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In this excerpt from his autobiographical memoir Everybody In, Nobody Out, Quentin Young, MD, describes his work in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the "Spurgeon 'Jake' Winters Free People's Medical Care Center" organized by the Black Panther Party (BPP) in Chicago, Illinois. It was no surprise that when looking for allies to help with their free medical clinic for impoverished and underserved Black people in Chicago ("so poor that they never go to the doctor until they are practically dying") the Panthers turned to Quentin Young. Young had long been a local and national leader in the movement to end discrimination in medicine and bring equity to health care.1 As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, he had campaigned to end the ugly disparity in health care options offered to students-White students received treatment at the University Hospital while Black students were shunted to Provident Hospital, an underfunded, run-down, and segregated facility. As a medical student, intern, and resident he had fought for national health reform and to end racial discrimination in medical care. In the 1950s he helped lead the Committee to End Discrimination in Chicago's Medical Institutions in its demand that licensure and tax exemptions be denied to hospitals that "turn away patients solely because of their financial situation, race, creed, or color."
In the 1960s, Young played a major role in the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) and joined volunteers from across the country who traveled south to provide medical support for sick, injured, and jailed civil rights workers, and who sometimes-like H. Jack Geiger-returned to organize new forms of care to impoverished Black residents of the southern states, as he tells us in this issue of AJPH (p1738). Back in Chicago, Young worked with Martin Luther King in his campaign to confront segregation and discrimination in northern cities and in 1966 King became Young's patient. In 1967 to 1968 and again in 1970, Young was elected MCHR national chair and moved the Committee's office to Chicago. Young and many other MCHR members fully understood the motives, and were deeply sympathetic with the social and service goals of the Panthers. They knew that the Panthers "were skilled at engaging their constituency" and were impressed that...