We all thought we were going to a party.
So begins Takeover (dir. Emma Francis-Snyder, 2021), the recent documentary about the 1970 takeover of Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx by the Young Lords and Health Revolutionary Unity Movement. Although no music greeted them, the Young Lords had indeed gathered for a party of sorts: they would occupy Lincoln Hospital until their demands to improve its health care services were met. Known as “the Butcher Shop” among the Black and Brown residents of its Bronx neighborhood, the hospital had high maternal death rates, high infant death rates, constant surgical errors, and rooms covered in filth. A visit to it more often meant endangering one's life rather than receiving medical care. And yet, as these activists knew well, other New York hospitals (white and middle class) had the funding, infrastructure, technologies, space, and staff required to provide real health care. Faced...
University of California Press