Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. A question that's going around right now is, how do you change things when it feels like the deck is stacked? So today on the show, it's David versus Goliath, and I just want to get straight into it. It's a Tuesday, July 14th, 1970. The sun is coming up over New York City, and word is out that a militant group has taken over a hospital.

This is not a candy store that took over. It took over a hospital. We didn't know how bad it was.

This is Sid Davidoff. He worked for the mayor's office at the time.

They're still putting their reports together. It's very sketchy. Bunch of people taking over a floor. They claimed to have hostages, and they have a list of demands. They want to talk to somebody.

Sid is the guy that the mayor's office would call in to deal with crises across the He'd negotiated with gangs in Manhattan, coordinated responses to race riots in Brooklyn. And so when he heard that some radicals were taking over a hospital, Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, he rushed over. Police were already there, surrounding the place, and it was chaos.

Ambulances are pulling up. People are sick. People are dying, maybe. Got 50 cops ready to come in and do what have to be done. Who knows what's going to happen?

In Inside are the radicals, about 100 women and men, some are in fatigues, big army boots, and everyone is wearing purple berets.

They're standing by the door. They're being very militant. They're using their force, their anger. We had to get them out of the hospital.

So who were these people in their Purple Berets? And why they trying to take over a hospital? Well, they were the young lords, and we're about to hear their story. It's a fight to save thousands of lives, a fight that is still at the forefront of American politics today.

The Young Lords Party began an occupation of part of the Lincoln Hospital complex.

That building was conserved 25 years ago.

The Young Lords opened up Pandora's box.

Is what they did. You're not going to get anything from this country. You're not going to change by prayings, lovings, and all other kinds of be-ins.

You're going to get it through arm struggle. It's the only way.

What does the AI revolution mean for jobs? For getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology? And what do they think? I'm Rana El Khaloubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all All Things AI with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Okay, we're going back to a year before the takeover. We're in East Harlem, a neighborhood that was known as El Barrio. This neighborhood was poor, really poor. A lot of the residents had recently migrated from Puerto Rico. They lived in cramped tenements. Roaches were everywhere. Here's how one woman described everyday life in El Barrio at the time.

We can call this housing.

We just call them dumps. Roaches live with you. They don't pay no rent, but you do.

All your children eat lead poison paint. Mickey Melendez grew up here. To him, the roaches and crappy houses, they were just part of everyday normal life. But when he got into college, he started looking at it differently. Mickey and some new friends were reading all about inequality and socialism.

We were so excited, and we have been reading all this stuff about revolution, and We were going to bring the revolution to our community. It wasn't a light going off. It was like hundreds of lights going off at the same time.

They also started sharing books about the history of Puerto Rico. They realized that it was basically a colony under the US government. And they read about independence protests on the island and people getting killed.

We were angry. We were very angry and wanted to figure out how to fight back.

They formed a group and started going around the neighborhood talking to people about getting Puerto Rican independence.

In our little broken-ass Spanish, we would just try to talk to people. These guys were playing dominoes, and they were almost like, What are these young people bothering us for?

Even though Mickey and his mates were well intentioned. They were college kids talking about the system and politics to real grownups. Nice try.

We got frustrated and said, Okay, well, what are your issues? What do you want to talk about? They just Just blew us away by just saying, Why don't you turn around and look behind you? There's garbage there.

The men said, Okay, you want to help out? Go pick up the trash. Mickey looked around. Trash was everywhere.

A disgusting sight. I can't even imagine it. I mean, I'm closed my eyes and I look at liquid, brown liquid, coming down the side of the sidewalk. Stuff that had been laying there, decomposing for five days on 90 degree heat. It was Dead rats. There were dead rats in the community, and the stench stayed in your nose, and it was really that bad.

The trash was so bad because New York City was actually in the middle of a literal garbage crisis. Garbage trucks weren't picking up trash across the city, and it was piling up. But it was particularly bad in poor neighborhoods like El Barrio. So these college kids decided to do what the old men wanted.

Okay, so we put the Revolution aside. We put Socialism aside, and we start cleaning up the garbage.

Have you ever cleaned anything before in your life?

Probably my nails. My nails, maybe. Not anything like that. No, absolutely not.

They started sweeping the streets, cleaning it themselves. But then, Mickey said, something really cool happened.

People started to come out with their own brooms, these little old ladies with their little guns in their heads. We call them doñas. The doñas would come out with their bathrobes and help us clean up. They used to call us muchachitos, those little kids, los niños.

That's what they called you.

Yeah, that's what they called us. Yeah, right. Five hundred years ago. It was that connection. It was the beginning of a love affair between the organization and the community.

Mickey and his friends kept cleaning the streets for a few Sundays in a row, but the sanitation trucks still didn't come. The neatly placed trash just sat there until the rats ripped it open and the trash littered the streets again. Soon, Mickey and his mates were fed up.

We were so angry, really pissed off. Said, Okay, they're not picking up the garbage. They denied us this. Sunday afternoon, we decided to take a more militant action.

One Sunday in August, they took the trash they had collected, and instead of leaving it on the sidewalk waiting for sanitation to collect it. They dumped the trash bags in the middle of the street, all across Third Avenue, which is a large street in New York City. And then they didn't stop there. People in the neighborhood joined in and started throwing mattresses, abandoned cars, rusted fridges, all on the street until the entire intersection was filled. Traffic couldn't go through. To top it all off, someone doused this trash in lighter fluid, and one One by one, the young lords threw matches onto the pile. What did that feel like to throw the match?

That felt great. That felt like we were doing this for our community.

In the middle of the street, not only did they burn the garbage, but they burned a pile of mountain of garbage. In the middle of the street, it was amazing.

Clio Silvers lived nearby, and she remembers seeing this burning heap.

I was like, Oh, God. This is their kids. I call them kids. They're young kids. It's crazy. They're nuts.

Do you remember what the scene was like?

Were people- People in the community? Yeah, they was happy. People were cheering and stuff. It was good. Yeah, And the old men, they were like, Yeah, these young people, they got it going on.

For weeks, these kids would put the trash in the middle of the street and burn it. And it totally worked. A New York Times article wrote, The mayor's office got the message, and a 24-hour pickup of garbage was begun. For a while, El Barrio was cleaner than anyone remembered. Here's Cleo again.

The garbage people started coming more frequently to pick up the garbage because they know them crazy ass kids might burn up some more garbage in the street if you don't.

This protest became known as the Garbage Offensive, a play on the name the Tet Offensive, which were a series of surprise attacks by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. The group behind the offensive were now infamous in New York City. They were calling themselves the Young Lords, a name they got from a Puerto Rican gang in Chicago who wore purple berets. That was a nod to the Black Panthers who wore black berets, and it was purple because in West Side Story, that dodgy musical with the Puerto Rican gang called the Sharks, well, the Sharks wore purple. Seriously. As word spread of what the Young Lords had done, Hundreds of kids, even some people who weren't Puerto Rican, would join them. They were ready to take on whatever the young lords asked of them. Eventually, Cleo Silvers joined, too.

Now, let's go out. Next. What's next? What do we need to do next?

The only problem was...

We really had no idea. We didn't know what the next step was because it was evolving. It wasn't like we had a plan.

The group had seized on something that people really cared about, the trash. Now they had to figure out how to keep it going. It didn't take long to find their next cause. They read in the paper that a two-year-old kid from the neighborhood had almost died from lead poisoning, and so they had a new target. Lead paint. Lead paint had been banned for almost a decade in New York, but layers of it still coded some apartments in the neighborhood. Here's Cleo.

They've been painted over and over and over again. The lead paint was It's so thick. I mean, it was really, really thick in these apartments. Chips would be fallen everywhere. Chips, lead-based paint would be everywhere.

Lead paint tastes sweet, so kids would eat the flex of paint. At the time, doctors knew that this was harmful. Lead poisoning can wreak havoc across the entire body, especially in children. It affects their gut, hormones, and nervous system. It can cause seizures, permanent brain damage, and even death. Clio worked in a hospital at the time and saw what was going on.

Children were dying from having access to lead.

Do you remember a child that- So many kids.

Oh, my goodness. A child. There's so many children, and it was an epidemic.

But lots of parents in the neighborhood didn't know how dangerous this paint was. The young lords wanted to change that. They started going door to door, talking to families about lead lead poisoning and testing kids. We began by asking some medical students to help us out. Here's young Lord Felipe Luciano talking to a local radio station from the time. We began an intensive block-by-block campaign, and we found out very interesting things. 30% of those children had lead poisoning. The young Lord's work got a ton of attention. A headline from the Village Voice claimed, Lead poisoning tests. The young lords do the city's work. And pretty quickly, the young lords planned to fight for the independence of Puerto Rico. They took a back seat to the health of their neighbors. Yeah, the lords had become unexpected public health crusaders. I asked Clio about this. Why would a group like the Young Lords, whose number one goal was independence for Puerto Rico, why was health care so important to you?

As people, Puerto Rico was here dying. To be very honest, people People were dying. You can't have life if you don't have access to quality health care. These people are people we know and love. And so people you know and love having access to quality health care is like, that's just basic.

In a newspaper they ran at the time, one young Lord wrote, Bullets and bombs aren't the only ways to kill people. Bad hospitals kill our people. Rotten, forgotten buildings kill our people. Garbage and disease kill our people. The lords took a page from the Black Panthers. They started a breakfast program for young kids, opened up a free medical clinic, and people in the community loved them. The kids from the breakfast program even put on a play about the young lords in their fight.

Our people are poor, and you know damn real, nobody wants to be poor. This plan is going to show that people start to take community control and liberated back.

But city officials and police, they weren't as big a fan. The young lords got into fights with the police during their protests, but the community came to their defense. With the community on side, the lords got bolder and bolder. So meet their tuberculosis offensive. The city was running this TB testing program, and they had these trucks with portable X-ray machines inside to help diagnose people with tuberculosis. Now, even though there were particularly high rates of TB in El Barrio, the truck was barely around. So the young lords thought, Wouldn't it be cool if we got that truck?

If we got that truck, we could test a whole lot of people.

The lords asked the city to use the truck in their neighborhood, but officials flat out refused. And so they took matters into their own hands.

Let's get it. That's it. That's the way it goes in the young lords. Let's go get it.

The Young Lords decided to steal the city's truck. So in broad daylight, one June afternoon, Mickey and two other Young Lords put on lab coats, grabbed some nunchucks, hey, it was the '70s, and approach the truck. They told the techs who were standing beside it.

They don't get in the back. Everything's going to be fine. Nobody's going to get hurt. We're going to take you to people that need this service.

What did the technicians do?

They went into the back of the truck very quietly. I got the signal that everything Everything was okay in the back. I started to drive off.

Mickey zoomed through the city in this massive truck. Meanwhile, other lords had told sick people in the neighborhood to meet them at a particular spot so they could get tested. About 50 people were there waiting. A young Lord had also called the press in advance. Just as Mickey arrived- The newspapers were there, the cameras were there, the line was there, and the technicians came out and started to X-ray people. But the police were there waiting, too.

The They had helicopters, there were police cars. But because the media was there, the police just walked away from this one.

Wow. So right in front of the cops, the technicians tested people, and the young lords put a flag of Puerto Rico on the X-ray truck. No one got arrested. And not only were the young lords not in jail, within a few days, get this, the Department of Health said that the truck was now going to be parked in El Barrio and opened for extended hours. The Department even paid to have technicians staff the truck for the extra hours. Win after win after win. But the young lords weren't done yet. Their biggest fight was still to come.

We were like a fleet. Hey, going up against an elephant. But we're going to bite this elephant on its toe until it just flips over, and that's it. We could whip this mother's ass.

Coming up after break, the elephant fights back. Welcome back. We've met the Young Lords, a ragtag group of kids who came together to fight for Puerto Rican independence and ended up fighting for the health of their community. As the Young Lords became more and more frustrated with the crappy conditions in their neighborhood, they zoomed in on one One big target.

It was the Butcher Shop. It was known as the Butcher Shop. It was not... People were not kidding. You would go in there and you would hope that you came out of there with your life.

Clio Silvers is talking about the place she worked, Lincoln Hospital, and it was truly awful. There were days when the water pressure in the hospital was so low that doctors couldn't wash their hands properly. Clio told me there were rats and roaches running across blood-stained floors.

Not only that- All the equipment was old-fashioned. The building was falling down.

What was the wait time at the hospital?

The wait time was between 10:00 and 72 hours.

You could be waiting three days.

That's correct. You could be waiting three days to be seen in the emergency room. Now, you have to remember that that was the only healthcare facility in the neighborhood.

The place had a reputation. Dr. Louis Frad was the Chief of Pediatrics at another New York City hospital, and he was interviewed around this time about the problems at Lincoln. He described it like this.

The problems are gigantic, and what the city and what everybody puts in is minimal.

If you take a situation like lead poisoning, we have seen children get lead poisoning while hospitalized at Lincoln Hospital.

Now, this is disgraceful.

In fact, the hospital had been condemned for years. The city was supposed to build a new hospital, but it had been delayed and delayed. The lords felt like no new hospital was on the way, and their crappy hospital wasn't getting fixed. Clio and the young lords protested.

That building, we need to send our people to.

Clio is standing outside the hospital and yelling to a crowd of about 40 people. It's a bit hard to hear, but she says that this hospital is supposed to serve 360,000 people.

We have 360,000 people in South France. And making our field can not serve is not being good.

And Cleo didn't just yell outside the hospital. Inside, she was pushing for change, too. She and the lords organized a group of doctors and health care workers who agreed with them. They wrote letters, tried to get meetings with administrators, but nothing changed. Here's Cleo.

So many demonstrations, so many demands. There's so much hollering, and they still didn't do it. So now's the time. We're going to take this sucker over.

On July 14th, 1970, just a month after they stole the TB truck, The Young Lords would try to take over Lincoln Hospital. At the time, the Young Lords were heavily infiltrated by police. We have documents from the FBI showing that basically as soon as the Young Lords picked up their first bag of garbage, secret police were trying to get into the group. Because of this, the group's leaders had to keep the hospital plan to only a very tight circle, but they needed a lot of people to take over a hospital. They threw a party to get around a hundred young lords together in an apartment.

Some of us knew that it was not a party. Some of us knew that it was going to be the takeover.

Did you know?

Yeah, I knew. Everybody's partying, dancing, having a good time. Then brothers and sisters, turning the music off.

One of the leaders of the young lords stood up and started talking.

Everybody sit down, have a seat. We're here because this is a serious business. It is now time for us to take over the hospital. So that's what we're here for.

And did everyone cheer? Do you remember the reaction?

It was cheering. It was cheering. We're ready to go. When are we leaving? Not now. It was electric when people found out what we were there for.

Everyone was assigned a buddy to keep an eye on them for the night to make absolutely sure that no one ratted them out.

I mean, you don't know who's who, and somebody might tell. So once you're in, you can't leave. And there's no phone calls and all that. This is it.

Mickey Melendez was in charge of security.

Mickey's on in security. Don't worry, we got it.

I mean, there was a tremendous amount of adrenaline. It was exciting. It's like, We're going to do this.

The plan was for Mickey and a few others to sneak in first, barricade some doors, and unlock others. The rest of the lords would pile into a large truck, drive up to the open doors, and stream in. Mickey told me that getting through security, it wasn't a problem.

There were actually two guards that knew us, and one of them had grown up with us and was very supportive of us. To him, it didn't matter.

Back at the party, it's still dark outside. The truck arrived to take everyone to the hospital. It was go time.

Once we get in the truck, you got to have complete silence. Shh, be quiet, because now it's getting serious. The closer you get to the hospital, the more serious things get.

They got to the hospital, and a hundred or so lords crept in.

It was daylight It was coming up, just about to come up. It was still a little bit dark outside. Here we go. As we were going in, everybody's crouching, very quietly, tipping to your spot where you were assigned. Everyone had an assignment of where they needed to be. I was responsible for going to the administrative offices and kicking out the administrators.

Cleo remembers seeing a few of them at their big wooden desks.

Then I just walked in and We've taken over the hospital. You are out. You're a bad administrator. You have to go get up and get out of here.

What? Do you remember that reaction?

Can we discuss? No, we cannot discuss this. It's too late.

The young lords wanted to kick out the hospital bosses so that they could run the hospital themselves. Some administrators refused to leave, and so the young lords told them to stay in their office. Meanwhile, other lords were tasked with stringing up a huge sign across the two towers in the hospital.

It said, Welcome to the People's Hospital. It was amazing. Welcome to the People's Hospital.

Within the hour, the police knew what was going on and had already started lining up outside the hospital, ready to barge in. This takes us to the moment we heard at the beginning of the show. It's 7:30 AM, and Sid Davidoff, the crisis guy from the mayor's office, he steps through the lines of armed police.

I walked in, I said, Look, there's a bunch of guys out there with guns who want to come in. You cannot disturb a hospital because if I don't take you out of this, they're going to take you out of this, and that's not something you want.

Until they were like, Okay, you guys got to get out now. Get out. We were like, We're not leaving. We're administering the hospital. We're not leaving.

Sid and the young Lord started negotiating. They told him they wanted a new hospital. Lincoln was bad, and they deserved better. Here's Sid.

The thing is, you don't change a hospital overnight. You don't rebuild a new hospital. The young lads were impatient. They wanted it done quicker.

I'm thinking, How could you dare stand here and tell us that we can't get a new hospital right now? That's what I want to see. I want to see a new hospital. I want to see this one cleaned up. I want to see doctors treating patients with dignity and respect. I want this right now.

They reached a standoff. The young lords weren't backing down, and Sid wasn't going anywhere either. There were hundreds of patients in the hospital that day. While the young lords were mainly gathered in an administrative floor of the hospital, Sid was worried that this would start affecting patient care. The clock kept ticking. Twelve hours went by, and the young lords got the sense that the police outside were ready to come in. In past scuffles, the police had beaten up the lords badly.

Then we got the feeling these people are getting ready to come in here and kill us. That was scary when you're demonstrating and you know that it is possible that you can get beat up real bad. That's scary.

Cleo said there were some young teenagers in the crew. They wanted to protect them. So the young lords agreed to leave with the condition that Sid would meet with them later.

I'm the guy representing the mayor, and I'm not a low-level guy. I'm not a clerk. I'm not coming in and say, I have to talk to somebody who's going to talk to somebody. I'm talking to the mayor. They understood it, so we got them out of there.

No one was beaten up or arrested at the scene. The young lords were on their way to getting what they wanted. They'd secured private meetings with the mayor's office, got a ton of press, which they thought would pressure the government to do something. But a few days after the take However, a Puerto Rican woman died from complications in the obstetrics unit. A doctor was inexperienced and not supervised properly, and the young lords were furious. They barged into hospital meetings demanding to speak with administrators. They threatened the chief of obstetrics and forced him to leave, and some other doctors from his department walked out of the hospital because they said it wasn't safe to go to work. Because of this, some patients were discharged without warning or transferred elsewhere. Here's the chief of pediatrics of Lincoln Hospital at the time, Dr Arnold Einhorn. He was interviewed soon after this. Their methods are terribly objectionable. They threaten They threaten body harm.

The fact is that they have absolutely no expertise to judge what is needed.

They would like to direct priorities and programs, and they haven't got the slightest idea. Clio had a different version of events. Was there ever any violence towards any of the doctors?

Never. Never any violence. That's the one thing that we did not do. One of the things that we would tell all of our Cadre, never to do. It's never inside of the hospital to engage in any violent activities. A hospital is a place of healing. This is not a place where you engage in in violent activities.

Sid from the mayor's office told me that while the young lords did scare administrators, they never brought in weapons to the hospital. Even though he was on the other side of the negotiation table, he says he had a lot of respect for what the young lords were doing.

This group were there to make a difference, and I respected that. This was a situation with a real concern for health care. They're right. We all knew that Lincoln Hospital was not a particularly great hospital of its day.

After the takeover, changes did happen. Sid told me that they brought in new administration to run the hospital and made some short-term fixes to the water supply so that there was enough pressure that doctors could wash their hands properly. The big thing, within weeks of the takeover, the city started clearing land where a new Lincoln Hospital would be built.

In a lot of ways, the young lads pushed the envelope to get a new Lincoln Hospital.

They claimed that part of the reason that they weren't getting attention was because they were poor and it was a new immigrant community. Is that true?

I think in part, yes. I think we say the voice of the voiceless. We're in a political world, right? Sometimes you need to be more vocal. They were vocal to a community that wasn't very vocal to us.

The fight for Lincoln Hospital felt like a huge win for the young lords. They had the respect of people in high places, and from the outside, it looked like they were unstoppable. Their numbers were growing. But from the inside, cracks were starting to form. It was getting tiring, the fights with the police, the constant surveillance. Things were starting to break down, and infighting began. Just as they were reaching the high point of their impact, it all came crashing down. About a year after the Lincoln takeover, something happened that for Mickey and Cleo would signal the beginning of the end for the Young Lords. It happened with a parade. For the Puerto Rican community in New York, the Puerto Rican Day parade is a big deal, a source of pride. In 1971, the Young Lords found out that some cops were going to lead parade, and they were like, No, here's Mickey.

All right, so we're going to take over the parade. We're going to take over the front of the parade because we protect and serve our people.Not the police.Not the police.

They'd walk out in front of the parade, cutting off the police. They would come prepared with mace and wooden sticks strapped to their forearm to ward off police batons.

We were ready to just fight it out with the cops.

But the police knew they were coming. We found a a handwritten note from a police infiltrator who knew about the whole plan, the mace, the sticks, everything. And so the cops came ready. Mickey had injured his shoulder, so he couldn't be involved in the takeover. He stood back and watched what was happening.

The parade starts. The New York City Police Department, Hispanic Association starts marching. From a side, young lords start coming out to take over the front of the parade. And the cops then move in and start beating the young lords.

Young lords were arrested. Some had to be taken to hospital. This thing had happened before, but the community supported the young lords. This fight, though, it didn't feel like it was for the community. And so Clio said the people didn't have their back.

The people did not demand that they stopped beating us. They didn't come out. They just let us get Our asses beat. I think that they thought we had gone too far. The people in the community thought that the young lords had gone too far.

Mickey saw regular folks getting pulled in the scuffle between police and the group, and he knew things would never be the same.

This is huge. This is big.

It wasn't for anything. It wasn't for health care.

Taking over the front of the parade. Then what? We ended the love affair with our community. The community didn't with us.

After the parade, the Donias in the neighborhood, they stopped coming around. Mickey and Cleo both told me that this parade was the first of many missteps. Over the next few years, the young lords would step away from health care and go back to their original goal of bringing independence to Puerto Rico. Soon, there was no more TB testing, no more breakfast programs. And by the mid-1970s, just as the new Lincoln Hospital was opening. The young lords had basically disbanded. They were over. But even though they didn't last long, the ripples of their work can still be felt today. Their lead offensive helped to get New York City to introduce mandatory lead poisoning tests for kids. And soon after, the CDC pushed states around the country to do this, too. These programs are still going on today. Their TB testing and protests at Lincoln brought attention to how unequal health care was across the city. It's a conversation that's still playing out across America today.

We were demanding free quality health care for all, or whatever it is, whatever that call is. We've been saying this since 1960, and it's just now getting to be a political issue. But we were naive, and I have to admit there was a level of naiveté that is still shocking to me as I am now a grown-up person. We thought we could whip their ass. And that is a wonderful thing to have that courage and determination that, yes, we're going to make this thing change. It is so naive.

That's Science Versus. This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Rose Rimla, Merrill Horn, Michelle Dang, and Lexie Krupp. We're edited by Kaitlyn Kenny, with help from Jorge Just. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munga, Bobby Lord, and Blue Dot Sessions. The archive for this story came from Pacifica Radio Archive, and the documentaries El Pueblo Se Levanta and Palante Siempre Palante. A big thanks to Denise Oliver-Velez, Dr. Darryl Wanzer Serrano, Iris Morales, Walter Bosco de Rio, Professor Jose Sánchez, Pedro J. Hernández, Professor Lloyd Novik, and others. An extra thanks to Blyth Tarrell, Amanda Orozniak, the Zuckerman family, and Joseph Lavell-Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.