IN CINEMA
MADE IN HARLEM
THE LAFARGUE CLINIC REMIXED: DOPE IS DEATH
Co-presented with Mass Action Defense and Northeast Political Prisoner Coalition
Friday, February 23 at 7 PM
Mia Donovan, 2020, 82 min.
In 1973, Dr. Mutulu Shakur (Tupac Shakur’s stepfather), along with fellow Black Panthers and Young Lords, combined community health with direct action to create the first-ever people’s acupuncture detoxification program in America: the Lincoln Detox Peoples’ Program. Over the course of the 1970s, this radical form of harm reduction became a fixture of hope and wellness in the South Bronx, helping thousands of Black and Brown New Yorkers treat heroin and methadone addictions. Dope Is Death explores why this visionary project was ultimately de-funded and dismantled—considered a threat to the medical establishment and to the political powers that be—while cementing the profound legacy of its revolutionary founders.
Post-screening discussion with members of Mass Action Defense
Made In Harlem: The LaFargue Clinic Remixed
Founded by Reverend Sheldon Hale Bishop (Pastor of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church that housed the clinic in Harlem) with co-founders Richard Wright (author of “Native Son” and former Harlem bureau chief for the Communist Party’s Daily Worker) and Fredric Wertham (German psychoanalyst who emigrated to the United States after the rise of the Nazi Party), The Lafargue Clinic was the first of its kind in Harlem: a pay-as-you-wish anti-racist mental health clinic, staffed largely by volunteers. Operating 1946-1958 out of the basement of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, The Lafargue Clinic pioneered a form of social medicine that linked patients' medical needs with the struggle for housing and economic justice. MADE IN HARLEM: THE LAFARGUE CLINIC REMIXED is a series of films, talks, and seminars on the legacy of this groundbreaking Harlem institution and its impact today on radical healthcare organizing, mutual aid, and collective wellbeing.
Curated by Kazembe Balagun
This series is made possible with the generous support of the West Harlem Development Corporation (WHDC)
“The Lafargue Clinic also helped create a model for later health care activism, specifically the Black Panther Party and Young Lords, who in 1971 took over Lincoln Hospital and created a free detox clinic utilizing acupuncture.”
