portland panther clinic article

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Willamette Bridge cover announcing the opening of theFred Hampton Memorial People’s Clinic in January 1970

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In the late ’60s, the Black Panthers set up free medical and dentalclinics in cities across the country; in Portland, these “survivalprograms” were helped by a handful of Reedies.

The Portland chapter of the Black PantherParty was launched in 1969 when Kent Forddecided the community had had enough.Beaten by the police and arrested for incitingto riot, Ford was awaiting trial in the oldRocky Butte Jail with little hope of raisingbail. Ten days later, someone miraculouslyposted the full amount: $80,000. Ford wasbrought downtown for processing to the oldpolice station at Southwest Third Avenue andOak Street; right there on the steps, he helda press conference. “I said, ‘If they keepcoming in with these fascist tactics, we’regoing to defend ourselves.’”

The story of Reed’s connection to thePanthers also begins at that moment: theexorbitant bail—nearly a quarter of a milliondollars in today’s currency—was raised byDon Hamerquist ’62, a man Ford had onlyjust met. “It was some Communists that gotme out,” says Ford, who was eager to get toknow his benefactor. “I went over to hishouse and found out he was at Reed.”

Not exactly. Hamerquist, originally fromClallam Bay, Washington, had enrolled atReed back in 1957. He had been a historymajor, studying for five years on a fullscholarship with professors like Howard Jollyand John Pock in sociology, and Smith

Fussner in history. The completion of his thesis—on the foreign policy of the 1948 Progressive Partyplatform—was all he lacked for graduation.


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“There was a lot of social disruption in those years,” says Hamerquist, “and I didn’t study a lot. EssentiallyI was looking for leftists to recruit. I managed to get thrown out of most classes because I had a problemwith the politics of my professors.”

In 1969, when he met Ford, Hamerquist was neither a student nor a member of the Communist Party.“By then, I’d been out working as a truck driver for some years and I’d been expelled from the party forfactional behavior—essentially opposing the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia,” he says.

But he still knew plenty of people on the left in Portland, among them Morris Malbin, a radiologist who putup a $40,000 for Ford’s bail, and Penny Sabin, who contributed $40,000 in Blue Bell Potato Chip stocks.

For Ford, who had graduated from high school in 1961 and turned down a college scholarship in order tosupport his mother and siblings, meeting Hamerquist was not his first exposure to Reed. He had oftenbrowsed the campus bookstore in the late ’60s, buying Ho Chi Minh’s On Revolution, the works of Mao Tse-Tung, and some rare English-language pamphlets produced by the Viet Cong.

Hamerquist was also able to help Ford find a lawyer, Nick Chaivoe, who not only got Ford acquitted on the riot charges, but successfully sued the Portland Police in federal court for brutal treatment at the time of the arrest.

Meanwhile, Ford and a handful of others—Tommy Mills, Percy Hampton, Oscar Johnson, and TomVenters—had started talking to people on the street about police brutality, lack of job opportunities, theeconomic disparity between the races, the role blacks were forced to play in fighting the war inVietnam—and what the Panthers could do about it.


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Women saluting, 1968, photo by Ruth Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones

The original chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded by Huey P. Newton andBobby Seale in Oakland, California, in 1966. Their first document, a list of demands for human rights calledthe Ten-Point Platform and Program, cited the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence insupport of its points. The Party’s first actions included patrolling the city streets, armed, in an effort tosilently monitor Oakland police, a precaution meant to ensure that black citizens were either arrested or letgo—but not beaten or waylaid on the way to the station, as had happened all too often.

The following year, in 1967, members of the party—wearing black jackets and sunglasses—appeared atthe California State Legislature with guns to protest a bill intended to ban the display of loaded weapons.That same year, Huey Newton was critically wounded and arrested following a shoot-out on an Oaklandstreet that left a police officer dead. These events, especially as they involved weapons, were welldocumented by an astonished press.

What never got as much attention were the Panther social programs—the clinics; the breakfast programs;the testing for sickle cell anemia, high blood pressure, and lead poisoning; and the community outreachand education on the legal rights of the individual.

The Portland chapter got its free children’s breakfast program up and running in fall 1969. Every schoolday for five years, the Panthers provided breakfast for up to 125 children in the dining room of HighlandUnited Church of Christ. (To this day, it is not unusual in Portland for one of the former Panthers, now intheir 60s and 70s, to have some 40-year-old come up to them and say, “Do you remember me? You usedto give me pancakes in the morning before I went to school.”)

Also that fall, Kent Ford got a call at the new Party office on Union Avenue (renamed Martin Luther KingJr. Boulevard in 1989), which would lead to Hamerquist’s third big favor for the fledgling chapter. “I hearyou guys are thinking about opening up a health clinic,” he said. “I got just the guy you need to talk to.”


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That was how the Party came to work with Jon Moscow ’69.

A Long Island native, Moscow had joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) after studying a front-page story in Newsday about a group of people who got arrested while demonstrating against schoolsegregation. “I just thought it was something I wanted to be involved in,” Moscow recalls. He was 13 atthe time.

He chose Reed for two reasons: he had fallen in love with the Pacific Northwest from listening to WoodyGuthrie songs, and he wanted to get as far away from home as he could. “I didn’t even think aboutHawaii,” he realizes today.

Reed accepted him as a freshman in 1965, when activism was still attractive to schools. “They hadn’t yetexperienced students taking over their buildings,” Moscow points out. (The Columbia University uprisingdidn’t occur until 1968.)

He turned 18 in October of his sophomore year. It was 1966 and troop levels in Vietnam were inching uptoward 400,000, but, in order to register as a conscientious objector, Moscow refused the 2S deferment hewould have received automatically as a full-time student. His C.O. status denied, he eventually reportedto Fort Hamilton, where he failed his physical because of asthma. “I didn’t want to get out that way,”Moscow says, “so I burned my draft card in Grant Park during the ’68 Democratic Convention and sent theashes to the draft board.”


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Father and child, 1968, photo by Ruth Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones

Moscow spent his junior year in Hyderabad, doing research on an experiment in village-leveldemocracy—his thesis was called “Inequality and status in Indian rural development”—and returned toReed in 1968.

That winter, he went back to New York for winter break and got work with the Urban Coalition writing areport on the city’s hospital system. In the process, he discovered Health/PAC, the policy advisory centerstarted by activist Robb Burlage. “I fell in love with them,” Moscow says. In his final semester at Reed, hestarted his own research and action project, Health/RAP, along with roommate Robert Spindel ’70.Together they researched healthcare options in Portland.

“I had been involved in Portland from as soon as I arrived at Reed,” recalls Moscow, who participated inthe DiGiorgio grape boycott in 1966. “I had no desire to be an island. There was a small group of uspolitical people who did things off campus.”

After graduation, Moscow stayed in town, immersing himself in anti-war activities, getting arrested duringthe Fry Roofing strike, and launching Health/RAP. “I thought it would be really exciting to see how itcarried over in Portland,” says Moscow, whose sights were set first on the Multnomah County Hospital,where it was hard to get an appointment and waiting room delays were endless. The need for clinics inthe community was also clear to him; at the time, the sole county clinic was in the hospital itself, way upon “pill hill.”

To support himself, Moscow got a $20-a-week job writing for theWillamette Bridge, Portland’s alternative newspaper, and an indispensablevenue for his own Health/RAP press releases.

When he got a call from Kent Ford, who contacted him at Hamerquist’s


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Jon Moscow ’69 (left) and Kent Ford in 2008, onthe street corner where the Fred HamptonMemorial People’s Clinic once stood.

Sandra Ford, 1970s

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He was still looking to make a contribution when hemet Moscow. “I just regretted missing all the actionin the States,” say Barton, whose brother, Lane, hadgone to Selma. “But I wouldn’t have gone to theSouth on a bus. I was scared of those lynchings andthose people with baseball bats.”

Moscow, Barton, and the Fords went to look at thespace. “There was a bar on the right and a men’sstore on the left,” Ford recalls. “It was a rowdy area.It would have been considered the ghetto, backthen.”

“The four of us kept dithering around,” Sandrarecalls, “thinking of reasons why we couldn’t startright away—all kinds of problems, all the stuff we’dneed. But Dr. Barton said, ‘Oh hell, let’s just do it!’”

They rented the space and went to work: Pantherscleaned and painted the clinic, a friend of Moscow’sbuilt shelves, and Moscow and Sandra made contactsin town, asking for money, equipment, andvolunteers.

The Fords were in awe of what Moscow could accomplish.

Sandra was stunned that so many white people invited her and Moscow into their homes and wrote themchecks. “We went up on Mt. Tabor, the West Hills, Council Crest, Marine Drive. It was a real eye opener tome, because I’d been brought up in the projects. I lived in Columbia Villa until I graduated from highschool.”

Kent had only read about organizers like Moscow. “Like the SNCC peopleand the CORE people and the Peace and Freedom Party people. I’d nevermet one. My only organizing experience personally was street cornerorganizing.”

They named the clinic after a 21-year-old Panther leader who had beenmurdered by Chicago police on December 4, 1969. “We had decided itwas going to be the People’s Health Clinic,” Moscow says, “but then FredHampton was killed.” Though officials would claim the deaths of Hamptonand colleague Mark Clark had occurred as a result of a gun battle, ballisticevidence showed that the bullets were all incoming—the people in theapartment where they were killed, including Hampton’s pregnantgirlfriend, were asleep. The raid was one of several on Panther offices andhomes; in September 1968, J. Edgar Hoover had declared open season onthe Party, calling it the “greatest threat to the internal security of thecountry.”

In Portland, the Panther free clinic opened its doors as the Fred Hampton Memorial People’s Health Clinic.In the cover story for the Bridge, Moscow wrote:


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“We now have 27 doctors, plus nurses and medical students. Our X-ray diagnosis is donefree for us and the lab work that we can’t do in the clinic is sent out for free. We havespecialty referrals to private offices on a free basis in surgery, internal medicine,dermatology, hematology, neurology, pediatrics and cancer therapy. We also have a smallbut growing lab of our own, and we have been offered a portable X-ray machine and itsaccessories.”

In the same article, Moscow made a call to readers. “If you happen to have an autoclave on hand,” hewrote, “we can use it.” He also invited them to support the clinic by sending a check, giving his homeaddress, and ended the article with “All Power to the People!”

Shortly after the article appeared, the postman came to his door. “‘I just want to let you know that there’sa mail cover on all your mail.’ he told us. ‘I can’t do anything about it, but I just wanted you to know thatthey’re checking all your envelopes.’”


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Jon Moscow (left) and Sandra Ford share memories and a laugh in 2008.

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The health clinic was open weeknights, from 7 to 10 p.m. Serving 25 to 50 patients a night, it providedfree care to anyone who walked through the doors. Cathy Traylor, a successful businesswoman with ForteMarketing who travels across the country to organize the sales of Yamahas and Steinways, visited theclinic in 1972. Just out of college and new to Portland, she had a job making celery boxes and couldn’tafford a doctor.

“I can’t remember how I heard about it, but clearly it was a Panther clinic,” says Traylor, who is white. “Iwas seen right away and everybody was so nice. It was totally free, and I wasn’t asked any questionsabout whether I’d be able to pay.”

Except for Bill Davis, a pathologist(and brother of the late OssieDavis), the doctors were white.Sandra makes the point that thefour black doctors in town—Drs.Unthank, Reynolds, Marshall, andBrown—already did a lot of pro bonowork just by virtue of working in thecommunity.

Barton’s wife remembers that herhusband used to bicycle to the clinicfor his Wednesday night shift, andthe Panthers always offered him anescort out of the area, a precautionthat he rejected.

“My experience with the Pantherswas nothing but positive,” says

Barton, who was then establishing a practice as a neurologist. In contrast to the patients he’d had atOutside In, Barton found his patients at the Panther clinic to be very much in need of his services. Fordremembers Barton making home visits to a few elderly men, including a neighborhood character calledGovernor Coleman. “When his apartment building ran out of oil,” Barton remembers, “Governor used hiscook stove for heat.”

Once Moscow got a project up and running, he had a way of disappearing, in true community organizer fashion.

“He’s such a smart guy!” Sandra says. “He’d get another idea and start another project.”

In 1970, Moscow helped open the Panther Dental Clinic. He recruited Gerry Morrell, a dentist who was also in charge of community outreach for the Multnomah Dental Society. Morrell, in turn, brought in most of the other dentists. Like the health clinic, the dental clinic remained in operation by the Panthers throughout the 1970s.

For Morrell, who had grown up in small Washington towns, working with the Black Panthers was arevelation. “I went to Oregon State in the ’50s and they never even had a black basketball player until the’60s. I remember seeing Kent and thinking, he’s not that scary.

“Kent and Sandra always stressed you can like or dislike people, but do so on the basis of who they are,not on the basis of their race.”


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Sandra Ford, too, was changed by the clinics. “I just got more and more involved,” she says. She did allthe scheduling for the medical clinic, and took on the dental scheduling, too. She even did some dentalassisting. “Which was mostly closing my eyes and holding out the instruments,” Sandra laughs. “But I didlearn to sterilize things.”

She also found her niche. In 1977, she went through a University of Washington program and today, with40 years in healthcare, works at Garlington Center as a physician’s assistant in community mental health.

Don Hamerquist is back on the Olympic Peninsula, where he describes his work as “fighting the timbercompanies.”

Jon Moscow works in New York as an educational consultant and grant writer, and continues to be an activist for racial and economic justice.

George Barton retired after 24 years as a neurosurgeon at Kaiser. He lives in Vancouver, Washington, and is still a champion of universal health care.

Recently, former Panthers Percy Hampton, Oscar Johnson, and Kent Ford took a tour of North andNortheast Portland. Only the dental clinic, which they ran for a decade, is still open, now operated by theOHSU Dental School. The health clinic is gone, and both of the Union Avenue buildings that housed thePanther offices have been torn down. “Boy, they just completely erased us,” Oscar Johnson observed.

But their gratitude—to Don Hamerquist and Jon Moscow, to Dr. George Barton and Dr. Gerry Morrell, andto all the doctors and dentists who helped them back in the day—will never be erased.

Martha Gies is the author of Up All Night, a portrait of Portland told through the stories of 23 people whowork graveyard shift. In Veracruz, Gies leads an annual writing workshop called Traveler’s Mind; at homein Portland, she teaches at the Attic Writers’ Workshop.


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portland panther clinic article

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