The Medical Committee for Human Rights: A Case Study in the Self-Liquidation of the New Left (part 1)

Kotelchuk, Rhonda, and Levy, Howard (1986). The Medical Committee for Human Rights: A Case Study in the Self-Liquidation of the New Left. In Race, Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s. Reed, Adolph, ed. New York, Greenwood Press.

An earlier version of this paper included the study's methodology, focused more on the events of 1972, and omitted the analysis of the organization's direction from 1973-1979. It appeared as "MCHR: An Organization in Search of an Identity. What happened io the most important health organization on the Left." in Health PAC Bulletin (March/April 1975). Online at http://www.healthpacbulletin.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/1975-63-March-April.pdf

Introduction

The Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) was on the Selma Bridge at the Meredith march during the height of the 1960s civil rights movement. It attended to the injured during the Washington, D.C., urban riots and at the 1968 Democratic Convention. It served the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and other Third World organizations of the early 1970s. It was with women in support of legalized abortion, with welfare rightists fighting for supplemental food programs, with prisoners rebelling at Attica, with the National Liberation Front fighting to end the war in Vietnam, with hippies running free clinics, and with workers struggling for occupational health and safety.

In short, MCHR was anywhere and everywhere there was movement in the decade from 1964 to 1974. There were, to be sure, other health organizations that for shorter periods during that decade also played important roles. It is conceivable that in the long run some of them may prove to have been of greater historical importance. As a reflection of the turmoil, conflict, and contradictions of political movements as it pertained to the health Left, however, only the MCHR provides an adequate canvas on which to depict that period in the richness, color, and tone required for accurate interpretation.

What follows represents an attempt at an analytic history of MCHR. It is our hope that this account will catalyze serious reflection, discussion, and debate concerning the many issues confronted by the movement of the 1960s, issues that promise to recur, albeit perhaps in different forms, in the movement of the coming decades.

The MCHR suffered from many of the same unresolved theoretical and practical issues as did the rest of the American Left. Further, its wane was coincident with that of the larger movement. This fact, however, provides scant solace or excuse for those concerned with building a viable radical movement. It is our contention that unless the shortcomings of the past are presented, understood, meditated upon, and ultimately overcome, we can expect nothing but a repetition under new guises of the same errors that plagued us in the past and that still plague us. We realize that this runs contrary to a strong tendency pervading the American Left and having its roots in the character of American pragmatism: to forget or ignore the past and to turn optomistically to the future, vowing to "try harder next time." Nonetheless, it is our hope that such resistance can be surmounted and that at least the beginnings of such a process will be stimulated by what follows.

The Catalyst and the Context

One night in June, 1964 three civil rights workers were arrested for speeding in Neshoba County, Mississippi, while investigating the burning of a black church. The sheriff claimed to have released them shortly after their arrest. A month later their savagely beaten and mutilated bodies were found buried 18 feet under a clay dam. The names James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman flashed across television sets all over the country. Millions of Americans were shocked, angered, and more determined than ever to complete the crusade for which the young men had given their lives. Mississippi was to be liberated by exorcizing racism and hatred from its bowels.

The year was that of the Mississippi Summer Project or, as it became known, Freedom Summer. Though supported by a coalition of civil rights organizations including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), its phosphorescent guiding light, moral impetus, and catalytic energy was provided by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The silent 1950s were over as thousands of Americans, mostly students, trudged off to the front lines of Mississippi to be greeted by bombings, beatings, arrests, state troopers, ferocious dogs, and sometimes death.

Up to this time the medical community had been mostly quiescent. There were, however, progressive medical organizations still functioning as holdovers from the Old Left of earlier eras. Despite their low energy levels, they represented latent forces for social commitment within the medical community and set the stage for MCHR's emergence.

In New York City, the Physicians' Forum held educational meetings, issued pronouncements on current issues, and wrote legislative proposals that were almost invariably ignored by a Congress that with all deliberate speed was going nowhere. Not that members of the Physicians' Forum and similar organizations had never known struggle. Many had a history of political activity dating back to the Communist Party of the 1930s; some had been on the front lines of the founding of the CIO; a few had been on the even tougher front lines of the Spanish Civil War fighting on the side of the Loyalists. They may in practice have accepted the 1950s ideology of the end of ideology but, unlike their medical colleagues, they had been bitten and sensitized by the political bug. Their concern was heightened now by the fact that many had children who had gone South to join the fight for freedom and justice. With the killing of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, they, as well as similar groups in other cities, were galvanized into action.

Toward the mid-1960s organizations with a more explicit civil rights focus sprang up within the medical community. In 1963, for example, a group of doctors, mostly from New York City, organized the Medical Committee for Civil Rights (MCCR) in response to the growing militance of the civil rights movement. Its first officers included John Holloman and Walter Lear, both destined to play central roles in the MCHR. Other MCCR members later to join the MCHR included Tom Levin, Aaron Wells, Charles Goodrich, and Paul Comely.

MCCR saw its role as challenging segregated medical facilities in the South and segregated local medical societies. In early June, 1963, MCCR wrote to the President of the American Medical Association (AMA) appealing for the "...termina[tion of] the racial exclusion policies of State and County Medical societies...direct membership in the AMA [for] Negro physicians who are denied membership in their State and County medical societies...oppos[ition to] the 'separate but equal' clause of the Hill-Burton Act." On June 20, following AMA inaction, 20 MCCR doctors, all wearing suits and ties, shocked the medical community by picketing the annual convention of the AMA in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in what MCCR described as a "dignified public protest." Later that summer the MCCR published its first newsletter, announcing its support for the up coming March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which had been promoted by all the leading civil rights organizations. The MCCR that year also testified before Congress in support of pending civil rights legislation.

Another group, albeit a nascent one, played a role in the genesis of the MCHR. In the early 1960s Tom Levin, a clinical psychologist in New York City, gathered together a mailing list of psychologists and social workers who had given money and support to the civil rights movement. The group, called the Committee of Conscience, became the first medically oriented group to make contact with the Southern-based civil rights movement when Levin went to Mississippi to obtain first-hand information about brutality against civil rights workers. The contacts Levin made, in particular with SNCC and CORE, later proved to be the direct link to the MCHR.

In Los Angeles the Charles Drew Society had an ongoing concern with discrimination against Black doctors. In Chicago the Committee to End Discrimination in Medical Institutions (CED) was the MCHR's direct predecessor. Indeed, two of its members, Quentin Young and Irene Turner, were to assume preeminent leadership positions (nationally and locally, respectively) in the MCHR.

Mississippi Bound

The killings of Chaney, Shwerner, and Goodman resulted in a panicked telephone call to Tom Levin from James Forman, head of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). Although neither Forman nor Levin had a clear idea of what should be done, a series of hurried phone calls resulted in a meeting two days later of twenty-five to thirty largely older white and black professionals held in the office of Dr. John Holloman.

One of the doctors present was Edward Barsky, a surgeon who had served as the chief medical officer of the Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. Perhaps out of his experience it was proposed that a "sort of Abraham Lincoln Brigade" be sent to Mississippi. By July 4, 1964, with vague sense of action and little sense of strategy, the first team of doctors flew to the Magnolia State on what was called a fact-finding mission. The team included Tom Levin; Elliott Hurwitz, chief of surgery at Montefiore Hospital; Les Falk, a deputy director of the United Mine Workers' health program, the national office of which was located in Pittsburgh; and Richard Hausknecht, a private-practicing New York City gynecologist.

Once on Mississippi soil the team scattered in different directions. Those more or less sharing a public health perspective, such as Falk, spent their time investigating segregation in local health facilities and exploring the local health establishment, particularly the black medical establishment, in search of people willing to meet the needs of civil rights workers. They concluded that what needed to be done was to directly fight segregation in southern health institutions. They suggested that the separate-but-equal clause of the Hill-Burton Act was a potential "action wedge" for such a program.

Tom Levin, on the other hand, spent most of his time "on the front lines" with Bob Moses, SNCC leader of the Summer Project. After touring the battlefield, Levin concluded that what was needed was "medical presence" to directly aid the beleaguered civil rights workers and to employ the prominence and wealth of northern doctors in support of the civil rights movement (the idea, in fact, behind Levin's Committee of Conscience).

When the team returned to New York City everyone agreed about one thing---that an organization was needed. At the suggestion of Falk, it was named the Medical Committee for Human Rights. As to exactly what, however, the organization was to be and do, there was disagreement---in a form that was to become prototypical of future debates within and about the MCHR. At stake was the question: What is the MCHR?

The seemingly more militant camp identified with CORE and the SNCC, the most militant civil rights organizations, and pushed the notion that the MCHR should be a support organization for the civil rights movement, providing medical care on the front lines, that is, medical presence. Those less enamored of civil rights militance argued for a direct assault upon Mississippi's two-class health-care system. Paradoxically this apparently less militant approach would have given the infant organization an independent and self-defined role. The seemingly more militant approach of medical presence won out, however, and defined the MCHR as an adjunct of the civil rights movement.

In this decision lay the kernel from which the MCHR's legacy would grow. Later the civil rights movement would be replaced at different times by the antiwar movement, the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, the American Indian movement, the prison reform movement, poor Appalachians and workers on the job. However, the MCHR would never escape the legacy (some might say the curse) of being a service-and-support organization attached to whatever movement was most current or fashionable at the time; and at every step of the way, those within the MCHR pushing for the closest association and identity with other movements would be regarded as the militants and radicals.

In the MCHR's earliest days the position of the less militant faction was not helped by their nagging, mostly behind-the-scenes opposition to Aaron Wells, a black New York City doctor, as the first chairman of the MCHR. Several black doctors who had been present alluded in retrospect to the opposition to Wells as the first sign of latent racism within the organization, a charge that was to be echoed before the MCHR completed the civil rights phase of its history.

Freedom Summer

Every two weeks like clockwork through the summer of 1964 the MCHR sent twenty to forty doctors, nurses, and students into Mississippi. The nerve center of the operation was the Congregational Church (United Church of Christ) in midtown Manhattan which, at the request of Dr. Connie Friese, a member of the church and of the MCHR, made space available free of charge. At first Tom Levin directed the project; later the job was assumed by Des Callan, a young New York City doctor working at the Columbia Neurological Institute. During this period John Parham, originally within the Urban League, had responsibility for the day-to-day operation of the national office. In the South the MCHR found a dependable ally in Bob Smith, a black doctor who had been providing most of the medical care to the civil rights workers. The MCHR decided to set up a full time office and hire staff. By 1965 Dr. Alvin Pouissant headed the Jackson office.

Early leaders of the MCHR stated their goals in amorphous terms, but most members shared at least some of the following purposes:

1. provision of direct medical aid to civil rights workers;

2. provision of a medical presence at demonstrations and marches, designed to forestall brutality against participants;

3. appeal to the conscience of health professionals and the general public to gain support for the movement; and

4. raising money for the civil rights movement.

With the exception of providing medical aid for civil rights workers, the remainder of the program was necessarily geared toward public relations and placed a strong emphasis upon professionals, especially doctors. This posture was reflected by the operation of the national office of the MCHR in New York City. An early advertisement in the New York Times, for example, raised an astounding $80,000. There was something incongruous about the high-stepping fund-raising parties and dinners at some of New York's poshier hotels, Columbia University Faculty Club, and the Caprice Restaurant ("Entertainment by Bobby Short!"), all ostensibly for the benefit of black sharecroppers in the Deep South. In the bewitching spotlight of publicity in which MCHR doctors basked, the organization lost sight of the fact that much of the day-to-day nitty-gritty work was done not by doctors but by nurses, who barely had access to the wings of the stage, let alone the footlights.

Nurses such as Phyllis Cunningham, who had formerly worked with the SNCC, along with a few doctors such as June Finer, worked full time, night and day, traveling sometimes dangerous backroads of Mississippi to provide first aid for civil rights workers and community people and to hold classes on childhood diseases and nutrition for black mothers. They also observed firsthand the effects of segregated hospitals, clinics, and doctors' offices and became less and less enamored of simple medical presence.

Rhetoric and Reality: An Uneasy Truce

Members of the MCHR originally thought of Mississippi as a battlefield and romantically envisioned themselves going to give first aid in the trenches. According to Des Callan, however, once MCHR doctors got to Mississippi they discovered that despite isolated physical attacks on civil rights workers, their gory expectations had been greatly exaggerated. This fact, together with the growing demands of SNCC militants and the perceptions of the MCHR's nurses, threw the emphasis upon medical presence and its public relations foundations into serious question. As Cunningham later commented regarding the visiting-fireman approach, "Pompous liberal doctors could think highly of themselves by daring a two-week voyeuristic trip to the wilds of Mississippi but then go back home and continue their lucrative, and often racist, private practices." Most galling of all to the nurses was that while the MCHR was paying them "peanut butter and jelly" wages for unstinting service, it, at least during the first year, was usually paying its doctors their plane fare and expenses for their brief appearances. Nor did it help matters when the doctors, according to Cunningham, referred paternalistically to the "grand work being done by our little maids in Mississippi."

The tensions felt, particularly by non-doctors and women, were barely articulated in the 1960s but were to erupt with devastating fury by 1971. In the meantime, on the surface at least, the MCHR appeared the picture of health. Participation increased and financial stability seemed at hand. In September, 1964 the MCHR decided to form an ongoing national organization with locally based chapters. Chapters rapidly sprang up in New York City, Washington, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. By April, 1965, at its first annual meeting in Washington, at-large membership was extended to people in cities where no local chapter existed.

Local chapters, as spelled out in the Executive Committee minutes, were "to have maximum local autonomy consistent with a functioning national body." Ostensibly membership would not be limited to doctors or professionals, although those same minutes reveal MCHR's ambivalence on the guestion: "Anybody interested and who can function [italics ours] is welcome." On the question of voting rights the MCHR's professionalism and paternalism were undisguised: "We should not restrict ourselves to medical personnel; the majority will always be physicians. Let us act in magnanimity and not limit ourselves."

Whatever the interpretation of the rhetoric, in the years 1964 to 1966 the MCHR's style was dominated by doctors, though by 1965 there was a large influx of nurses and medical students into the organization. An indication of the leaders' real resistance, however, to consumer involvement was their reaction when a group of Mississippi black people asked to address the 1966 annual convention in Chicago. After much haggling, each consumer was allowed one minute to address the dignified assembly. To compound the irony, the convention's keynote speaker was Dr. Martin Luther King.

Drifting and Shifting

As early as 1965 the MCHR began to lose ground and support, at least of its original base, through guiet attrition. Early leaders such as Tom Levin began to drift away, in part because of the doctor-dominated atmosphere of the MCHR. The black doctors who had provided so much of the early leadership were also early departers. Some merely wished to devote more time to the pursuit of their growing private practices. Others moved on to organizations more appropriate to their social concerns than the MCHR. Several turned toward the National Medical Association (NMA), and in 1966 John Holloman was elected to the NMA presidency.

At about the same time MCHR lost many of the public-health-oriented doctors who had made up its early roster. For some, who surmised that a movement could not be created to confront the southern two-class, racist health system, the alternative was to push for foundation and federal money to establish community health centers to serve the Black community in the Deep South. Eventually Jack Geiger, one of the members of this group, succeeded in opening the much-heralded Mound Bayou Health Center in Mississippi. However, the very decision to seek an alternative represented both the failure and the abandonment of the earlier struggle, and those sharing the alternative vision soon left the fold of the MCHR---and the movement.

Still through 1966 there was no sense of crisis. MCHR tried to "keep on keepin' on" with the civil rights movement, providing medical presence as it marched that year through Mississippi on a mammoth voter registration drive. It was on this march that James Meredith, the first black student admitted to Ole Miss, was shot. It was also during this march that Stokely Carmichael, a SNCC militant, first shouted "Black Power!"

The contagion of these two words threw the civil rights movement into disarray, as the more militant leaders and soon the SNCC itself began to guestion whether white participation was more a hindrance than a help. Having been rejected by the very cause for for which they felt they had sacrificed, whites abandoned the civil rights movement. White participation plummeted and with it white support and financial contributions from the North.

No less than other organizations, MCHR was thrown into a tailspin. As one MCHR communique put it, "The financial situation has not improved during the summer and it seems that there is little interest by MCHR members since the Meredith March." Indeed, only 25 percent of MCHR members responded to urgent fund-raising appeals. For the first time there was discussion of whether the MCHR should continue and, if so, what its role should be.

By this time many of the prominent and busy doctors who had founded and shaped the early MCHR had left it. They had been happy to step into a heroic role when history called on them, but most had no ongoing radical commitment and certainly no ongoing commitment to the MCHR. It had become clear that the early MCHR had been dominated by too many generals and had too few soldiers. The generals had no patience to stick around at a time of great confusion to chart out a new course for the organization. To the extent that a few may have wondered about sticking it out, they were soon enough dissuaded from doing so by the shift to the left that the MCHR was about to take.

A harbinger of this shift had taken place at the 1965 annual MCHR convention when younger members, mostly doctors and medical students, proposed that the MCHR adopt a resolution denouncing the War in Vietnam. Although the resolution was defeated that year by a narrow margin, it was passed at the next convention.

The old guard within the MCHR was not ready to take a stand on the war and could see little relevance of the war to the MCHR's civil rights concerns. Their qualms were greatly magnified by the fact that those who pushed the anti-War position were also beginning to vocalize, largely in response to demands of black power militants, the need to do something about medical care back home in the North. This meant attacks upon the medical system in which many of the older members had vested interests. This was the last straw; nearly all of the remaining older members bid the MCHR adieu.

The Interim Years

By 1967 the MCHR was a dead letter in New York City. But there was still vitality in Chicago, and it was logical to move the national office to the Midwest. From that time on no name stands out more clearly in connection with the MCHR than that of Quentin Young, who came to be regarded by many as "Mr. MCHR."

In 1967 Young was a youthful-looking forty-four-year-old internist with a private practice catering to the mixed university community of Hyde Park and assorted movement people. He had been active in the MCHR since its founding in 1964. Earlier Young had been involved with the Committee to End Discrimination in Medical Institutions in Chicago and before that with various political activities of the Old Left. Even with this extensive political experience under his belt. Young clearly had his work cut out for him with the MCHR.

With the eclipse of the civil rights movement Young inherited in MCHR an organization in danger of losing its raison d'etre. Nor was there any new issue current on the Left that could provide the holistic, even if transitory, sense of direction that the civil rights movement had so readily furnished.

For a while it looked as if the MCHR might be successful in turning the corner. In June, 1967, it was applauded with front-page headlines when, in conjunction with the Poor People's Campaign, an MCHR member disrupted the AMA convention in San Francisco by seizing the microphone to denounce the MCHR's arch foe, while other activists picketed outside the auditorium. Aside from keeping the name of the MCHR alive and helping recruit new blood to the organization, the event also served as a model for similar demonstrations at subsequent AMA conventions in other cities.

In 1968 the MCHR again hit the front pages, this time for its role in ministering to the victims of the police riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Shortly afterward the MCHR again gained prominence when Quentin Young was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) concerning MCHR's role at the Democratic Convention. Again in 1969 the MCHR was in the public eye as it provided aid and medical care to the 2,400 poor residents of Resurrection City in Washington, D.C.

The MCHR's success in the newspapers, added to its earlier civil rights reputation, gave it an important asset. It acquired a national prominence and recognition among the medical community that would bring it new recruits for years to come. More than that, these spurts of activity offered the hope of carrying the organization through a period of confusion and dissipation. For at no time was the MCHR more in its prime than when it was responding to the dramatic medical needs of one or another movement group. A need which these spurts of activity did not fill, and in fact, may well have hidden, was the need for an ongoing political program that could guide the organization when the dramatic requests faded and that could meaningfully engage old members as well as integrate new ones. When it came to articulating such a program the MCHR fell back on grandiloquent pronouncements, such as "We argue that health care is a human right...that our economy should...make available to all the people." Hard to disagree with, but hardly a prescription for a program.

That the MCHR could articulate no meaningful national program during this period should come as no surprise, for the years 1967 to 1971 were not in general good years for national organizations. Rather this was the era of suspicion of leadership, structure, and central direction, of extreme local autonomy and of "doing your own thing." While the national organization shrank to a mere vestige, local chapters attained varying degrees of apparent vitality.

New Faces

The year 1967 introduced an almost entirely new cast of characters into the MCHR. As the older doctors left, they were replaced by younger doctors, nurses and, more importantly, by nursing and medical students. Many of the medical students, in particular, had been activists within the Student Health Organization (SHO), which had burst onto the radical health scene in 1966.¹

This is not the place to discuss the politics of the SHO, except insofar as they impinge on the MCHR. Perhaps because its summer project orientation so successfully capitalized on student energy (even as Freedom Summer had) or perhaps because of its early success in gaining funds and support, SHO during this period was viewed by all as the more vibrant and vital of the two organizations. Many identified with both, and the more committed SHO members graduated into the MCHR in the late 1960s as they graduated from their medical schools.

It is important to recall that many SHO members had been recruited into political activity as undergraduates and were influenced by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the model it presented for community organizing, the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). For SHO as well as many MCHR members, this influence, in addition to the influence of Black Power, was all important. Members of SHO tried to respond to the insistence of their former black civil rights compatriots: they went back to their communities in the North to fight against white racism. This often resulted in projects seeking better services for Third World and poor white communities. When applied to health, these projects occasionally confronted institutions such as local health departments that denied adequate care to the poor or medical schools that refused to admit significant numbers of Third World students. By and large, however, early SHO and later MCHR projects had a distinctly service-and-support-oriented flavor. This was the genesis of projects like lead screening, sickle cell testing, childhood immunization, and rat control.

But despite the new faces and the emphatic orientation toward local as opposed to national projects and organizations, much of what the MCHR was during 1967 to 1971 was a continuation of what MCHR had always been---a medical support group for movements outside the health system itself. All that had transpired between 1964 and 1967 was that the unitary civil rights movement had fragmented into half a dozen movements, with the MCHR now trying to serve them all. This is not to say that medical support work was bad. It was not, and often the MCHR's services were urgently needed. It is only to say that the MCHR never developed a conception of itself that went beyond support, a fact that was to prove severely debilitating, if not devastating, as the political movement of the 1960s moved into the disillusionment, fragmentation and demise of the 1970s.

Vietnam As the New Mississippi

No movement shows the MCHR's orientation more clearly than that against the war in Vietnam. While the war may have been driven home to many participants by the threat of the draft, the tone of the antiwar movement was one of support and service to the Vietnamese people. It was for many the direct descendant of the civil rights movement transported by American militarism and imperialism some 10,000 miles away.

Like others in the antiwar movement, MCHR members organized opposition to the war in their own institutions. Leaflet and literature tables blossomed at medical schools, and contingents carrying bold banners inscribing the names of local MCHR chapters, schools, and hospitals appeared at antiwar demonstrations. So overwhelming was this political thrust that for an entire year the New York City chapter of MCHR was literally submerged into the Medical Committee to End the War, which in the spring of 1967 turned out over 2,000 health personnel for an antiwar rally in Central Park.

The MCHR went beyond general antiwar activities to play a more specific support role, serving as the medical arm of the antiwar movement. Hence almost all MCHR chapters set up a system of draft counseling and referrals for physical examinations to serve young men seeking medical exemption from the draft. One exceptional draft panel in Los Angeles proved an embarrassment to the MCHR when it turned out that participating doctors were pocketing thousands of dollars in private fees for performing draft physicals.

An even more direct transfer of earlier tactics was the medical presence MCHR members provided at antiwar demonstrations and marches. In San Francisco, for example, the local MCHR chapter was largely absorbed by the pressing need for medical presence in the Bay Area. Hardly a day went by without the police attacking a group of demonstrators, often antiwar, but also black students (as in the San Francisco State strike) and years later white community-control advocates (as in People's Park). Necessary and commendable as such support work was, still the episodic nature of this sort of activity forestalled coming to grips with consideration of the development of a more organic program for MCHR members.