Body and Soul - Chapters 3 & 4 Reading Response

     During the times of the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panther Party represented a revolution to destroy the current (racist) system that was in place within the United States. The Panthers believed that the United States government had failed to fulfill the basic principles it was founded upon; such as all men being created equal.
     When looking back on the Black Panther movement, one usually imagines black men with large guns. The Black Panthers are usually thought of as a militaristic group, and while true in the beginning of their organization, it would eventually shift into an organization where the main focus was to help the black community obtain quality healthcare. Healthcare became a main focus for the Black Panthers. Whites had failed to provide health service for blacks and sometimes hospitals would be miles and miles away. Distance became an obstacle for many. African Americans began to take it upon themselves to create their own healthcare.
     To provide free health care, the Black Panther party would need health workers that knew what they were doing which is explained in the following, "The Panthers partnered with health activists who were able to impart the knowledge necessary to administer Party initiatives and who also shared its commitment to patient empowerment to demystify medicine, to the deprofessionalization of medical practice, and to a conception of healthcare as a human right, rather than a commodity" (Nelson 80). Medicine would no longer be a mystic art only known by educated white men. The Black Panther party helped uneducated African Americans learn basic medical care and empowered the population to learn more about the field of medicine.
     Along with the idea of creating their own medical care, the idea of Self-health (Nelson 89) surfaced among many radical feminists. They employed techniques to take care of their own bodies; protesting against the white-dominated powerhouse of the medical field. Self-health linked The Black Panther Party and many feminists within the country. In fact, Bobby Seale, one of the co-founders of the Black Panther Party, estimated that within three years of the Party's founding approximately 60 percent of its members would be women (Nelson 96). Healthcare served as a linkage to various minority movements during the Civil Rights Era in the mid-twentieth century.