An Introduction: The Black Panther Party and Acupuncture?
Dr. Tolbert Small (left, photo courtesy of Billy X. Jennings) and Dr. Mutulu Shakur (right, photo courtesy of Friends & Family of Mutulu Shakur)
As I ordered a sandwich at a Subway in Manchester, New Hampshire, I saw the subtle but distinctive skin-colored patches on the server’s ear. I had just spent a summer looking for disposable ear acupuncture seeds on members of the public in Shanghai, where I was studying traditional Chinese medicine. But I was now in a small city in New England, and over a choice of sandwich dressings, I was startled. What were the patches doing here?
The server was a middle-aged, white woman in recovery from opioid addiction. She had just come from Hope for New Hampshire, a recovery community center with the mission to help people with substance use disorders through providing support by utilizing a non-clinical peer to peer approach.[1] They also offer acupuncture on a weekly basis.
A few minutes away from Subway, the recovery center presented another surprising scene: a group of ten people sitting in the lounge, chatting away, with five orange needles sticking out of each ear. A warm, energetic volunteer, named Elizabeth Ropp, welcomed my friend and me, and asked, “Would you like to get acupuncture treatment?” We agreed, and a few seconds later, we were also marked by the orange needles of the distinctive auricular acupoints of the National Acupuncture Detoxification Association (NADA). We sat among the group, and I asked whether or not they believed in acupuncture. They unanimously agreed – yes, of course. They felt it made a difference. I asked if they accepted traditional Chinese medicine’s theories, such as yin and yang or qi. One elderly man responded, “We don’t know what medicine is anymore. Whatever works, works.”[2] The others nodded in agreement. A few minutes later, Elizabeth handed me a small pamphlet entitled: A Radical History of Acupuncture in America.[3]
In the pamphlet, I read about the connection between acupuncture and the Black Panther Party (BPP), a revolutionary group in the civil rights era traditionally known for their self-defense practices. Fascinated, I started researching and realized that there is only a small amount of literature written around this history. I found a few resources on the topic (here, here, and here) and learned that there is in fact a few separate yet simultaneous stories of BPP members or affiliates using acupuncture starting as early as the 1970s. There is development of the NADA protocol at Lincoln Detox Hospital in the Bronx in New York City, where revolutionaries such as Dr. Mutulu Shakur (Tupac’s stepfather) introduced acupuncture into the detoxification program as an alternative to methadone. There is also Dr. Tolbert Small on the West Coast, who, after a trip to China with the BPP in 1972, returned home to teach himself the practice and integrated Western and Chinese medicine in his medical practice in the Bay area until his recent retirement at the beginning of 2020. Importantly to note is that Drs. Small and Shakur both started using acupuncture simultaneously but in parallel — they were not connected during the early 1970s!
These histories are significant for a number of reasons:
They nuance our understanding of the BPP and Black revolutionary movement. Often known for violent practices of self-defense, the BPP’s focus instead was primarily around community empowerment and self-actualization. A number of academics, such as historian Alondra Nelson, have been working to shift our understanding of revolutionary groups like the BPP. BPP members and affiliates were multi-dimensional, often clashing with each other on ideology and practice. Dr. Small, for example, never became a formal member of the BPP as he “agreed with 80%, disagreed with 20%” of the party’s politics, especially around its use of arms. Dr. Shakur, on the other hand, was a formal member of the Republic of New Afrika, a black separatist movement which was related but distinct from the BPP. Dr. Shakur worked with the BPP but was not a formal member.
They challenge the traditional narrative of Chinese medicine in the United States. The introduction of acupuncture into non-Asian communities in the states is often attributed to the New York Times’ reporter James Reston, who wrote about his successful post-operative acupuncture care in his 1971 article, Now, About My Operation in Peking. Yet, these revolutionaries discovered acupuncture through their own channels, with Dr. Shakur learning about the practice prior to Reston’s article and Dr. Small witnessing acupuncture first handedly in China.
These stories introduce new and crucial dimensions of race, ethnicity and class into existing scholarship on Chinese and integrative medicine. This is deeply important to me. As a young Asian American with personal connections to Chinese medicine (my grandmother was the last of a lineage of traditional practitioners), it is my dream to make sure that these significant and complex stories of the use of integrative medicine by diverse and marginalized populations are not lost in academia and public knowledge. My project aims to include dimensions of race, class, gender, ability, stigmatized illnesses (such as addiction or HIV/AIDs) and stigmatized environments (such as those in prisons, a population with whom my grandmother worked extensively with during the Second World War). These conversations are especially important to bring to light in the context of dominant narratives and practices of integrative medicine in the West that have become largely absorbed by the well-off.
Finally, they give us a new definition of integrative medicine. Traditional literature is often concerned with medical theory, but these narratives suggest that integrative medicine is more often the combination of not just one medical practice with another, but also with social practices. For the BPP, acupuncture fit into their social praxes of “serving the people, body and soul” and empowering the marginalized. In the context of distrust around the biomedical institution (think the Tuskegee syphilis study or Mississippi appendectomies), acupuncture was appealing because it was strictly non-biomedical and based on notions of self-healing, as the practice aims to readjust the body’s inherent balance.
The histories of Dr. Tolbert Small and the 1972 BPP trip to China as well as Dr. Mutulu Shakur and the Lincoln Detox Center have many puzzle pieces and I am trying to trace them through the immense guidance of those who are part of the puzzle! Dr. Small has taken me under his gentle wing, opening up his home and mind. Details of his story can be found in this post. Dr. Shakur has been held in jail for more than thirty years, beyond his sentence, and has recently been diagnosed with bone marrow cancer. His family and friends have been diligent to keep his legacy alive, and more information on his story is here.
Many lives have been influenced by the work of Drs. Small and Shakur (whether they know it or not) and I will update this blog as I continue my research that has taken me to the most surprising of places! Currently, I am in the United Kingdom and tracing the history of auricular acupuncture (of which NADA is part of), and I have been particularly fascinated by its use within addiction and substance use disorder programs around the country (including in prison systems). This is all part of an interconnected and rich history that must be explored, and I hope to put the puzzle pieces together.
Thank you so much for following along – it is an honor!