MADE IN HARLEM: THE LAFARGUE CLINIC REMIXED
January - June 2024
Curated by Kazembe Balagun
Co-founded by Richard Wright, Frederic Wertham, and Elizabeth Bishop, 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.
Films include:
Thursday, January 25 at 7PM
NATIVE SON
Pierre Chenal, 1951, 91 min.
Thursday, February 15 at 7PM
FRANZ FANON: BLACK SKIN WHITE MASK
Isaac Julien, 1995, 70 min.
Thursday, February 22 at 7PM
WHAT'S HAPPENING IN HARLEM?
Communist Party USA, 1949, 10 min. 16mm print
KOCH: MAKING A MISTAKE
Neil Barksy (POV season 27, episode 12), 2014, 4 min.
Friday, February 23 at 7PM
DOPE IS DEATH
Mia Donovan, 2020, 82 min.
...and more TBA!
The Lafargue Clinic, founded by Richard Wright (author of “Native Son” and former Harlem bureau chief for the Communist Party’s “Daily Worker”), Frederic Wertham (Austrian Psychoanalyst who emigrated to the US after the rise of the Nazi Party), and Elizabeth Bishop (pioneering Black psychologist who volunteered in the clinic and whose father was the Pastor of Harlem’s St. Philip’s Epispocal Church that housed it), 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. 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.
