[this page is still under construction :)]

1960s – 1970s

• In the 1960s, only a handful of Black doctors, and almost no white doctors, were willing to work with young activists from Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality. Dr. Robert L. Smith (“Doctor to the Civil Rights Movement”) and Dr. James Anderson were two of the main physicians who treated civil rights workers in Mississippi, for everything from small injuries to emotional and physical trauma.

• In June 1964, Drs. Smith, Anderson, and Tom Levin organized the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), a group of ~100 American healthcare professionals who provided physical and emotional care to civil rights workers, community activists, and summer volunteers during Mississippi Freedom Summer.

  As part of their Four Point Program for Freedom Summer, MCHR clinicians administered first aid to civil rights workers and local Black communities, helped people get access to local doctors and hospitals, and supported Black and white healthcare personnel already in MS in this work. MCHR set up informal clinics at community centers and Freedom Schools and offered home care to support Black families.

• After its formation, MCHR members found themselves in situations where they felt they had a duty to act. Unfortunately, many clinicians brought saviorism and elitism into their work and refused to share their resources (e.g. rented cars) or to assist in administrative or community health work.

  In response, an MCHR break-away group formed called the Medical Presence Project (MPP) in 1966. MPP began preparing to provide direct first aid on the streets as the very first street medic collective

• Anne Hirschman-Schremp from the MPP began training civil rights workers to administer first aid at protests, including the Vietnam Vets Against the War, Young Lords Party, and the Black Panther Party. Among those she trained was a doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine named Ron Rosen (“Doc”), who worked with the American Indian Movement and founded the Colorado Street Medics.

  Anne Hirschman-Schremp and Doc Rosen later moved to New York City, where they founded the Broome Street Collective in 1967. They worked with returning combat medics from Veterans for Peace to develop field protocols to support anti-war movement.

  Learn more:

  • Video interview with Anne Hirschman-Schremp
  • A blog post written in memory of Doc Rosen
• The street medics of MPP developed a specific set of skills and ethics and a curriculum that grew, developed, and persisted through time. By the late 1960s, medical professionals in solidarity with movements for justice routinely attended street medic trainings to be cross-trained to work in a variety of protest environments.

  Many of these trainings were led by medics with no formal licenses or certifications. Many were BIPOC students, veterans, and formerly incarcerated/institutionalized people. Street medicine grew out of necessity for community care and collective survival, out of circumstances of poverty, disenfranchisement, organized abandonment, and state violence.

• In 1967, the very first paramedic program in the U.S., the Freedom House Ambulance Service, was created, a collaboration between Black-run inner-city community organization Freedom House Enterprises, Inc., the non-profit Maurice Falk Medical Fund, and Presbyterian-University Hospital.

  Before Freedom House, police wagons and privatized funeral hearses transported patients to hospitals. Pre-hospital emergency medicine did not exist, and privatized ambulances only served white or affluent neighborhoods. Black people who needed emergency care faced racism and violence while being transported to hospitals.

  These Black paramedics were poor, often formerly-incarcerated, community members with no prior medical training or experience. They believed that paramedicine made their communities stronger and safer. Freedom House established its base in Presbyterian-University Hospital’s Emergency Room and responded to more than 5,600 calls in the first year, mostly in Black districts. Freedom House’s model expanded to other cities and states.

• While physicians continued pushing for desegregation of the AMA and medical care, the official end to segregation in 1968 did not end medical discrimination toward poor Black patients. 

  Dr. Leonidas H. Berry recognized problems of access and affordability for Black communities. With the support of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Cairo civil rights organizations, he chartered 2 airplanes and regularly flew a group of Chicago health professionals to Cairo, IL, to provide care. They called themselves the “Flying Black Medics.”

• In the 1960s and 1970s, poor Black and Latinx neighborhoods in NYC were neglected of adequate healthcare and sanitation services.

  In response, the Young Lords:

  • Protested irregular garbage pickup
  • Overtook a tuberculosis testing truck
  • Launched a breakfast program for children
  • Conducted door-to-door lead poisoning tests

  In 1970, after the negligent death of Carmen Rodriguez, they barricaded and occupied Lincoln Hospital in demand of more funding, staffing, childcare, and preventative care programs. They also launched an acupuncture and detox clinic at the hospital for people in recovery from heroin addiction.

• While the Black Panther Party was known for their armed resistance and revolutionary philosophy, they also developed Community Survival Programs for health equity in the late 1960s and 1970s. These programs included free breakfast programs for children, political education classes, and clothing distributions.

  In 1968, they launched People’s Free Medical Centers, which offered preventative and primary care like vaccination, annual physicals, routine testing and lab work for chronic diseases, and screening for sickle cell anemia.

1980s – 2000s

• Street medic collectives maintained their focus on non-protest long-term community support work and campaigns through the 1980s and early 1990s. The onset of the HIV epidemic brought renewed moralization of illness and organized abandonment of marginalized people.

  The queer community, namely lesbians, came together in response to the government’s failure to act. Where the CDC failed, queer women stepped up to offer education for at-risk populations, organize blood drives, advocate for women with HIV, and take care of the sick and dying when healthcare providers and facilities turned away AIDS patients.

• Street medicine reached a new generation as part of the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s. Earth First!, ACT UP, fairy farms and pagan cluster communities, radical feminist health collectives, and others converged at the Battle of Seattle in 1999, a series of anti-capitalist, pro-labor, environmentalist protests at the World Trade Organization. Thousands of medics were trained in a few years and tended to protestors who were targeted with chemical weapons like pepper spray and tear gas. Some of the collectives that emerged were the Colorado Street Medics, Black Cross Collective, and On the Ground.

• Street medicine has expanded to include disaster response. In 2004, American Indian Movement medics responded to tsunami in coastal Thailand. Since then, street medics have:

  • Set up the first medical clinic in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina
  • Worked with local groups after the 2010 Haiti earthquake
  • Developed a health clinic after the 2010 Gulf oil spill
  • Set up emergency clinics, performed door-to-door checks, and provided first aid during Hurricane Sandy in 2012
  • Supported Centros de Apoyo Mutuo in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria
  • Organized in rapid response to Hurricane Helene in 2024 and the 2025 Los Angeles fires

2010s

• Occupy Wall Street led to a massive resurgence of street medics trained tens of thousands of protesters in short courses focused on protest health and safety, eye flushes, and day-long affinity group medic trainings. Some of these groups, like NYCAM, became a stable presence and continued to grow.

  New medics offered medical care, food, hygiene products, Reiki, and herbal medicine to no/low-income communities. In Eugene, Oregon, after working inside canopy tents for a year throughout wind and rain, Occupy Medical turned a former bloodmobile into a bus for their Mobile Clinic.

• In 2016, protests began in opposition to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and ended in early 2017 when the National Guard and police forcefully removed protesters.

  The protest camp at Standing Rock brought together street medics from different collectives and traditions. Led by indigenous elders, this affinity group came together as the Standing Rock Medic and Healer Council.

• In the summer of 2019, protests evolved in response to a new bill that would increase criminalization of protests, political dissent, and criticism of the Hong Kong and Chinese governments. Nurses, doctors, medical students and ordinary people with first aid training formed a volunteer corps to treat people on the frontlines.

2020s

• The COVID-19 pandemic expanded the role of street medicine and grassroots medical advocacy as new health disparities emerged, and as medical rationing guidelines targeted disabled people, elders, and BIPOC. Medics organized around:

  • Mutual aid coalitions for PPE distribution
  • Education about disease transmission, treatment, and Long COVID
  • Translation of public health guidance for accessibility and non-English languages
  • Herbal medicine for illness prior to the availability of known tr
  • Medical advocacy and support in getting vaccines and treatment
  • Development of protest protocols to minimize the spread of COVID

  The 2020 uprisings in response to the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor brought new visibility to the role of action medical and brought thousands of medical professionals into the field of street medicine. Some protests turned into sites of intentional occupation with free clinics, like Occupy City Hall in NYC. New medic coalitions formed and many pre-existing collectives (including NYCAM) developed and solidified new training protocols, remote medic roles, and internal covenants.

• The Stop Cop City movement spawned after the police murder of Rayshard Brooks in 2020. His family developed plans to create a community center to provide social services, community classes, food distros, and resources to local Black folks in the Atlanta.

  The city co-opted the Rayshard Brooks Peace Center to turn it into a $90 million 85-acre police training facility. In response, community members occupied of Weelaunee People’s Park from 2020 to January 2023, which experienced multiple police raids.

  We mourn and honor Tortuguita (they/them), a 26-year-old queer, non-binary Afro-Venezuelan street medic and member of our sibling collective, the Atlanta Resistance Medics, who was killed by Georgia State Police in the final raid on January 18, 2023.

• Since October 2023, the Israeli Occupation Forces have:

  • Killed at least 500,000 Palestinians
  • Killed or injured at least 3,759 medics and healthcare workers (likely 10x that amount in reality)
  • Targeted over 393 healthcare facilities

  Activists of all backgrounds, like all of us, have come together in collective care and solidarity to demand an end to empire. We also know a free Palestine will not come without an end to war, occupation, and genocide here on Turtle Island and around the world, including in Borikén, Hawaii, Kashmir, Congo, Sudan, Tigray, and Haiti.