NFPA Journal - Spring 2023 - 52

Perspectives
Freedom House paramedics at
a public demonstration. Despite
the program's success, Pittsburgh
officials remained resistant to
it, largely on racial grounds,
and finally eliminated it-only
to replace it with a new EMS
program staffed by people who
were predominantly white.
hires the first-ever medical director,
beefs up its services, and
eventually wins a federal grant to
help pilot the first nationally recognized
standards for emergency
training and medical practice
by paramedics. But they never
got the chance to see that grant
through. What happened that led
to the end of Freedom House?
The city had been resistant to this
program for quite some time. They
were frankly resistant to the idea of
paramedics, period. They spent years
fighting it, suggesting that it wasn't
viable, that they didn't want to pay for
it, that they didn't have to pay for it,
that nobody else was doing it, that this
would be proven in the long term to be
a wasteful lark, which of course was all
untrue. Eventually they had to acknowledge
that this thing was happening all
over the country and that it was born
in Pittsburgh, yet they were the only
people who hadn't embraced it, so
52 | NFPA JOURNAL * SPRING 2023
maybe they should actually do something.
But rather than expand upon this
groundbreaking, revolutionary standard
of EMS care, they decided to scrap
what they had and start over. They told
Freedom House that at the end of 1975
they would stop paying them and revoke
their charter, in which case Freedom
House would just cease to be. And that's
what happened. And the city developed
its own new EMS program that was
essentially entirely white.
It's been about 50 years since
the end of Freedom House. You've
immersed yourself in this story
during the writing of this book.
How do you look at the legacy of
the Freedom House paramedics
and everything they managed
to accomplish?
There's this practical legacy of ambulance
design, the role of the medical
director, the first training manual,
the use of Narcan, and a ton of other
things that you can point to and say
that these modern things stem directly
from what Freedom House was. And
there are people who have had successful
careers that grew out of all this.
But I think the real legacy is this truly
American story of a group of guys that
the world had overlooked who see their
opportunity to serve and who step up
and do an incredible job in spite of
their background and in spite of official
indifference. If there's anything
more American than a bad news bear
story, I don't know what it is. This
underdog crew who nobody believed in
went out and changed the world. The
tremendous work that they did when
everybody was very happy to put them
down and smear them with every sort
of racist brush that you could possibly
use is what's most impressive. None
of that stopped them. None of that, in
their minds, took away from the job
that they did. To me that feels like
the legacy.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY, SCHLESINGER LIBRARY ON THE HISTORY OF WOMEN IN AMERICA
NFPA Journal - Spring 2023

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