On this day, 14 July 1970, Puerto Rican street gang-turned activist group the Young Lords occupied Lincoln Hospital’s major administrative building in response to the city’s indifference to the health needs of Puerto Ricans and African Americans in the South Bronx and the deplorable conditions of health care delivery at Lincoln Hospital. The Young Lords actions at Lincoln were an extension of the group’s activism around issues of public health in East Harlem. Their health activism included the Garbage Offensive, which protested against irregular sanitation services; the launch of breakfast programs for poor children; the Lead Offensive, during which they conducted door-to-door medical home visits in collaboration with progressive nurses, medical technicians and doctors to test local children for lead poisoning and adults for tuberculosis; and the takeover of a city operated Tuberculosis truck.
Pictured: Young Lords with the expropriated truck
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If you like this sort of thing may I suggest Dan Bell’s Dead Mall Series where he walks around and films (mostly) old and abandoned shopping malls while giving trivia about why the places are abandoned. It’s extremely fascinating and relaxing.
During the Christmas season in 1974, the radical Danish Solvognen theatre group held several days of events dressed as Santas, culminating in a near riot in a Copenhagen department store. Against a background of an unemployment crisis, groups of Santas went around on roller skates, others attacked state buildings with pitchforks, others visited the elderly in nursing homes and visited children in schools and passed out people’s history books.
The events climaxed when the Santa Claus Army entered the Magasin department store and began passing out gifts from the store’s shelves for free to shoppers, saying “Merry Christmas! Today, no one has to pay”. They justified their actions saying they were returning gifts to the workers who had made them. When police arrived and began arresting the Santas, the children who had been watching started crying.
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This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
