Co-conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman by Susan M. Reverby

Abstract

Reviewed by: Co-conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman by Susan M. Reverby Jeff Jones (bio) Co-conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman By Susan M. Reverby. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 408 pages, 6⅛" × 9¼", 19 b&w illus. $32.50 cloth, $22.99 e-book. What makes someone a revolutionary? And how is that label influenced by the historic moment? Thanks to the work of the 1619 Project, we are finally coming to grips with the results of the struggle of enslaved Africans seeking human rights and, ultimately, freedom in the New World. The Founding Fathers are considered to be revolutionary because they led the effort to overthrow English rule and cohere a democratic form of government. Militant abolitionist John Brown was a revolutionary who took up arms to overthrow the slave system in the mid-1800s. And then we arrive in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Black Freedom Struggle moved from nonviolent civil rights protest to become an armed Black liberation struggle, while at the same time, the United States was fighting a genocidal antiliberation war in Vietnam. It was a post–World War II moment, now some fifty years past, that still reverberates in today's definitional conflict between democratic rights for all and white supremacist authoritarianism. In Co-conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman, author Susan Reverby addresses the question of who is, or what makes someone, a revolutionary. Her book, published in 2020, tells the story of a New Yorker who grew up in Middletown, became a people's doctor, underground bomber, and political prisoner, who served nearly a decade in maximum security prisons before emerging to play a truly significant national and global role in the fight to overcome the deadly AIDS epidemic. Alan Berkman's story, along with that of his partner, Dr. Barbara Zeller, and other colleagues and comrades near and far, not only puts his life forward with the respect it deserves but provides important insights as we contemplate the coming stage in our nation's political development. Reverby and Berkman knew each other as children, and as students at Cornell University. But their paths crossed dramatically in 1971. Both were living in New York City, Berk-man in the last year of medical school, Reverby working for a left policy think tank. Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale was on trial for murder in New Haven, Connecticut, and Alan wanted to know if Reverby would be willing to "take up arms if Bobby is convicted?" [End Page 427] Although a yes answer was unlikely at the time, it became moot when Seale was acquitted. But I know from personal experience that it was a question many were asking in those days as the police and government killings of Black revolutionary leaders escalated under orders from FBI head J. Edgar Hoover. For me, it was the police killing of admired colleague Fred Hampton in Chicago on December 4, 1969, that propelled me into the armed underground. It is a benefit for readers that Reverby knew Berkman as she unfolds his story. Recognized by his family and classmates from his years growing up as the smartest kid around, she follows the course of his life with the care and analysis it deserves. Ultimately, the essence of his life's work is not so much revolution, in the sense of overthrowing a corrupt government, as fighting for a system of health care that provides for the poorest, least advantaged, and most oppressed among us. The story describes how Berkman, Zeller, and other medical radicals strove to provide high quality, unbiased health care while also confronting the white supremacist polices that they understood to be the foundation of the capitalist system. But it was not enough to provide thoughtful health care. The system responsible had to be confronted, challenged, and changed. Much of Reverby's narrative describes this in detail. In October 1981, for example, following the Black Liberation Army–led robbery of a Brinks truck in Nanuet, New York, in which a Brinks Guard and two Nyack police officers were killed, Berkman was asked to treat...