Biography Cleo Silvers
Cleo Silvers began her career as a community and labor organizer as a VISTA Volunteer and activist in the South Bronx beginning in 1966. Her training as an organizer was based on the Saul Alinsky organizing method of door-to-door meeting and listening to people in the community.
She was co-founder of the Trinity Avenue Block Association, the Jackson Avenue Block Association and the Kelly Street Block Association, Lincoln Detox, and the Think Lincoln Committee, TLC, (a coalition of members of the community, interns and doctors, Young Lords and Black Panthers and hospital workers). Cleo as co-chairperson of HRUM (Health Revolutionary Unity Movement) which with the Think Lincoln Committee collectively penned the Patient’s Bill of Rights (a watered-down version now seen in every hospital room across the country).
After a one-year stint as a VISTA Volunteer, Cleo worked at Lincoln Hospital Mental Health Services as a community mental health worker and was a member of 1199/SEIU Hospital Workers Union.
She participated in the three take-overs of Lincoln Hospital. The demands for the first takeover of the workers were:
· a living wage for the hospital workers,
· training and upgrading for the workers,
· and the end of the use of psychotropic drugs to deal with economic and social problems being seen at the Mental Health Center,
· and the community, the establishment of the drug detoxification program,
· and an end to the use of members of our community as guinea pigs in the many research programs.
After a year of struggle with the hospital administration over minimal medical, further funding cuts, job cuts and finally the death of Carmen Rodriguez, the activist doctors and staff and the Think Lincoln Committee felt compelled to act. During the second takeover, they called for decent hospital conditions for the only hospital in the South Bronx serving more than 800,000 patients and also called for community-worker control of the hospital. By this time, Cleo had the honor of becoming a member of the Black Panther Party, and later the Young Lords Party as well as co-chairperson of the Health Revolutionary Unity Movement (HRUM). HRUM made the initial public calls in the Black and Puerto Rican community for “healthcare as a right” and for “free, quality, preventive healthcare for all.” HRUM published a newspaper, edited in-part by Cleo, called For the People’s Health. The influence of HRUM activists on the healthcare industry has been significant.
The third take-over at Lincoln Hospital was to demand a drug detox program for the community that did not use addictive chemicals or drugs such as Methadone to rehabilitate heroin addicts.
The Patient Bill of Rights demanded these rights:
1. To be treated with dignity and respect.
2. To have all treatment explained and to refuse any treatment you feel is not in your best interest.
3. To know what medicine is being prescribed and what it is for and what side effects it will cause.
4. To have access to your medical chart.
5. To have door to door preventative medicine programs. Toward a Patient Bill of Rights
6. To choose the doctor you want to have and to have the same doctor treat you all the time.
7. To call your doctor to your home.
8. To receive free meals while waiting for outpatient service.
9. To have free day care centers in all hospital facilities.
10.To receive free healthcare.
“With its far-reaching implications for the relationship between patients and doctors, rearticulations of HRUM’s Patient Bill of Rights have been adopted by hospitals across the nation under the same name. Part of what was remarkable about this list was its prescience. It significantly advanced the standards and ethics of patient care and patient rights in public discourse and helped enshrine concepts such as patient dignity, full disclosure and explanation of medical treatment and prescriptions and their side effects, and the right of the patient to refuse treatment. At the same time, it anticipated, in its call for free healthcare, what remains one of the most contentious debates about public health.”
Cleo went on after being recruited by James Forman and the central committee into the League of Revolutionary Black Workers – DRUM, etc., which became the Black Workers Congress, (BWC). She began her work with the BWC on a labor organizing introduction tour of the United States and organized in most of the major working-class cities in the country. She returned to Detroit and started working as a labor organizer while working as an assembler, (auto worker) at the Dodge Truck plant in Detroit, Michigan. There she became a full-fledged, professional community and labor organizer. “During my time at the auto plant, I was an active member of the second-line leadership of the Black Workers Congress. I lead workers study groups and wrote a pamphlet called From Detroit to Durban.”
After these organizations collapsed along with their goal of building a multi-national Revolutionary Communist Party in the United States, Cleo moved to Los Angeles, California.
While in Hollywood she held down many jobs from the front desk clerk at the Hollywood YMCA to receptionist at the department store, Hollywood Broadway. She had a business braiding hair and doing nails and sold precious gems, gold and silver. For a couple of summers, she sold dinners at the Playboy Jazz Festival. Cleo also worked at an answering service, answering the telephones of the stars. She also became an organizer trying to unionize faculty at Los Angeles community colleges. Cleo also had several other jobs, including as an assistant to the producer of the 1988 Olympics.
After about fifteen years “tooling around” Los Angeles, she returned to New York in 1995. In an ironic coincidence Cleo was hired by 1199/SEIU Hospital Workers Union East as a training field coordinator in the 1199/SEIU Training and Upgrading Fund which was established as a result of the historical struggle of the community mental health workers at Lincoln Hospital. After eight years at 1199/SEIU Training Fund, Cleo became the Executive Director of For A Better Bronx, (an environmental Justice nonprofit organization in the South Bronx, New York). Later, she was hired as Director of Corporate Education at Long Island University School of Continuing Education.
In 2007, Dr. Steven Levin, Medical Director of the Mount Sinai Irving J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine, hired Cleo to be the Director of Outreach for the tragic 911 medical program from which she retired in 2014.
In 2008 she was the recipient of the Purpose Prize Fellowship (for activists over 50 who changed careers in the second half of life) now titled the AARP Purpose Award.
At the age of 60, Cleo graduated Suma Cum Laude and was the class valedictorian when she received a bachelor’s degree in Labor Relations from Cornell University. Cleo is now actively retired in Memphis, Tennessee.
Today Cleo works as a consultant for the Cossitt Library in downtown Memphis, Tennessee. She is part of a mentoring program for sixth graders to high school students. She will be helping youngsters design and implement a podcast on the need for protests and how to organize. Black people in Memphis were NOT allowed to use Memphis Public Libraries in town until a sit-in of students from Southwestern University (now Rhodes College) at the Cossitt Library in 1961!
Cleo is also working to complete her memoirs within the next few years.
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