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[humming motor]
[street sounds]
[faint TV dialogue]
[clattering dishes]
[sizzling food]
[traffic sounds]
[hands clapping]
[traffic sounds]
♪ [soft music]
Breathe in.
Exhale.
♪ [soothing music]
OK, Walter, turn your head that way,
like you're looking at that hat.
Excuse me.
Just wanna see something.
I'm gonna adjust this one right here,
the liver point.
Let me get rid of this
Turn your head that way.
[off camera chatting]
There you go sir, turn your head the other way.
There you go, brother. You're good to go, man.
Try not to tense up when you breathe in; just try to relax.
Breathe in.
And exhale for me. All right? All right.
Turn your head for me?
OK, sir.
I've been doing this, oh for about seven, eight years now.
Woman: Really? -Maybe more.
Maybe I skipped a couple because I was doing drugs back then.
It helps me with a lot of things.
It calms my breathing; it calms my heart down;
it keeps me relaxed.
And it just makes me happy.
I'm a happy person anyway and with this,
it makes me extra happy.
Come on, put the pins in.
This helps me with my anger management.
[Lily talks in the background]
Lily, let me talk.
This helped me with my anger management.
And I found out through taking anger management courses
that it's not anger I feel, it's hurt.
And so it helps me manage the hurts that I have within.
And keeps me away from alcohol and substance abuse.
Walter: Right, you don't have to medicate yourself anymore.
This is your natural medicine here.
Yes, yes, yes.
Come on, hit me up. I'm ready over here.
Look up a little bit; there you go.
[off camera] How long were you in the military?
Quite a few years, you know...
Juan: I didn't really know the true history behind it,
which was, that one of the senior counsellors,
I was telling them about acupuncture and stuff,
and she said, "Do you know how this really started?"
And she said, "It was the Black Panthers and The Young Lords.
They actually were the first ones to bring acupuncture
to the South Bronx."
♪ [jazz guitar and congas]
♪♪
[siren]
Walter: Growing up in the South Bronx,
when the heroin epidemic really hit strong,
I got used to seeing the addicts, the men,
nodding on the corners.
So I grew up with that sense.
We just didn't drop out of the sky addicted to heroin.
We became addicted to heroin because of the situation,
and our environment, exposed us to heroin.
You could buy a bag of heroin for three dollars.
So people got addicted to heroin,
and then it just got out of control.
At one point, there were 100,000 addicts in New York.
So I wanted to do something.
♪ [drums]
♪♪
New male voice: The need to go into the Panther Party
came as I watched and observed the interaction of people,
the interaction of Party,
and what the police was doing at the time.
[angry shouting]
Even if the situation required verbal interaction,
verbal communication,
they'd rather use the baton and use force.
This I seen.
I didn't have to read it in the evening paper.
I seen this.
♪ [high hat tapping]
So I offered my skills in the martial arts
to the Panther Party,
♪ [snare joins]
located in the Bronx Chapter on Boston road.
♪ [cowbell joins]
In the community, we structured the free lunch program.
♪ [bass joins drums]
♪♪
Also the daycare centre.
♪♪
Woman: The name of this revolutionary puppet show
is called, "The child, the man,
the revolutionary, the Panther.".
Oink! Oink! Oink!
[kids laugh]
Oink! Oink! Oink!
Oink! Oink! Oink! Oi9nk!
♪ [piece continues]
♪♪
[hammering]
[male] To the United States we came
To learn how to misspell our name
To lose the definition of pride
To have misfortune on our side
To live where rats and roaches roam.
To be trained to turn on television sets.
To dream about jobs we will never get
To fill out welfare applications
To graduate from school without an education
To be drafted, distorted, and destroyed
To work full time and still be unemployed...
Woman: After work at Lincoln Hospital,
I would sell my newspapers,
my Black Panther Party newspapers.
I sold the newspapers across the street from the hospital
because that's the closest place
and there were lots of people,
a lot of people walking back and forth.
And on the stoop, every day, was this fifteen-year-old.
and his buddy, who was about twenty-five maybe,
and they were stomp-down heroin addicts.
And I kept telling them, you know,
you don't want to be addicted to heroin and let me show you why.
Because the system is keeping you
--I gave them the whole spiel--
the system is keeping you down by making sure
that you stay addicted and you don't stand up and fight
against all the exploitation and horrible conditions
that we live in because you're over here nodding out.
You don't want to fight when you're on heroin.
You just stay there and nod yourself into oblivion.
♪ [men singing] Hey now! Hey now! Hey now! ♪
♪ God bless!
During that era, I found out I was very political.
I don't know how this happened.
Obviously, subconsciously something was working in me.
♪ [Drums and shouts with lines of poetry between shouts] ♪
I was admiring the Panthers.
I had already met with Bobby Seale and James Forman.
And I told Bobby Seale I wanted to organize the counterpart
to The Black Panthers called The Brown Tigers.
He said, "Son, can I tell you something?
We're catching hell being called The Black Panthers.
I would suggest that you find another name
and work the objective conditions of your country.
Try to apply socialism to the objective conditions
of your country and don't try to do what we do."
I thought that was a brilliant answer.
Another panelist, Mr. Felipe Luciano,
a member of The Young Lords,
and I have asked him to speak briefly
as to the philosophy of his organization
and what he feels its place in the community is.
Mr. Luciano.
First of all, The Young Lords are a predominantly
Puerto Rican group operating out of East Harlem.
Basically, the way we go about mobilizing our people
is through serving their needs.
That is, if our people need hot water
then we're gonna get hot water.
If it's shoes on their feet,
then we're gonna give them shoes. Right?
And if it's a political campaign that needs to be run
then we're gonna run political campaigns.
That's basically what The Young Lords are about.
In the process... [continues]
Walter: And I just fell in love with the movement.
Once I heard him speak about what we had to do
in our community, I wanted to join the movement.
["Two Little Boys" by The Last Poets]
Have you seen the skinny little boy
that chases the white ghost at night?
Have you seen the little boy?
Face puffed up, tracks in his arm, and his mind blown.
His momma's somewhere drinking and talking about survival.
Pop's in jail, or downtown at the Y.
The little boy chases the white ghost with his friend,
and they get high.
And they get high.
Like cloud nine, where everything is fine.
The fast rise of people's personal economy grew
as a result of selling drugs.
Qualitatively, that overshadowed living harmoniously
amongst each other, which the Panther Party was introducing.
So we had to tackle the drugs now.
[indistinct conversations]
At first, we went to those who were distributing the drugs
and selling drugs.
We asked that they stop.
They wouldn't.
And we just kindly removed them out the community.
♪ [drum beat]
♪♪
It didn't hit the lower-middle-class
and middle-class neighbourhoods.
It was clearly in the areas of colour.
If it isn't large enough to get to the influential community;
if it isn't a big media story;
if it doesn't affect your kid going to school every day
because you're in Forest Hills or in Bay Ridge
or some middle-class neighbourhood;
it's not a big problem.
I was an administrative assistant to John Lindsay
when he was mayor from 1966 to 1973.
And basically my responsibility was the street.
♪ [electric guitar and congas] ♪
♪♪
We believe in armed self-defence.
Not because we like violence-- no one likes violence--
but you have to make a differentiation between
the open and direct violence
that very often is attributed to revolutionaries
and the type of violence that happens every day
on a regular basis among poor people.
Whether it's the violence of having to go all winter
in an apartment that has no heat,
or whether it's the violence of having to go to a hospital
that doesn't give you service and you end up dying anyway.
You don't die with a bullet necessarily,
but you die in other ways.
And that type of violence takes a lot more lives.
[crowd noise]
Today, we don't want to just have a rally here.
We're gonna go marching through the streets of South Bronx.
We're gonna tell the people of South Bronx
that we're not going anywhere,
that we're gonna be here until this hospital
learns and is put back in the hands of the people.
That building was condemned 25 years ago,
condemned because it was unsafe for human habitation,
condemned for rich people and opened up for poor people.
That's what always happens.
Young Lords, Black Panthers, workers and patients
who set up a complaint table...
We took complaints of rat bites for babies, lead poisoning,
asthma, heroin addiction.
Woman: They have those two thousand complaints
that we got from the patient complaint table
in their hands and have done nothing about them.
A group called "Health Revolutionary Unity Movement".
Some Blacks, some Puerto Ricans, some Jewish-Americans,
we all got together, and we decided,
it's time to do something.
And we decided - I know this is gonna sound crazy -
we decided to take over the hospital.
♪♪
Felipe: It was an occupation that came
straight out of the Normandy Invasion.
Understand it's a U-Haul truck, driven by a friend of ours.
The gate rose up, and we were sitting with our legs open,
and a guy would sit between us,
and it was like a paratroop assault.
♪♪
I knew that we were ready
because I was expecting them to look at me for confirmation.
Not one person looked at me.
They knew exactly what their roles were.
We took the place in seven-and-a-half minutes.
We secured it in fifteen.
That morning, the Puerto Rican flag is flying
over Lincoln Hospital.
The cops come.
They had more cops than I had ever seen in my life.
So they sent over their best negotiator,
this guy named Sid Davidoff.
[police radio chatter]
So I get a call one morning that The Young Lords
have taken over the hospital, whatever that means,
taken over the hospital.
The police are ready to move in. They've got hostages.
Can we do something about it.
It's one thing to have a demonstration in the street.
And you cordon it off and you have police
and you do what you have to do.
This is a hospital where people come who are seriously injured
and seriously sick and we couldn't provide,
it couldn't provide, patient care.
And we had to draw the line there.
[shouts] We don't want a police state!
Don't let anybody tell you that there was one minute
of disruption of the delivery of healthcare at Lincoln Hospital
when The Young Lords took it over.
Never.
We had our press conference where we said the hospital
had been taken over and we were willing to negotiate
but these were the demands.
Pretty much, those demands were the thousands of complaints
that we had received from the patients in the emergency room
at our complaint table.
We kept our end of the bargain.
We did open a detox centre soon thereafter.
With, as I remember, a Puerto Rican administrator,
I'm pretty sure.
Felipe: And that was the beginning
of the Lincoln Detox Unit.
♪♪
[happy chants]
♪♪
We have now started the Lincoln Hospital
Drug Detoxification Program.
We brought hundreds of drug addicts.
Heroin addicts came.
[crowd chatter]
Carlos: The first day that we opened up the doors,
there were two hundred.
Cleo: Walter came in off the street.
I was in nursing school, walking up the block with my ex-wife,
and I saw this big Puerto Rican flag across the street.
So when I told them I was in nursing school,
they said, why don't you volunteer?
In the beginning, I was just like a translator,
because all of the doctors were white and didn't speak Spanish.
And since I had a little experience with nursing school,
I went from being a translator to drawing blood.
And the clients loved me.
They said I had excellent hands.
They even said, I wish I would've known you -
you would've been my shooting partner.
This is one of my cards.
It has my name on it.
We used to be at the entranceway.
And we had a big box at the entranceway.
And when the addicts used to come in, we used to say to them,
put your weapons here and when you leave, you'll get them back.
And of course, this is what they used to do.
So they had zip guns; they had knives that were called 007s;
they had ice picks.
They carried all this stuff because
when they were out there in the street,
you never knew when you were going to get mugged,
or you actually were going to do the mugging, right?
Your eyes are brown, your hair is brown,
your height is 5'6", you say?
Yeah.
OK. You haven't had a physical?
Blood tests? You're not handicapped?
All right now, listen. I'm gonna put my name on your card.
This is my home number, all right?
[woman murmurs]
If you have any problem, where you can't get in here,
you call me up, all right?
Cleo:And then, once we had doctors from Lincoln Hospital
who said that they were going to be responsible,
that's when we brought Mutulu in.
Because we had a medical director,
and we wanted to have a director
that had revolutionary consciousness.
I was just a sister that came to the clinic
and was really messed up.
You know, I didn't know anything.
I was not politically conscious of anything;
I was just troubled.
I learned a lot of things as I been there,
in terms of helping your people,
making it better for your people.
I learned about the streets and the drugs, to that nature,
and what it was doing to our people.
That's why the political education classes,
we used to call them P.E. classes, were so important.
Because we gave them history.
We gave them history about what happened in Africa,
what happened in China, Puerto Rico...
the political movements that were stopped
because of the drugs.
We started realizing a lot more who we was.
Thinking about our African roots.
Realizing that the names that our parents carried
were the names of slave masters that our forefathers had.
That's what we used to call them: what was your slave name?
And most of us that changed our name
wanted to get rid of those slave names.
We wanted names that more accurately portrayed
who and what we were.
You figure you've been oppressed all your life, right?
So now you wonder where that's coming from.
But they forget to tell you that the problem
really comes from the system.
Because who oppresses your mother,
who oppresses your father?
The system.
The system oppresses your father so therefore they oppress you.
And when they start oppressing you,
you hanging out in the streets.
Cleo: I don't know if you've ever seen a drug addict detox,
but it is horrible.
They have chills; they're sick;
they're cold sometimes, hot sometimes.
It's really, really horrible.
That's why people don't want to get off drugs.
Because it's such a horrible experience,
the actual body detoxing.
My poem was Jones coming down.
Day breaks, got the shakes, nose running, joint dripping,
mind slipping, body aches.
Jones coming down. Jones coming down.
Got an attitude.
Fighting mad.
Feeling bad.
Funeral sad.
Another 24 hour drag.
Damn, I need me some scag.
Pawn my brother's doo-rag to cop me a transparent thin bag.
You see 'cause I'm strung out.
Strung out on a white witch.
My timeless bitch.
Riding a white horse into my main vein.
Damn baby, I got to kill this pain.
America's public enemy number one
in the United States is drug abuse.
In order to fight and defeat this enemy,
it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive.
If you are a heroin addict, you need upwards of $100 a day
to buy heroin to feed your addiction.
And you will literally do anything to get some heroin
to relieve the withdrawal.
Nixon was under a lot of pressure to show real evidence
that he was cutting down on Black street crime.
And if you get those people into a program where they are getting
methadone every day, they have no withdrawal symptoms.
And they have no need to go out and steal
or hold somebody up at gunpoint.
So there's a direct correlation:
the more people on methadone, the lower the crime rate.
It's then possible to get access to the person
on a regular basis.
The very fact that it's addicting
is one of its real attributes.
Once a person is on methadone,
he has to come back every day.
Methadone itself, in 1970, is not a new drug.
What was novel was its use as a maintenance drug.
Meaning that someone who used to use heroin several times a day,
indefinitely, could use methadone once a day,
indefinitely.
They would be maintained on it, not detoxified with it.
If you're coming from a place that is very critical
of federal, state, and local government,
and how it treats Black people, Brown people, poor people,
Asian people, you understandably might come to regard
methadone maintenance with some suspicion.
Because it is regulated and in large part
dispensed by the government.
♪♪
I'm a Puerto Rican.
And we came here, and we went to fight for the United States.
If we can fight for them,
why can't they fight for us Vietnam veterans?
Right on! Right on!
I got hooked in Vietnam, you know, with drugs.
So after I came from over there, I couldn't get any jobs here.
So I went to the welfare centre, and they told me,
you have to get into a methadone program.
And if you don't get into a methadone program,
you won't be able to get help.
What's methadone doing for you?
Is it helping you?
Getting me high, getting me high, that's all.
What they saw was that was just
replacing one addiction with another.
And what they wanted to do at Lincoln Detox
is have a chemical-free way of detoxing from heroin,
and also from methadone, for that matter.
By '72, we had started looking around for an alternative.
We no longer wanted to use methadone.
Dr. Mutulu Shakur, if it wasn't for his leadership,
I don't think we ever would have done what we did.
He was the one who found this article in the newspaper.
That an acupuncturist, who is treating someone
with respiratory problems,
who also happened to be addicted to opium,
had found that by stimulating the lung point
of the ear, did not only help the respiratory problem
but also took away the withdrawal symptoms of opium.
Walter: So there was six of us there,
and we would each read a paragraph.
And when we read that article, everybody sort of,
a light was turned on.
And we said, "Wait, why don't we do this?"
♪♪
And when I walked into the program,
I was seventeen-and-a-half years old, or eighteen.
And I walked into the program and I saw this old man
with needles in him.
And I said, "These people are really crazy in here.
They sticking needles in folk and that kind of thing.
I need to get up out of here."
But I stayed because I wanted to get off of the drugs.
So that was the first time I saw acupuncture.
I stayed in the treatment program,
and as I stayed in the treatment program,
I began to politicize myself.
I began to educate myself and study about movement stuff
and politics and philosophy, etcetera.
Shortly thereafter, I began to study acupuncture
under Dr. Mutulu Shakur.
When the patients or victims would come up, we would say,
"Well listen, we're not going to give you no methadone today.
But what we going to do is massage your feet,
massage your back, and we massage your ears.
And what we would use, we're gonna use our fingers.".
And so before we even got needles,
people would come up to the Bronx, dope fiends,
hardened dope victims; we would massage their ears,
and massage their hands and legs.
And we would stand there with our fingers in their ears
or in the different points.
We'd do deep breathing.
And they would fall right off to sleep.
And just relax.
And then the next day,
they'd be back for that treatment.
And we would detoxify people off of heroin and cocaine
and methadone with acupressure, a lot of love,
and a lot of commitment to it.
And it was some of the most rewarding times of our lives,
you know.
It was just great; it was just great.
It was spirited.
And we then began to get the needles
and learn needle insertion and how to ... [fades]
All right, I'm gonna move you here.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Can you tilt your head to the left for me?
Mm hm.
Thank you.
Breathe in, out.
Can you tilt your head slightly?
Breathe in... breathe out.
Please share with them, Malaya, what these five points do.
The first point, which is the Shenmen, right here,
opens up your spirit gate.
The second point, sympathetic, right here,
has to do with calming your nerves
and dilating blood vessels.
Third point, kidney, up here, has to do with fear.
Your liver, which is right here, that deals with anger.
And last but not least, right inside the ear,
that's your lung, deals with sadness and grief.
Winston: So the whole purpose of the collective
is to empower individuals so that
they're able to take care of their family.
You know, and that's the major thing.
If I can take care of me, if I can take care of my momma,
my daddy, my sister, my brother.
And then they can reach out and take care of some other folk,
and we can do some more stuff,
that is the way it's supposed to go.
That's what this collective is all about.
So on a grassroots level, one at a time.
Each one, teach one.
You are your brother's and sister's keeper.
♪ [soft music]
♪♪
Walter: We started with one point,
and we used an electrical stimulator.
Carlos: They tried the acupuncture and they saw
that it did take the edge off,
and so they kept on coming every single day.
♪♪
Walter: Before you know it, they were so relaxed and sedated,
that within a week or so, they were detoxed.
So we said, well we have to stop using the machine
and start using more needles.
I remember, when we did acupuncture
and people got off heroin,
and to see them moving on, it was like a joy.
It was like seeing people being born.
And of course, the people that pushed methadone were not happy.
Cleo: Everything that we did was based
on this slogan of "love the people".
So you love the people, you love yourself, you love your family.
You don't want to see them living in this horror.
So that's why you're working so hard
to make all these changes in society.
Walter: So we read all the material
that was available to us.
We read it.
The Red People's Army had all these techniques
that they were using.
We just didn't read the Red Book and became political.
We read, especially, the medical books.
Film Narrator: Before the establishment
of the People's Republic,
medical services were almost non-existent here,
as in most agricultural areas throughout China.
Chairman Mao insisted that in health and medical work,
the stress should be on the rural areas.
The primary motivation for becoming a barefoot doctor
must be to serve the people.
We wanted to create a medical cadre,
just like they did in China.
♪♪
I helped the revolution.
I helped the revolution because I knew how.
I knew how to do it.
♪♪
Mario Wexu, and his father Oscar,
who ran the Quebec Acupuncture Institute in Montreal,
gave us six scholarships to go to their institute
and become acupuncturists.
My father, Oscar Wexu, he learned acupuncture
in Europe, in France.
He brought acupuncture here when we came here
originally at the end of 1951.
But he wasn't doing acupuncture in the beginning
because he was afraid they'd lock him up;
they'd think he was some kind of a coo-coo
and lock him in a coo-coo house, in an asylum.
Who's this crazy guy putting needles in people?
In the beginning, he was doing just Chinese massage.
And then we used to get all these lumberjacks.
I'm breaking my thumbs on these lumberjacks
who are strong like hell.
Each massage treatment was like a wrestling match
with the devil.
♪♪
So I told my father at that time,
why don't we give them acupuncture,
instead of breaking your thumbs on these guys?
In the beginning, my father didn't want to.
But after, as soon as he did one person,
the next day he came with eight people.
And a week later, there was thirty people,
and within a month there was people lining up
all through the street.
It became very popular, the acupuncture.
So my father started a school, and we started teaching people.
So me, my father, my sister, my brother-in-law, started working.
And we were doing 350 people a day;
we had a six-month waiting list.
♪♪
You have to understand the situation in Quebec
at that time, before we had the Medicare card.
The doctors wouldn't treat anybody poor.
The poor were really abused.
So we wanted to do acupuncture to help the poor people.
Now we had The Black Panthers
and the people wanting acupuncture.
In Montreal, the same thing: the people wanted acupuncture.
We didn't force it on them; the people wanted it.
♪♪
[foreign language]
[laughter]
You're getting much better; I like it, I like it.
The liver's good, you're good.
Breathe in.
Exhale.
Breathe in; exhale.
Let it out.
Breathe in; let it out. Exhale.
I'm a drug addict; I've been a drug addict fifteen years,
I'm thirty-one years old.
I used to shoot heroin.
I've got track marks if you wanna see.
Are you relaxed?
I'm very relaxed.
Before I came here, I was depressed. I had anxiety.
And then, the acupuncture has helped me.
I'm like, happy now.
I feel relaxed, I feel calm.
Take a breath in, a breath in, then exhale.
Thank you.
I was a drug user for many, many years.
I was in and out of jail.
I was on the streets with the whole shabaz thing
that comes with it.
With the violence, the suffering, the pain.
It wasn't till actually one day,
I walked through 138th street and 3rd avenue.
And I was walking, and I somehow came across this building
that I seen people going in there,
and I asked what that was.
And they told me, "Well, this is like a recovery center.
There's actually a program." And I was like,
you know what, I desperately need a program
right now in my life, and I walked in there.
And I was exposed to acupuncture.
That was my first real taste of holistic health.
It was great; I was receiving acupuncture treatments
every day, sometimes twice a day.
And then I decided to get off methadone.
I was on methadone for 15 years.
It was acupuncture and learning about Tai Chi and Qigong
and how to do deep breathing and also being surrounded
by people who supported me, that I was able to change my life.
You go straight down so, you do Shenmen...
The kidney is at the base,
See? Where both the edges touch pretty much.
At the base right there, that's your kidney point.
♪ [bass line with snapping fingers]♪
♪♪
[door buzzer]
Voice on speaker: Whenever you're ready.
I'm ready when you're ready.
My names is Mutulu Shakur.
Well, I think it's important to realize
that the pioneers are always the ones targeted as the fools
and the naysayers and all the rest.
Walter: Mutulu was our leader.
He was one of the most vocal activists
in the community at the time.
If it wasn't for Mutulu,
maybe we wouldn't have had the acupuncture program.
Mario: He helped to heal people.
He liked healing people.
He was good at it; there's no doubt about that.
But I think he used it also as a political tool.
It gave him power and it gave the people power.
Maybe it also gave him a following; I don't know.
Maybe it gave him more of a following; I don't know.
Me, I didn't want to hear anything about politics
when I was teaching.
It was not politics; it was love and healing people.
That's all that mattered for me, that's all.
I never discussed politics with him.
I didn't even know they were Black Panthers
for about five years after I stopped teaching them.
I didn't know anything about that.
Walter: We got the people who we detoxed,
and the community involved in political work.
So they all became activists.
[protestors chant]
People 'round the world are picking up the gun.
Run Rocky run Rocky run run run!
People 'round the world are picking up the gun.
Run Rocky run Rocky run run run!
Walter: Cause we had all these clients. Ex-clients.
They were no longer clients.
They were ex-clients, part of the movement,
protesting the inequality of police brutality,
injustice in the courthouse.
Protester: Jail the rich and free the poor!
[siren wails]
We're trying to wake up the people
to what we are going through.
We're trying to tell the people;
it is only Blacks and Puerto Ricans in those prisons.
And the white man if they is poor!
I remember one demonstration that we had in front of,
I thinkit was Citibank on 138th street.
There had to be at least 500 people in the street.
We closed the street down; traffic couldn't move.
[shouts]
So we became an issue in the South Bronx
and a threat to the establishment.
But before they came to attack us,
they attacked the doctor's collective,
which was basically a collective of white doctors
at Lincoln Hospital, who were very active, very political.
And who actually had been supporting the movement,
especially the Young Lords and the Black Panther movements
by donating money,
by paying rent
for some of the offices that we had.
They were lending us their cars.
So when they attacked in the New York Times,
they attacked the doctor's collective,
and they called them Marxists, Leninists, communists.
Those kinds of words, I knew that our days were counted.
When you're in the South Bronx,
you either get activist or you get the hell out.
Or you get hurt.
Black, white, Puerto Rican, young and old,
all working together.
Which is what I want to see in our society.
We spent a lot of time with Richard Taft.
He was one of the doctors that really did care
about the revolutionary ideas that we had
and was committed to the detox program.
Walter: Richard Taft may have looked like he was the leader.
Obviously, he looked like the leader because he was MD
and he was white, and people thought that he was the head.
That was their mistake.
He wasn't born in the South Bronx or some other ghetto.
He came from a family that had connections and stuff.
So I always questioned,
who killed him?
I don't think he killed himself.
I don't know how we will ever prove that
since so much time has gone by.
[protesters shouting]
Carlos: At that particular time,
the administration of the hospital
was complaining about the Lincoln Detox.
They wanted to come in and control our program,
which meant that they wanted audits and people coming in,
observing, and they wanted to fire people.
Walter: They were threatening us with closing down the program.
And so, we went to the corporation,
and the element of surprise has always been in our favour,
so we got there super early.
We locked out the employees
and everybody who came to do business that day.
Then we sat down and Mutulu negotiated with the
Health and Hospital corporation
about what we were gonna do with the program.
We didn't want to put anybody in a position of leadership
because history had already told us
that when you put a leader up in front to run the show,
they just bump off the leader.
And then the movement falls apart.
So we didn't want to put one face up front.
And who was the leader?
Well, that was their job to figure it out,
but we weren't going to tell them who the true leader was.
And I would think that that gave us a few more years.
♪♪
Woman: Mutulu was involved in a lot of different things.
He was received by the Chinese government.
You know, he was involved with the Republic of New Afrika.
The big difference with the RNA, the Republic of New Afrika,
and the Black Panther Party
was they were talking about land and independence clearly.
We were saying, in the Republic of New Afrika,
that this land should be allocated to us
and reparations, funds, to build this land
and to build our nation should be given to us.
It was always clear that that wasn't going to happen,
that this government wasn't going to just say, "here".
And also, I mean these people who were young, arrogant,
sometimes cockish, that rubbed them the wrong way also.
We were supposed to be subservient.
We're not supposed to be developing programs;
we're not supposed to be discovering new ways
to treat something, you know.
We were supposed to follow, and that was not acceptable.
So from the mentality of the Herbert Hoover type people,
I could see why they would want to keep an eye on him.
I really understand that.
And I understood that at the time.
FBI memos made public today
show that the late J. Edgar Hoover
ordered a nation-wide campaign
to disrupt the activities
of the New Left
without telling any of his superiors about it.
The FBI campaign lasted from 1968 until [fades out]
The FBI undertook a program in 1968 to harass and destroy
New Left political organizations whose views
the federal police agency disagreed with.
The purpose of the program would be to expose ... [fades out]
♪ [high-hat cymbal]
♪♪
♪ [piano]
♪♪
Walter: In 1977, we returned with our acupuncture degrees
so Mutulu decided, we'll open up a school
and we'll call it The Lincoln Detox Acupuncture School.
And we did it.
Now, did we have permission?
No.
Were we going to ask for permission?
No, because we knew they would have said no anyway.
We just did it.
[woman] I was in the first class of students
and we started at Lincoln Hospital.
Lincoln Detox and Mutulu and other people
had built a relationship to Mario Wexu in Montreal.
He came and we had training.
It was a three-year program that we all went through.
Woman: It was always steeped in this struggle for human rights
and for health care for all, and in the struggle
to really understand the system we were living under,
and what it was doing to people.
China was still doing just tours
that had to be arranged politically.
♪♪
Mario: And of course, they were Maoists,
but they had no idea what communism was like.
That's why eventually they wanted me to bring them,
as a guide, to China, because they got grants
from the federal government to go to China
to see the acupuncture.
But I told them, Mao Tse-Tung don't give a damn
about you guys.
He'll use Black guys as publicity.
He don't give a shit.
♪♪
The CIA followed us around China.
It was very bizarre, because I actually thought--this was 1977
- I thought China was communist and progressive...
and the American government...
I got it, it was really clear.
♪♪
[prison gate buzzes]
[metal clangs]
[camera shutter click]
I remember when Koch actually sent the riot police
to the entranceway of our clinic.
We went to go to work and there were padlocks.
So we didn't know what was going on.
♪♪
When they closed the clinic,
it was like we had to fend for ourselves.
Cleo: Corporate doctors at that time saw everything
that we were doing as a threat.
Because what we were saying,
and the other thing that's so important,
is that we were calling for free,
quality health care for all.
That was the bottom line for all of this.
That we demanded free, quality health care for all.
That was the first call.
Which now, everybody is talking about and it's a big deal.
But that was the first time, in the 1960s and early '70s,
and it came from that same group of people.
And so when I say there were two detox programs,
there was the first one, which was the People's Program,
and after that, it changed.
There was no longer any politics.
It just became the Lincoln Detox program under Michael Smith
and there was no politics.
That was the end of the political education.
And people went their own way.
Mutulu created BAAANA and he moved into Harlem.
Susan: To create a new clinic was really the only alternative
in order to keep the ideas of the project and program
alive and to keep having a space to be able to treat people.
But it then became a private enterprise,
so the funding for it completely changed
and access for people who really needed it also changed.
And it then became a political project
which was the Black Acupuncture Association of North America.
This was where the school and the clinic was housed.
This is what I think --in Mutulu's mind--
is that he wanted to create BAAANA to serve
the whole person.
The drug addiction thing was great
because it opened them up to the idea of acupuncture,
but it's more of a holistic thing.
All parts. We need healing on so many different levels.
♪ [drums]
You know, it was a real family thing after a while,
when I came in BAAANA.
Because I was comfortable with everybody; everybody knew me,
and I just seen a good thing that was going on
and I seen that I was starting to feel better,
getting stronger about myself,
you know, and having better decisions.
They were treating everything.
And I think what I enabled them to do
was to have a little bit of medical oversight.
In terms of, is there certain things
that they really shouldn't be treating,
that needed some other kind of intervention?
That really didn't happen very much.
Then they had started the school,
which really populated this entire city
with community-based acupuncturists.
Two to three of the people started their own schools
that still exist.
And they did all this before there was any
New York state recognition that they could do it.
It was completely in your face, saying we are doing this;
it's for the people; what do you have to say about it?
And then they began to do the work with the state
to recognize non-MD acupuncturists.
That was the first.
And now, of course, they're everywhere.
So I was with my Kung-fu brother and we were selling incense
and oils on the street corner in downtown Brooklyn.
A woman comes along, and she says,
a Black acupuncture school opened up in Harlem.
A Black acupuncture school: I couldn't believe it.
Opening up in September in Harlem.
So I followed up; I went up to the school.
♪♪
[shouts]
Please, please help us!
Reagan: Almost three years ago,
President Carter came down to this very spot.
Woman: What are you gonna do?
What a minute.
It is three years, and nothing has been done.
[people shout negative remarks]
Please, wait a minute.
Right now in Congress.
What are you gonna do for us?
I'm trying to tell you!
But can you?
Can you tell us what you're capable of?
I am trying to tell you!
I can't do a damn thing for you, if I don't get elected.
No, but what are you gonna do anyway?
But make promises...
I was trying to tell you,
but you wouldn't stop talking to listen.
I was part of an organization that was called
the May 19th Communist Organization
and we came under complete attack in the early 1980s.
In 1981, it wasn't just us.
There were people around the country who were involved
in supporting revolutionary nationalist Black politics.
Makini: I remember telling Mutulu this
and I didn't know it would be a prophecy.
Mutulu was that person who -
we could be out at the after hours show
and we could be partying all night.
and he would come home and maybe get an hour's sleep.
And he would get up and take a shower and he was on the case.
Nothing stopped him from taking care of his business.
And I used to tell him all the time, I was like,
"Mutulu, if you do everything, nobody else
is going to know how to do shit.
So they didn't show up and instead you're doing it.
So you're doing everything, but what happens
if something happens to you?
Who's gonna do it?"
And that's exactly what happened.
It was like, oh my God.
Because he had his hands out, helping everybody.
I think they looked at him,
on all the levels that he was dealing with:
politically, socially, medically, etcetera.
That, when they looked at him, they say,
the problem is this guy here, he's got too much influence
in too many areas.
He's potentially a leader.
We need to get rid of him.
♪♪
Makini: I had just gone to bed, cleaned up my room, my space,
got my baby together, lay down.
And about two hours later, I heard this boom!
They had blown the door off, the hinges off,
just blown it off with some apparatus.
And when I got up to look, I was on the 4th floor,
and looked over the railings, all I could see
were those black SWAT caps and the lights
on the end of their guns pointed at me,
coming up the stairs, you know in the dark.
Cause they had cut the lights and everything.
It was harrowing.
♪♪
It's a very strange atmosphere in the street.
And, I was going to work, and there was nobody on the street.
This was in the morning.
Normally, it would have been a busy day
on the street in Harlem.
And as I am walking toward the clinic, once again I look up,
and there are FBI Black Ops people on the roofs,
all around the clinic in Harlem.
And as I'm walking, there is literally a tank
rolling down the street, coming in the wrong direction.
Today, seven people from the radical underground
were indicted in the robbery-murder
of a Brink's truck in which three were shot to death.
Subsequent investigations center here, on this Harlem townhouse,
which back then, housed an acupuncture clinic.
Mutulu Shakur, head of the acupuncture clinic,
and FBI reports say, the suspected ringleader
in the Nyack robbery.
But by the time they came to arrest Shakur, he'd left.
One defendant was Kathy Boudin, radical, fugitive.
Others came from exotic groups like the Black Liberation Army,
the Republic of New Afrika.
Showing something police had never seen before:
white and Black criminals working together.
Whites renting the cars, Blacks doing the jobs.
Among those indicted today for murder and robbery
in the Brink's holdup: Katherine Boudin, Nathaniel Burns,
David Gilbert, Samuel Brown, Judith Clark...
I was tortured for about six hours when I was captured.
I've still got scars from where they burned me,
pulled my toenail out, flushed my head in the toilet.
That was their way of waterboarding me:
sticking my head in the toilet and flushing it.
I was involved in supporting the politics
of this whole group of people.
And so I, along with many other people,
were targeted in this federal RICO conspiracy case.
And I was placed on the FBI's most wanted list
at the end of 1982.
And because I didn't believe that it would be possible
to fight this case, I went underground.
And was being hunted and looked for with shoot-to-kill orders
by the FBI for two-and-a-half years.
[police siren]
Susan:My husband is a physician - was a physician.
He was actually working at Lincoln Hospital at the time,
when the FBI arrested him.
And he was brought before a grand jury
and they said that he was accused of
treating one of the people who had been wounded
in the aftermath of the Brink's case.
And he wouldn't talk, so he stayed in jail.
He refused to collaborate.
So he was in jail for about a year.
And then they indicted him as an accessory
after the fact of the robbery.
And at that point, he went underground.
News Anchor: Besides the people charged in the actual crimes,
the grand jury has jailed six others:
associates and friends of the defendants.
Jailed them not because they were involved in the robberies,
but because they wouldn't furnish hair
and handwriting samples.
Aiysha: In '82, that's when I got visits from the FBI.
They brought me in to the courts.
So they say, would you like to answer questions?
And I says, I don't know anything, you know,
I was just a patient.
And I said, I was told to take the fifth.
I took the fifth, and they said, no.
Either you tell us what we want to hear, or you go to jail.
And at that point, I took the position of going to jail.
I said, I have to live in the community.
I have a child, I have family.
I don't know what's going on.
And, at that time, they incarcerated me.
[siren]
My husband was jailed for resisting the grand jury,
you know, because he was a friend of Mutulu's.
So, there must have been surveillance before that.
Sikou: Mutulu and I was on the same case.
One of the charges that I was charged with was
helping to liberate Assata Shakur.
And being involved in expropriation
of armoured trucks.
And I was given forty years on one
and twenty-five-to-life on the other.
I won in court, after thirty-three years,
if you can count that a win.
We were living in a revolutionary period.
So, to stick up a bank to feed the people,
or to build a people's army,
that had happened all over the world.
From the People's Republic of China, Russia, Vietnam.
That was part of the movement, that was part
of the liberation struggles of the world.
So we weren't creating that situation,
we were just imitating that situation.
We were part of a world revolution.
I didn't know the details, you know.
I knew what had happened after the fact.
It wasn't meant to be a violent overthrow.
The Wells Fargo Heist,
which was done by a Puerto Rican militant group,
not a bullet was shot or a drop of blood.
The Brink's was a different story.
Susan: Then I was arrested in 1984 in New Jersey.
It was very ironic in so many ways,
because after I was convicted of possession of weapons in
New Jersey and given a 60-year prison sentence for that,
the charges in the case itself which had sent me underground
to begin with were dropped for lack of evidence.
And I think that's important, because that also speaks to
what kind of evidence there was or wasn't against Dr. Shakur.
So the first eleven years I was in prison,
I was either in small group isolation, solitary confinement,
lock-down, or maximum security.
Then, after the first decade, I did make it into population,
where I became an organizer once again.
And became a peer-advocate and an AIDS-advocate
and a prison-legal- human-rights-advocate,
which is really difficult to do in prison.
But we managed to do it.
One of the men suspected of taking part in the 1981
armoured car robbery has been captured in California.
Shakur's four-and-a-half- year flight ended
in this residential neighbourhood
in West Los Angeles.
He was still running, authorities said,
when he was literally tackled from behind
by two New York police officers,
who had chased him across the years and miles.
Myself and some other people, we were unindicted co-conspirators.
So they say that we were involved in it, you know,
they wanted to lock us up and kill us too.
And they attempted to do those things.
But any time that you have a movement
and a struggle that's going on,
they're going to highlight specific people,
as you heard him say.
They highlighted him because he started a clinic.
Shakur: Our children, who were targeted and harassed,
who were followed, who were... you know ...
put in fearful situations because, like myself,
I was clandestine for many years and on the run.
And so my daughter and my sons were always followed,
and they would go into their schools.
So they knew the reality of what this is.
Tupac wasn't angry just to be angry.
His mother's life, as a member of the Panther 21
and the Panther situation,
his growing up in Lincoln Hospital with us
and that whole struggle.
He grew up around dope fiends all his life.
He grew up with the tension of what we were going through
with these counter- intelligence operations.
In a better world, we could have done better with that anger.
In a better world.
In better circumstances.
But I think he did the best that he could.
[indistinct chatter]
OK, so we're gonna do the same exact thing on the other side.
I wanna make it so they don't come out.
Turn your head for me.
For the liver.
For the lungs.
It stimulates the point.
When I put this into your ear,
I'm sending a message to your brain.
Because every part of your ear represents the inside of you.
So when we're stressed out and we're worried,
the muscles get very tight; it's difficult to breathe.
You get angry; you get upset really easily.
This will relax you.
You'll see, in ten minutes you're gonna feel like,
wow, was there medicine in here?
No, the medicine's already in your body.
This is just releasing it into your organs,
increasing the blood flow to your brain.
We see progress in people's lives,
where before I would see the pain that people go through,
through drug use.
I would see the suffering.
But I felt, at that time, there was nothing I could do.
I would just either witness the pain
and act like it didn't happen,
and just keep moving and keep getting high myself
because I had my own pain.
Today, regardless of my own pain,
I try my best to ease the pain that others have.
And today, I see that when people walk through these doors,
and they're in pain, and they go...
[clap]
[stifling a sob]
You gotta cut that!
You're doing well, keep going.
It's OK.
[laugh] Gimme a second!
When I see people in pain, and they come out of here
feeling better, then I know I did my job.
I know that I did something today
that made a difference in somebody's life.
And that's the most important thing to me.
captions by sas harris