Health Justice and Ending the War at Home

Jenna M. Loyd

One of the forgotten gains of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s is in making a place for health as a right and means of politics. Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963–1978 situates the struggle over health in Los Angeles within the context of both the Vietnam War and domestic conflicts over the racial economy and social welfare. The book describes how Black freedom, antiwar, welfare rights, and women’s movement activists formed alliances to battle oppressive health systems and structural violence, working to define health as a matter of individual and collective self-determination. This talk reflects on the legacy of these movements for the contemporary moment of Black Lives Matter.

Jenna M. Loyd received her PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and is assistant professor of public health policy and administration at the Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a coeditor of Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis.