“It was called ‘The Butcher Shop.’ There was blood on the floors and blood on the walls and a rat in the emergency room,” a voice in the trailer for the documentary “Takeover” says, describing Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx in 1970, when it had already been condemned for 25 years. Too decrepit to be used by the middle class or the wealthy, it remained a treatment center for the city’s marginalized populations.

For years, the Young Lords, who advocated for the rights of Latino and Black Americans in New York, had attempted to negotiate with the hospital to convince them to renovate or replace the building, but the hospital would not talk, and instead threw them out and called the police.

On July 14, 1970 the Young Lords took action. They peacefully occupied the hospital, escorted the hospital administrator out (all of the other hospital staff remained to care for patients), hanged a banner that read, “Welcome to the People’s Hospital” out of one of the hospital’s windows, and vowed not to leave until the city agreed to build a new hospital.

The events of this day have been captured in a new documentary called “Takeover.” Made by Market Road Films and directed by Emma Francis Snyder, it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2021.

As a result of the occupation, not only did the city agree to build a new hospital, but as “Takeover” explains, the protest resulted in other monumental improvements in American health care as well, including “a call for universal health care and community control, a new understanding in America that that health care was a basic right for all Americans, and a national Patient Bill of Rights.”

Featured prominently in the documentary is Juan D. González, a co-founder and leader of the Young Lords, who is now the Richard D. Heffner Professor of Communications and Public Policy and Professor of Professional Practice, Journalism and Media Studies at SC&I, and a co-host of DemocracyNow!.

González said, “The film centers on little-known but pivotal protest over public health – that protest became the catalyst for some major changes in public health policy in this country. The film recreates the takeover and various efforts of the Lords in advocating for better health care for New York City’s Black and Latino communities. Following the success of the documentary, an effort is now underway by a Hollywood company founded by Rupert Murdoch’s daughter to produce a feature film based on the same events.”

The New York Times ran an op-doc written by the director and the Young Lords, titled “The Hospital Occupation That Changed Public Health,” Variety covered the documentary, and Amy Goodman, González's co-host on DemocracyNow! interviewed Snyder and Gonzalez for the story “’Takeover”: New Doc Chronicles Historic 1970 Young Lords Occupation of Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx.”

In the DemocracyNow! interview, Synder told Goodman that by directing “Takeover” she wanted the world to learn about direct modes of civil action – that the protest was community-led, but doctors and medical residents followed. In addition, she said, she wanted to show “what it takes to do something like this – to capture not just the planning of the takeover but the feelings the participants had about it – when they took over a building and there was a face-off with the police.”

When during the interview Goodman asked González, “Why did the Young Lords choose Lincoln Hospital, and what were the demands?” He said, “I think it’s underappreciated the amount of work the Young Lords did in what we would today normally call public health. It was not just the issue of treatment in the hospital and the services in a dilapidated, run-down hospital that the city had been promising to tear down for decades but hadn’t done, but it was also all of the work we did in lead poison detection, tuberculosis detection, drug detoxification, and using acupuncture for the first time in drug treatment that was developed by the Lords and the Panthers at Lincoln Hospital. In other words, health was a major concern of ours at the time, but we understood that to get the system to listen and change we had to disrupt it. We had to find a way to force people to pay attention to the problem. That is the main thrust of all of our actions that we took in this wide area of public health at the time.”

Watch the full DemocracyNow! interview with Amy Goodman here.

Photo caption:

Taken from a collection of photos by Beverly Grant, who was a professional artist and photographer who was very close to the Young Lords and who chronicled many of their events. Several of the photos are included in a new book Grant published last year and they can also be found on her website. Pictured is González, seated and smiling, while conducting a community meeting in East Harlem over health care issues. Photo courtesy of Juan D. González.

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