Health Rights Are Civil Rights

Health Rights Are Civil Rights situates health in the struggles for social change in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. Jenna M. Loyd describes how Black freedom, anti-war, welfare rights, and women's movement activists formed alliances to battle oppressive health systems and structural violence, working to establish the principle that health is a right.

“...health is not simply bodily or biological, but fundamentally social.”
— Health Rights are Civil Rights

Health Rights are Civil Rights documents what many Los Angeles activists recognized decades ago: that militarization was in part responsible for the inequalities in American cities. This challenging new reading of suburban white flight explores how racial conflicts transpired across a Southland landscape shaped by defense spending. While the war in Vietnam constrained social spending, the New Right gained strength by seizing on the racialized and gendered politics of urban crisis to resist urban reinvestment and social programs.

Recapturing a little-known current of the era's activism, Loyd uses an intersectional approach to show why this diverse group of activists believed that democratic health care and ending war were essential to create cities of freedom, peace, and social justice—a vision that goes unanswered still today.

Praise for Health Rights are Civil Rights
“Health Rights are Civil Rights suggest an entirely new geography of Los Angeles based on both activism and geopolitics. Jenna M. Loyd makes pathbreaking connections between health, war making, race, and the environment that offers us a new way of viewing midcentury Los Angeles. An essential text for all scholars of Los Angeles, health, race, and activism.”
— Laura Pulido, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA