Black Panthers: Activists for Healthy Communities

Black Panthers: Activists for Healthy Communities: Dr. Alondra Nelson, an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University, didn’t set out to find stethoscopes and the white coats of medicine among stories of gun-toting Black Panther Party members or their iconic black leather jackets and berets, but she did.

The historical research and extensive interviews conducted with members of the Black Panther Party that eventually led to Nelson’s October 2011 book, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, began, somewhat, as a scholarly detour and personal curiosity. Nelson, whose expertise includes gender, science, and socio-historical studies of medicine, had already set out to understand and write about the barriers that African-American communities confronted in mobilizing around the HIV/AIDS epidemic when she began noticing references to the Panther’s little-known health activism.