was my first connection, politically, to what my ideas were. And, truly, anybody who really looks at the situation, unless you have something about you believe that you are going to be the rich person, you are going to be the person that has access to the resources, and I don’t know how a person of color for instance, in this country, can believe that. Even with the greatest possible education, it’s not going to happen, not in the United States at least.
It’s just so simple, so basic.
It sounds like fairness is the through line in how you would characterize your political ideology. What shaped your clear vision of what fairness is? How would you define it?
My definition is that every human being should have the basic things that they need in life in order to live a decent, quality life. Every human being. The constitution of this country says that all men are created equal and that you should have the access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Life, you can’t have life without quality healthcare. You cannot be happy if you don’t have the basics that you need: food, clothing, and shelter. It really boggles the mind that there are people in the world that don’t have basic stuff, that can’t hop on a train and go someplace because they don’t have the fare. Or, can’t think of feeding their children. That there had to be a free breakfast program because people didn’t have money. That people don’t have jobs! It’s just so many basic things that people…I don’t understand why it is that people have not figured out that there’s something upside down in the world if everyone does not have access to the basics. I’m not sure how to further explain this, except that everyone, to me, should have food, clothing, and shelter.
To me it’s like don’t you see what’s happening right in front of you? This is so simple, in one way. And as a person of African descent in this country, it is very deep. It goes very deep to know that your whole background and all of your people were stolen in order for you to get here. Stolen off the coast of Africa. Brought here. Enslaved. Sold. Beaten. Murdered at will. Had all this value extracted from them and never compensated over a 400 year period. And that you live in this society and you have knowledge of this. Even if you have the slightest knowledge of this, how can you not understand? Some people react viscerally, but if you have the tiniest bit of education and can look back and understand the history of this system, and how it has become the capitalist system and the richest, capitalist system in the world. That’s saying something.
To some degree, I think some people want to ignore this. I guess it’s hard, I guess it’s difficult to really look at it, these politicians, these Black politicians and Black capitalists, I think they want to ignore the real truth of the essence of what has happened over this period of time. And, a human being could ignore it and say “well I’m not really sure, how do I fit in, I wasn’t there.” Well, my grandparents were there. My great grandparents were there. Their parents and their grandparents were there. So I can’t not look at it and not consider it.
It’s almost like how could you not have basic views?
Your view is grounded in relationality. Politicians think the solutions are too complicated and what you’re saying is we should just treat people like humans and humans deserve x, y, z rights. And that doesn’t seem so complicated.
It’s not very complicated! And all these people that say they’re religious. People who follow whatever religious concepts, the basics of any religion is do unto others what you want done unto you. So those concepts navigate all throughout how human beings interact with each other. It’s beyond politics, it’s beyond education, it’s beyond your role as a laborer, your role as a capitalist, it is to treat other people as human beings, and be a decent human being yourself! How can you look at other people and just want things for yourself? Again, it’s just not that difficult.
In your mind, what is the connection between this very simple outlook on the world of how humans should relate to each other with your understanding of health as a site for justice and liberation?
The reason why I became a community organizer is because I couldn’t get a job. As a dark-skinned, African-American woman out of high school with dyslexia, I could not get most jobs. So, I got a job as a waitress while I was trying to figure out how I was going to get the money to go to college. I graduated number 13 out of a class of 638 students so I knew I was supposed to be going to college but my family didn’t have the money to send me there. I had to figure this out. I was working on the midnight shift in a restaurant in Downtown Philadelphia and I remembered that my mother, who was such an encouraging, brilliant, vibrant, and beautiful person, her thing was “don’t get pregnant like I did.” She had her first child when she was 15. “I want you to see the world and enjoy culture” and she was all into that kind of stuff. So I had that in the back of my head, I want to see the world. One morning I came home from work and there was an ad that said “Join VISTA and see the world!” VISTA was the domestic Peace Corps. And I thought, I better do this. I was the first African American woman that was brought into the VISTA movement.
So, they train you! They didn’t just bring you in and throw you out into the community… well they kind of just did drop you into these very poor communities. But, they did train me at Pratt Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. The Alinsky Method in organizing is what we were trained in. The organizing philosophy was to listen to people and hear what they say their needs are. That you as an individual cannot go into another person’s community and tell them what they need. Your job is to go in and hear what people need. And then, help them to articulate their needs and carry out the struggle to attain what it is that they need.
After my training was over, they dropped me off with my one partner, Paula Bowers, in the South Bronx. South Bronx being the congressional district in the United States with the lowest income per capita. Even lower than Mississippi. It was absolutely the most shocking thing I’d ever seen in my life. The first thing that we did was work with the little kids. I went in and said let’s go to the school and see if we could help out over there. And of course, the principal was a racist. The community was 60% Puerto Rican and 40% African American. We went to the principal’s office and asked how we could help and he said, “Well, all of these children are garbage pickers. And none of them are going to be anything. So we got the worst ones we can give you. They’re in the 6th grade, reading at a 2nd grade level, and they’re disrupting the rest of the school. So you can do something with them.” He not only said the children were garbage pickers, but that their families were too and that these were the worst of the worst human beings.
First of all, I was shocked to hear someone saying it straight out like that. The other thing is we figured out we shouldn’t play with these kids without talking to their parents. We asked the children to introduce us to their parents, so they took us home, and we met their parents. They were just lovely people but the conditions they were living in were… I had never seen anything like it before. The housing conditions were horrible and that was my first time organizing, was in housing.
So that’s how I started organizing in housing by visiting the homes of the children and seeing how bad the conditions were. And we started organizing rent strikes. Now, who were organizing rent strikes who don’t really know how to do it, and who were organizing to get buildings out of the hands of recalcitrant landlords, but the Young Lords and Black Panthers. Who else would be doing that kind of stuff in a poor community besides them and other community activists! So that’s how I met my first Young Lords and Black Panthers as a housing organizer.
As you begin to do organizing in one issue, housing, I realized I was connected to these families in all ways. Some kids would get sick, parents wouldn’t speak English, they would need someone to accompany them to the hospital, then you get to the hospital and you have to wait 72 hours before they will see you? I could go on with hundreds of horrendous stories about healthcare. Then you have to connect with the welfare department. Because they used to come out and looking in people’s closets to make sure there was no man in the house because they would cut off your welfare and your ability to feed your children if you had a man in the house. So I dealt with that. There were all these issues but it starts to clarify when you help families.
We started a Block Association, mine was Trinity Avenue, where we put people in the community that were sitting at home all day in an office and let them deal with complaints that would come from other people in the community. And we would design programming, take the kids bowling, take them out to restaurants, but the major thing I think that hit me was when you go to the hospital, how horrible things were. Person could go into the hospital for an amputation on the left hand and they would take off your right hand. You could go into Lincoln Hospital Emergency Room and for 72 hours not have access to food or water. There was no such thing as triage. So if you came in with a gunshot wound and they were already treating someone with the flu, they would continue treating the flu and make the person with a gunshot wound wait. People were dying in huge numbers. The actual physical hospital had lead paint falling off the wall and kids eating it. Rats running around the emergency room.
But, the doctors had a beautiful dining room, with silverware and dishes! And the people in the emergency room would just be living horribly during the time they were waiting there. And then the doctors would treat them so disrespectfully. “Oh you don’t know what you’re talking about, just do what I tell you to do because I’m the doctor and you don’t know anything. I’m smarter than you,” and that’s the way they’d treat the patients. As someone who would accompany patients in the hospital, I couldn’t believe this. A lot of research was being done on people and people would never know they were having research done on them!
The Black Panther Party had a newspaper out called the Black Panther and we were learning that this was not the only place, it’s not just the South Bronx, it’s not just Harlem, it’s all over the country. We learned that nutrition is a health issue and the Free Breakfast Program and how important it was to have food before you go into the classroom. We were all working together in the community, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, the Block Associations, the people, there was a lot of community activism going on. The young people came in arguing, fighting, and demanding, and we started to see that one focus that you had to have was to get people to be treated like human beings in order to live.
If you’re ill, you can’t go to work. You can’t take care of your family. You can’t clean your house. There’s so many things you can’t do if you’re not well. And all of that has to do with healthcare. Young doctors started coming into the community and connecting, we all gravitated to each other, we like the same music, we connect. The young doctors started telling us that diabetes and tuberculosis are all preventable diseases! And they started teaching us about preventable diseases, about lead poisoning and what it does to children, and how lead was in every bit of paint that was all over the hospital walls and in everyone’s home.
Then you start to be like oh my goodness it’s all this stuff that has to be done and where do you start? Because now I’m overwhelmed, we’re all overwhelmed. But we sat down and talked to each other and read books together. I was reading all the progressive education books and we would have study groups and stay up all night long, drinking wine, and talking about what needed to be done in society and how to change it. We’d hang out together, go to the bar together, go to the jazz club, and the concerts together! And all the time, planning and thinking and considering. The other important thing is we’d live together. VISTA volunteers don’t get paid hardly anything so the church gave us an apartment. And some of the kids in the neighborhood didn’t have a place to stay so they would come couch surf in our apartment, in the doctors’ apartments. It was this connection with each other that was very, very important. And that’s one thing that’s missing today.
Can you say a little more about the importance of personal relationships in organizing?
You have to feel like you’re committed to something. I do interviews with fourth and fifth graders and they always ask me what made you decide to give your whole life to other people? And what I say is that you have to be committed, and you have to commit yourself. And you have to be committed to not only the struggle but the people you struggle with. There’s not going to be any success in organizing if you don’t have the tightest relationships with other people. You have to have each other’s backs! Because if one person goes down, hey guess what, you’re next. And we know that from looking at all of our leaders that have gone down and are continuing to go down. New people have to step up. And in order to do that you have to always be tight with the people who you are working with. You have to have a sense of trust in that person who is standing beside you. And you cannot do that if there’s competition in the room. If there’s no mutual respect in the world. Trust comes out of mutual respect and a recognition of the other person’s skills and the things that they bring to the table. It’s not a question of competition, it’s a question of let’s all put our skills on the table and see how we can use them in the interest of changing society and making a better place of the world. So really it’s a question of making the world a better place. And as human beings, we all should want the world to be a better place. Why would you not? It’s not complicated to want things to be better. And if you want things to be better than you take the tiniest steps and make the tiniest relationships and you do that constantly.
Look, it took me ten years to begin organizing here in Memphis, Tennessee. In the south, Black people don’t talk to each other, they’re in fear of talking to each other because you could get killed for being in a group. You could be lynched for being in a group. And it’s an undercurrent, it’s not something you can see. There’s still segregation here. It is extremely difficult when you’re not able to share. That’s the other thing, we shared. We lived together. There was always an apartment that you could go to if you didn’t have a place to stay or if you were visiting. If I went to Oakland right now, there’s ten places I could stay, no matter what. Any place I could go in the country where there’s a Young Lord or a Panther, I know there’s a place I could stay. So that’s the thing, we always had an opening. We were there together, we were talking to each other, we were trying to uphold each other.
The other thing is there were always agent provocateurs and there were always people trying to destroy the strength of your organization. And there were things that we used to mitigate against that but we were not always successful. There were very many times we were not successful at all.
That leads me to wonder how you maintained the belief that relationship building was so important to your organizing goals when there were those who tried to disrupt your goals by infiltrating the relationships?
An outside agitator usually doesn’t have anything good to bring to the table. Everything that we did and stood for was to do good, to make things better, to bring positive change to the society. Agent provocateurs like to come in and complicate stuff. Look, it’s not complicated. And when you find somebody that walks into a room and starts bringing in 10,000 pieces of disparate philosophical position points and throwing them out there when you’re in the process of trying to figure out how to organize to end the use of lead paint, that person has got a problem. You got to look at them. Now, they might not be, they don’t always have to be an agent provocateur. But you have to be mindful.
When people are just coming in and saying let’s do totally illegal stuff without considering it, it takes thoughtfulness! You can’t just say let’s go blow up this building and make our demands. That’s not the way you change society. First of all, you need to do research. It’s very important to have an analysis and understanding of the broader conditions. You can’t just understand what’s going on Kelly Street, and not make the connection on what’s happening over on Trinity Avenue. You have to have a broader analysis. You have to understand the demographics in a society. You have to have an analysis of who is where and what the conditions are and what the healthcare conditions are and how many people are suffering from what. Because you can’t make a considered attack on some issue or health problem if you don’t know the details, if you don’t know what’s going on with the people. And that takes time! We spent so much time reading books, going to the library, going to the health department, trying to access data, and putting it together. Our analysis was usually more accurate and more succinct than the Department of Health! None of this can be done without complete immersion and focus and thoughtfulness and sharing of information. You have so many different people with so many different skills. Some people are epidemiologists, some are speakers and can take that data and turn it into something people can understand, some people are writers. You have to have all those skills in the room and figure out who can do what best and how to make it as successful as possible.
What I’m hearing is that when you put the investment in your co-organizers, it becomes much easier to spot when somebody is coming to you with a lack of understanding and immersion. It becomes a lot clearer who is not there for the intended purposes of the group.
And that’s where the problem is, because what do you do about it? I’m sure you read about what happened with the Black Panthers in Connecticut where someone was accused of being a police agent and the police tortured and killed him and then blamed it on the Panthers. So, you have to be really careful. One of the things I learned from SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] was any time you are organizing with somebody, you ought to be able to take them home and meet your parents. You ought to be able to talk to their mothers and fathers and grandparents. You oughta meet their friends. You gotta have intimate relationships with people.
And, the paranoia is not unfounded. As you have shared over the years with me, so many of our revolutionary movements have been infiltrated, have been destabilized, trust has turned, and people have died because of it. How do you maintain your commitment to building relationships without letting the paranoia take over the way you move?
That’s where I talk about how deeply connected you need to be with each other. And what I mean is that I don’t think there’s anybody that was a Black Panther or a Young Lord that I didn’t know their mother and father and that I couldn’t go knock on their door in the middle of the night. They might not like it! They might say I’m disrupting their sleep! But you know who they are, and they know who you are. Leadership needs to also have ways of finding out who people are and their background. You need to figure out who is who. Sometimes that’s out in the open, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes you can have a wrong idea, so you don’t just throw it out there. So you say, “take me home with you!” Because when you’re so close to each other, “come to my house, let’s eat dinner together, let’s talk, let’s do our study groups,” you’ll know. Study together. Live together. But, don’t have sex with each other! [laughs] You need to be comrades and friends.
Building off this importance of relationships, can you take me back to the Lincoln Hospital Takeover and how the workers collaborated with the community, including the Black Panthers and the Young Lords?
After the VISTA, I got a job at Lincoln Hospital as a community mental health worker. The same month that I got the job, the community mental health workers took over the mental health services. They occupied it, took it over, threw the administrators out, and I’m right in the middle of it, because I’m an activist now. And that same day Columbia University students took over an administration building. Who should come support the workers at the Lincoln Hospital and the students at Columbia? The Black Panther Party! They came in and brought food, they brought water, they brought books, they brought analysis, they brought support. And they broke the organization into two—one goes up to the workers at the Lincoln Hospital and the other group goes to Columbia University to support the students. Immediately they came in and helped us, they did things like grunt work, working on the machines so we could get flyers out in the community. I’d take them out and explain what was going on at Lincoln Hospital. They also studied with us and they cooked with us. Because the workers were busy, we were meeting 24 hours a day. We gotta have press conferences, interviews, analysis, information, gain support of the doctors and the other medical workers, there’s a lot of work to be done. And so the grunt work was done by the Black Panther Party. Then they helped us make decisions about what to do next. During that time, they asked if I would join the Party because at that point I was well known in the community. So, everyone was working together, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, workers and we pulled together a 24 hour complaint table in the emergency room. I was the person mostly there for 24 hours a day and there were all these stories of how security would try to take down my setup and when they would go to lunch, I’d put everything back! And finally, the security people would take it down if they were told but then they would bring it back. So after a while, if you’re consistent enough, you gain the support of everyone, because everyone knows we were there to do good.
Understanding the struggles of the different groups of people—this is a key element to organizing. When you’re trying to build relationships with people, you have to understand those people. You have to understand their history, their struggles, what they stand for, what they believe in, and what they feel is necessary in their struggle and be willing to support the struggle. Just like we support the Palestinians. We support people who are struggling to change the conditions in their society. And of course, one of the first things I did was I went to Puerto Rico. I understood the struggle for Puerto Rican independence, and always supported it, but going there and living and working and organizing in the community gave me a deeper sense of the connection between the struggle for Puerto Ricans and the struggle of African Americans. And a deeper desire to support other international struggles because at the same time the Vietnam War was taking place.
Why was it important to make those cross-border connections to the domestic work that you were doing?
You don’t want to be isolated in your struggle. The world is set up where we are all connected to each other. This is not just one group of people here in the United States, there’s like 20,000 different groups of people who need different things and who are struggling for different things and who have different needs in terms of their own independence. People who want to be independent don’t want to be living under the cloud of colonialism or neo-colonialism. So the studying of colonialism was a key element of understanding what we were doing! We’re not just here by ourselves. We’re here on a planet where there’s lots of people and we should support anybody who is fighting for their independence, who is fighting for a decent life. And we should be looking to support other people and gain their support. The students in France in 1968, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Chinese Communist Party, I mean there are things swirling around the world and you want to be a part of what’s happening in the world. You don’t want to think your struggle is the only and most important struggle. It’s not. We have relationships with other human beings on the planet.
Part of what we’re doing is we’re trying to end all war. War is a ridiculous way for humans to function. Wouldn’t it be better to help each other? Instead of fighting each other? That’s another important concept of what we are doing. We want to build warm, strong, healthy relationships with other people and help to take the resources that are on the earth and share them equally. Now we’re going back to the 5th grade and talking about what does it really mean…you can give it a name, you can call it communism, you can call it socialism, but what it is is you don’t want war. And if you don’t war, then you have to have mutual support, and mutual concern, and mutual care. I just call it wanting a more beautiful way for humans to interact with each other. There are all these resources that can be used in so many different ways to make everybody live better.
If someone were to say that’s a very idealistic way to think about how people and the world work, what would you say to that?
I would say that you can call it idealistic, but more importantly, who wants to live in horror all the time? That’s what goes on in society when you don’t think idealistically, when your goals are negative instead of positive. I want society to be a place where little kids can grow up better off and learn good things. I don’t want to see the next group of human beings come into a world of hatred and disgust and horrible conditions, you know? And I’m a person that is for love and not for hate. I’ve been through a lot. But I’m not down for hate. I’m down for what can make this place a better place.
It is difficult, it’s very hard, because there are so many people who don’t want to think. It actually doesn’t take that much thinking to want better. The philosophical part of capitalist society is to focus on individualism, focus on me, I just want for me and mine. If you just think you want for you and yours, then somebody is going to try and take it for them and theirs. So the better way, the more thoughtful way, the more effective way would be to want for the person over there to have access to what you have so they don’t want to come steal yours. It’s better to share than to be selfish, back to my mom! If everybody had food then we wouldn’t have no thing called stealing. If everybody had access to the resources they need, then there would be no need to be at war, as a matter of fact. Wanting to use hatred to destroy other people, I just don’t understand it.
So, you can call it idealistic if you want to, but I bet you won’t have war and you won’t have crime. And that’s the goal.
Hey, if that’s idealism, sign me up.
Yeah, that’s what you want to be!
Also, I know we could keep talking forever but please let me know if you have to run at any point.
I’ll have to run soon but I’ll let you know, you know me, I’m on my soapbox. It’s hard to make me shut up!
And I would never dare to take you down from there! Maybe this can be our last question: I’d love to think about connecting all of the public health work that you have done to the landscape today. What have we not learned from the way y’all did public health back then? What have we learned?
Whew, that’s difficult! The Black Panther Party really had a focus on healthcare. But there were so many other things going on. You have to be anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, you have to deal with food, clothing, people going to jail, housing. Healthcare for Black people has always been an issue. Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington talks about the history of how Black people have been treated in the medical field historically. Not only did they treat us badly in terms of being able to kill us at will, they used us in every possible horrible research that was done, most of the time without any pain mitigation or consent. And especially on Black women.
So, what we did was deal with the conditions that we had direct access to, the people in the community, and that was also a period in the United States where they were bringing hard drugs into the community. Not only were people suffering from horrible preventable diseases, they were also under this deluge of heroin, so that 1 in 4 people in the South Bronx and Harlem were addicted to heroin. It was the Black Panther Party that began the struggle against drugs, both in Oakland, around the country, and in New York City. It was Michael Tabor, who wrote Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide which was the basis for us demanding, along with the mental health workers, the establishment of a drug detoxification center that didn’t use chemicals.
Public health is always an important issue, has always been an important issue. It’s just a question of having a group of young people who have the spark to look at it and say that this can be done better. Our people deserve better. We have to figure it out, we have to help make conditions better in the field. There’s so many aspects to this, there’s child healthcare, lead poisoning, the need for traffic lights, environmental justice, nutrition, women’s health, access to abortion, preventable diseases, industry, labor rights. There’s so much!
Everything is somehow connected to the health of human beings. The question becomes, which things do you choose to focus on now?
***
Perhaps your answer can be formed with Cleo’s book recommendations:
Body and Soul by Alondra Nelson
Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington
Young Lords by Johanna Fernández
Black Faces, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide by Michael Tabor
Palante, the Young Lords Newspaper
Authored by Shivani Nishar
Shivani Nishar is the Co Editor of Public Health is Political. She is a big fan (and friend) of Cleo Silvers.
