from thefreeonline pn 16 Jul 2023 by Jon Jeter at Black Agenda Report
Shakur’s generation of radical Black activists represents the sun around which the modern American state orbits, or to say it more plainly, the late 20th century’s most democratizing social movements were in collusion with Black militancy.
After commandeering a chest x-ray unit in New York City, the Young Lords named it after 19th-century Afro-Puerto Rican physician and abolitionist Ramón Emeterio Betances. (Image Credit: Hiram Maristany. X-Ray Truck II. 1970.)
The late Mutulu Shakur and other Black radicals were responsible for improving the lives of millions of people in the U.S. The counter revolution ended that period of progress, but the political crisis they created forced systemic change on a grand scale.
Inspired by the Cuban Revolution and the Black Panthers, a clique of poor and working class Puerto Ricans founded the liberation organization, the Young Lords, in Chicago in 1968 and opened its New York chapter a year later.
The activists got down to business immediately, creating a free, daily breakfast program for children and testing them for lead poisoning, organizing clothing banks and street patrols to monitor police abuse, and launching inmates’ rights and school reform efforts.
In October of 1969, the militants protested abysmal living conditions in East Harlem and the South Bronx by forming a human chain to block traffic at 125th Street and 2nd Avenue, and lining up rows of garbage cans at the entrance to the Triborough Bridge.
After the hour-long bridge blockage, here is what happened next, according to the historian Johanna Fernandez in her book, The Young Lords: A Radical History:
[t]he Young Lords spontaneously redirected the protesters along 125th Street, Harlem’s major thoroughfare, to the neighborhood’s welfare grievance office on Seventh Avenue, half a mile west of the bridge entrance.
According to Young Lord Pablo Guzmán, rerouting a predominantly Puerto Rican march through Harlem offered an opportunity to counteract the “divide and conquer game in the colony”—in which Puerto Ricans and black Americans were pitted against each other on the basis of ethnic differences—and build class unity among them.
As he put it, ‘Everybody’s on welfare and everybody’s poor, and everybody should be fighting on the same side of the revolution.’
Fifty-three years ago this week, in the wee hours of the morning on July, 14, 1970, a cadre of Young Lords occupied the main administrative building of Lincoln Hospital, an underfunded, public hospital in the South Bronx that provided health care so derelict that it was known as the “Butcher Shop,” according to Carlos “Carlito” Rovira, an artist who joined the Young Lords at the age of 14.
The 12-hour-standoff ended ambiguously but when a Puerto Rican woman, Carmen Rodriguez, died from an abortion five days after the militants’ takeover of Lincoln Hospital, the combination of events forced the city’s hand; within seven years, construction was completed on a new hospital.
In addition to the new facility, the demand for community control over the hospital produced a revolutionary drug rehabilitation program that eschewed methadone for acupuncture which proved more effective.
The acupuncture protocol was the first of its kind in the nation, and was introduced by a Black radical named Mutulu Shakur, who at one meeting of the Young Lords read aloud from a newspaper article that explored a Bangkok doctor’s use of acupuncture to treat a patient’s opium addiction. The article quoted the patient saying that he no longer craved opium after undergoing the acupuncture treatment.
By 1974, hospital administrators acquiesced to the community’s demands and introduced acupuncture as a critical component of Lincoln’s Detox therapy; Shakur would go on to become the program’s assistant director.
“Dr. Mutulu was meeting with our people on a consistent basis,” Rovira said.
Deepening budget cuts would eventually phase out acupuncture therapy but along with his mentorship of his stepson, Tupac Shakur, Lincoln Detox is part of the huge legacy of Mutulu Shakur, who died last week of bone marrow cancer, eight months after he was paroled; he had served 37 years for his role in an armored car robbery that left one security guard and two police officers dead.
Continue reading “Mourning Mutulu Shakur and the Black Radical Tradition that Transformed the US”
Los Álamos (Chile), June 9, 2023. The pylon of the high-voltage power line failed to withstand the shock of the attack.
Ñuble region (Chile), June 13, 2023. The pulp industry’s railway bridge no longer functions
Placilla (Chile), June 9, 2023. The damaged pylon of the high-voltage line near Valparaíso.
The Free 