MADE IN HARLEM: THE LAFARGUE CLINIC REMIXED
January - June 2024… and ONGOING

Curated by Kazembe Balagun

MADE IN HARLEM: THE LAFARGUE CLINIC REMIXED'' is a series of films, talks, and seminars on the legacy of this groundbreaking Harlem institution that pioneered a form of social medicine that linked the mental needs of their patients with the struggle for housing and economic justice, and gained national recognition through Ralph Ellison’s famed essay “Harlem is Nowhere” in 1948 and its impact today on radical healthcare organizing, mutual aid, and collective wellbeing.

The Lafargue Clinic, founded by the 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), served as a model of connecting the psychic wounds of African Americans with the oppression they face in society as a whole. Named after Karl Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, this mental health clinic was the first of its kind in Harlem, with a pay-as-you-wish schedule and staffed largely by volunteers. Elizabeth Bishop, pioneering Black psychologist and daughter of Reverend Sheldon Hale Bishop, volunteered as a practitioner in the clinic. The Lafargue Clinic pioneered a form of social medicine that linked the mental needs of their patients with the struggle for housing and economic justice, and gained national recognition through Ralph Ellison’s famed essay “Harlem is Nowhere” in 1948.

As Gabriel N. Mendes noted in his study “Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry”:

A remarkable convergence of both history and autobiography brought Wright, Wertham, and Bishop together in 1946 to establish the Lafargue Clinic. Three distinct traditions—black intellectual radicalism, Jewish émigré scientific radicalism, and the Progressive black church—met together in the basement of a church in Harlem to address an urgent community need. Beyond the immediacy of providing inexpensive and accessible mental health care within the Harlem community, the founders of the clinic confronted one of the central problems of postwar American society: the psychic fallout of black Americans’ struggles to live a human life in an antiblack social world. This world required blacks to accommodate the ideology of white supremacy, while systematically subjugating them as a source of readily exploitable labor. And so Wright’s writings and activism joined with Wertham’s politicized medical science and Bishop’s Christian social justice traditions to set in motion the creation of a new type of institution on the American scene, the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic.