"Genuine Struggle and Care": An Interview with Cleo Silvers

Philadelphia native Cleo Silvers moved to New York City to take up a VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) post in the mid-1960s. In the course of her VISTA service, she was awakened to the extreme deprivation faced by many Blacks and Latinos in Manhattan and the Bronx, New York. This experience also occasioned a political awakening in Silvers, who sought to systematically understand the social and economic inequality she witnessed and how to upend it. Following her VISTA service, she worked as a community mental health worker at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx. She also joined the Black Panther Party in Harlem, New York. As a Panther, her work included conducting neighborhood health surveys and door-to-door testing for sickle cell anemia and lead poisoning and being a patient advocate in its clinic. Silvers later became a member of the Young Lords Party and played a role in its takeover of Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx. In more recent years, Silvers served as executive director of For a Better Bronx, a community-based social and environmental justice organization. She recently retired from a position as a community outreach director at a leading New York City medical center.

Silvers speaks here with Alondra Nelson, PhD, a sociologist and historian who has documented the Black Panther Party’s health activism, about the formative experiences that led her into five decades of health advocacy—an activism notable for its insistence on the inextricable links between health and socioeconomic well-being.