New from the University of Minnesota Press:
Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963–1978, by
Jena Loyd (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
. The Press explains:
Health Rights Are Civil Rights
tells the story of the important place of health in struggles for
social change in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. Jenna M. Loyd
describes how Black freedom, antiwar, welfare rights, and women’s
movement activists formed alliances to battle oppressive health systems
and structural violence, working to establish the principle that health
is a right. For a time—with President Nixon, big business, and organized
labor in agreement on national health insurance—even universal health
care seemed a real possibility.
Health Rights Are Civil Rights
documents what many Los Angeles activists recognized: that
militarization was in part responsible for the inequalities in American
cities. This challenging new reading of suburban white flight explores
how racial conflicts transpired across a Southland landscape shaped by
defense spending. While the war in Vietnam constrained social spending,
the New Right gained strength by seizing on the racialized and gendered
politics of urban crisis to resist urban reinvestment and social
programs.
Recapturing a little-known current of the era’s
activism, Loyd uses an intersectional approach to show why this diverse
group of activists believed that democratic health care and ending war were essential to create cities of freedom, peace, and social justice—a vision that goes unanswered still today.
Laura Pulido says:
Health Rights are Civil Rights suggests an entirely new
geography of Los Angeles based on both activism and geopolitics. Jenna
M. Loyd makes pathbreaking connections between health, war-making, race,
and the environment that offer us a new way of viewing midcentury Los
Angeles. An essential text for all scholars of Los Angeles, health,
race, and activism.
More information is available
here.
